Two Excavations That Rearranged the Whole Book

Robert Henricks's study of the Guodian and Mawangdui manuscripts describes two twentieth century excavations that overturned a great deal of what had been assumed settled about this text. In 1973 archaeologists opened a Han dynasty tomb at Mawangdui and found two silk manuscripts of the Tao Te Ching, both older than any previously known copy and, strikingly, both arranged with the material now known as chapters thirty eight through eighty one placed before the material now numbered as chapters one through thirty seven, the reverse of the order every printed edition since has followed, this chapter included.

Twenty years later, bamboo slips found at Guodian in 1993 pushed the evidence back further still, to roughly 300 BCE, but the Guodian text is not a complete Tao Te Ching at all: it contains only about two fifths of the received chapters, arranged in its own sequence unrelated to either the Mawangdui order or the later standard one, which raises the possibility that the book grew by accretion from several originally separate collections rather than existing complete from a single author at one time. Legge's nineteenth century translation, the edition this passage quotes, necessarily reflects the received, standardized order fixed centuries after either manuscript was buried, with no way to know how closely its opening chapter matches what stood first in the text at its earliest recoverable stage.