Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation

Rating:
Summary: going to the source
Review: I am now in my third decade of Taijiquan and Qigong play. I teach both of these Chinese forms. I have 14 different translations of the Dao De Jing, four of the Art of Warfare and five of the I Jing. For many years, I have been trying to make sense of the variations in translation. My experiences -- physical, mental and spiritual - from taijiquan and qigong have not always been congruent with my "rational" understanding of the written works.

Roger Ames translation s of the Dao De Jung, Yuan Dao and SunZi has dramatically changed everything. Ames has done what no one else has done. He has attempted to understand the Daoist writings within the classical Chinese mode of thought and then translate that into English without the accompanying Western dualistic (Cartesian) baggage that has imbued all previous translations.

Ames insights into classical Chinese "cosmology, ontology and epistemology are exemplary and amazingly revealing. No previous translation had achieved his depth of insight.

I am indebted to Roger for these wonderful translations and explications of traditional Daoist thinking and being. My "new" understanding of Daoist being in the world or as Roger says, "way-making", has allowed completely new insights and abilities to emerge from my taijiquan and qigong.

Anyone who has an interest in Daoism can do nothing better than to obtain copies of Ames Dao De Jing, Yuan Dao, Sunzi and Thinking from the Han. You will be, as I am, delighted with the concept of the Wu-forms and the idea that much of the Dao De Jing derives from traditional folks songs. Imagine singing or chanting the Dao! This connects, sympathetically, for me at least, to Australian songlines and to Dineh "harmony & beauty".

Ames work is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the classical Chinese worldview and become realized.

Rating:
Summary: Who are they kidding?
Review: Pretentious, self-indulgent, and a waste of money! Buy a different translation. I was more enlightened by Dr. Seuss's "Horton hears a Who". Too bad there isn't a zero star option.

Rating:
Summary: Who are they kidding?
Review: Pretentious, self-indulgent, and a waste of money! Buy a different translation. I was more enlightened by Dr. Seuss's "Horton hears a Who". Too bad there isn't a zero star option.

Rating:
Summary: Utter Drivel
Review: The authors have no concept whatsoever about the beauty and simplicity of this document.
Instead they use their academic doublespeak to try and intellectualize "The Way".
I highly recommend that THEY read Tolle's "Power of Now".
This book is stomuch-turning to anyone seeking a path to enlightenment.

Rating:
Summary: Utter Drivel
Review: The authors have no concept whatsoever about the beauty and simplicity of this document.
Instead they use their academic doublespeak to try and intellectualize "The Way".
I highly recommend that THEY read Tolle's "Power of Now".
This book is stomuch-turning to anyone seeking a path to enlightenment.

Rating:
Summary: Makes understanding the Tao harder, not easier
Review: The authors seem to have purposefully obfuscated their writing with liberal use of arcane references, and by choosing the *most* complex words and sentence structures to express their ideas. Read these quotations -- do you agree this is the way one would speak when trying to explain something to someone new to the Dao de jing?

"Experience is processual, and is thus always provisional. Process requires that the formational and functional aspects of our experience are correlative and mutually entailing." (p. 77)

"For the Daoist, dividing up the world descriptively and prescriptively generates correlative categories that invariably entail themselves and their antinomies." (p. 80)

"The dynamic field of experience is the locus in which the stream of phenomena is animated and achieves consummation..." (p. 90)

These examples are pretty representative of the commentary that accompanies the translation. But the translation itself, far from rendering the text as poetry, favors the same kind of overwrought techno-jargon, using words like "determinacy," "noncoercively," etc.

The *best* thing you could say is that this book is aimed at an academic audience already comfortable with technical terms like "underdetermined" (used throughout) -- an audience that fully understands the difference between "formational" and "functional aspects of our experience."

The worst you could say, I expect, is that the authors simply didn't care to write anything that could be useful to anyone who isn't already an expert on both philosophy and Chinese writings of the period.

Had I the choice, I would un-buy this book. As it stands, I have given up on it absolutely. The only use I can get out of it would be if in the future, the highly unpoetic translation maybe helps illumniate a different translation.

Take my advice: don't be too quick to reject my review (and other negative reviews here) as the grumblings of someone who didn't give the book a chance.

Leave this book to the experts. And shame on Ballantine for not marketing it as such.