Tao Te Ching

The received text runs to eighty-one chapters, none longer than a page and many only a few lines, totalling around five thousand characters. It falls into two parts: chapters one to thirty-seven, the Daojing, and chapters thirty-eight to eighty-one, the Dejing, which together give the book its Chinese name. The older title is simply Laozi, after its supposed author.

Much of it is rhymed or near-rhymed, built from paradox, negation and images drawn from the low and the yielding. Water wears down stone. The uncarved block is worth more than the carved. The valley outlasts the peak because it takes the low ground. The empty hub, not the spokes, is what makes a wheel useful. The opening line warns that the Tao which can be named is not the constant Tao, which sets the terms for everything after: the book keeps pointing at something it insists cannot be stated.

The central practical term is wu wei, usually rendered non-action but better understood as action without strain or interference, doing what the situation already tends towards rather than imposing on it. A great deal of the text is addressed to a ruler. It advises him to reduce taxes, restrain his officials, avoid war except in extremity, and stop improving his people, on the argument that most disorder is manufactured by government activity and that the sage ruler leaves his subjects saying it happened of itself.

Later Taoist religion read the same chapters as instructions for personal cultivation, breath and longevity, and eventually as the utterance of a deified Laozi. Both readings, the political and the meditative, have run in parallel for two thousand years without either displacing the other.

The traditional account comes from Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE. Laozi was an archivist of the Zhou court whom Confucius consulted on ritual; disgusted with the decline of the dynasty, he rode west, and at the frontier pass a gatekeeper asked him to set down his teaching before he vanished. Sima Qian himself hedges this, offering rival identifications and conceding that nobody knows what became of the man. Most modern scholars therefore treat Laozi as legendary or composite, and the book as an accretion of sayings from several hands, assembled in the fourth or third century BCE.

Two archaeological finds transformed the argument. In 1973, tomb three at Mawangdui near Changsha, sealed in 168 BCE, produced two nearly complete copies on silk. Both put the De section before the Dao section, reversing the received order, and both are close enough to the received wording to show that the text was substantially fixed by the early Han.

In 1993, tomb one at Guodian in Jingmen, Hubei, dated to around 300 BCE, produced three separate bundles of bamboo slips carrying Laozi material: some 2,000 characters corresponding to about thirty-one chapters of the received eighty-one, in a quite different order, with nothing at all from the closing chapters.

The two finds pull in different directions and both are useful. Guodian proves the material existed well before 300 BCE, killing the late datings that had placed the whole book in the third century. It also shows that at that point it was not yet a fixed eighty-one-chapter work with a settled sequence. Mawangdui shows how quickly it became one.

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.