The text turns on terms that resist English, and translations differ so much that readers can be arguing about different books.
Dao is conventionally the Way. The first line of the received text says that a dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao, which is a warning about the word placed at the head of the book that uses it. It is not a deity and not a moral principle; it is closer to the pattern or course things follow when nothing interferes.
Wu wei is usually non-action or effortless action, and both mislead. It does not mean doing nothing. It is more nearly acting without forcing, in the way a swimmer works with a current, and in the political chapters, which are numerous, and which readers who come for the mysticism tend to skip, it means a ruler who governs least and leaves people alone. A substantial part of the text is advice to rulers, including on warfare.
There are well over a hundred English translations. Many are made by people who do not read Chinese, working from earlier English versions, and some are frank paraphrases. The differences are not stylistic: chapter 1 alone admits readings that make the book epistemological, cosmological or apophatic.
The religious Daoism that developed from the second century CE, with its liturgy, priesthood, alchemy and pantheon in which Laozi is a deified figure called Taishang Laojun, is a different thing again from the text. Treating philosophical and religious Daoism as two separate traditions is itself a Western scholarly convention that specialists now question.