The version almost everyone reads descends from the edition attached to the commentary of Wang Bi, a prodigy who died in 249 CE at twenty-three. His reading is metaphysical, treating the Tao as the nothingness from which the myriad things arise, and it set the terms for educated interpretation for centuries. A rival lineage attaches to the commentary ascribed to Heshang Gong, which reads the same chapters as a manual of physiological cultivation and was the preferred text within organised Taoism. Where the two differ in wording, translators must choose.
Classical Chinese of this period has no inflection, no articles, no obligatory marking of number, tense or person, and, as written, no punctuation. A line of four characters may be a statement, a command or a condition, and the subject may be the sage, the ruler, the reader or nobody in particular. In an ordinary prose text, context resolves most of this. The Tao Te Ching is the worst possible case: compressed, aphoristic, deliberately paradoxical, and lacking the surrounding argument that would fix the sense. The book does not so much permit divergent translations as require them.
The consequence is a vast and uneven body of versions. It is the most translated Chinese work and, by most counts, one of the most translated books of any kind, with several hundred English renderings alone. Many of the popular ones were made by people with no Chinese, working by rewriting earlier English translations, and some say so openly. The result is that readers comparing two English Tao Te Chings can encounter chapters with no discernible common content, and that judging the book by any single version is unwise.