Tao Te Ching

Rating:
Summary: Confucian-based interpretation
Review: D.C. Lau's translation is as good a place to start as any if you're new to the Tao Te Ching, though his introductory essay might scare off some with its dry, scholarly tone. I would suggest that you avoid reading it, unless of course you really want to hear his thoughts on the text. Given the ambiguity of Lao Tzu's masterpiece to interpretation, translations of the Tao Te Ching are wide and varied. Lau's is very much a Confucian-based interpretation. Which is not to say it is not any good, however, be aware that you're essentially reading one school of thought on the text. As for the text itself and it's meaning, it is difficult to explain. The Way is the path to truth, but what has to be understood is that this path has no start or finish. To put it another way, it is eternal and cyclic, much like the idea of Karma. It's about finding the true nature of existence and in turn, non-existence. Lao Tzu says, "Those who speak do not know; those who know do not speak". So perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about! I guess the meaning of the Tao Te Ching is up to the individual to decide upon. Regardless, D.C. Lau's translation is recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A perplexing but profitable read
Review: I first encountered the Tao Te Ching in the Mithcell translation as a sophomore in college, and we read it--fitting the context of a course on world religions--as a religious text. What is really nice about D. C. Lau's translation (and he mentions this in his fine intro) is that, in keeping with a longstanding tradition in Chinese culture, he attempts to restore some of the political import to the text. Re-reading Lao Tzu's lyrical fragments in Lau's rendering of them really brought home to me an aspect of the text that is completely overshadowed, in most translations, by the religious angles that are important but not sole determiners of the Tao's relevance and message. (This view sees me in disagreement with the avowed "Taoist" reviewer below who lamented Lau's attention to Lao Tzu's political import.)

While I heartily disagree with the political message of the Tao Te Ching--which sponsors a hands-off, laissez-faire, small-government formation, letting everything work itself out without intrusion from leaders and other well-intentioned officials, as if things ever just work themselves out on their own!--I appreciate Lau's efforts to recover in his translation a crucial, crucial aspect of Lao Tzu's thought, and one that has been shuffled under the magic carpet by Taoism's New Agey popularity among many Anglophones.

Rating:
Summary: OK introduction to the text
Review: The Tao Te Ching is one of those hyped-up texts that come about with the proliferation of the New-Age establishment. One can walk into most bookstores to be hounded by dozens of editions, finely illustrated, with plenty of white space, printed on unbleached, acid-free paper, almost saying "buy me, simplicity and enlightenment beckons". So, to cut away from the hype into reality, there are two issues - what's the actual text like and how good is this edition?

The Tao Te Ching is a very short text (I think about 5000 characters in Chinese). It is one of the primary Taoist texts but it has been used in many, many other contexts since. It's attributed to Lao Tzu, the sage of Taoism, although scholarly opinion about authorship varies widely. It opens with a line that can be translated as "the Way that can be named is not the Way," so it's quite impossible to convey the principles without breaking them. The general pop analysis is that it accentuates simplicity, intuition, the under-dog, adaptability, spontenaiety and harmony with the universe. And these all seem to be at least partially, true while of course missing the unattainable essence as all analyses of the work must. Some of the teachings are certainly radical in interpreted literally ("exterminate the sage...and the people will benefit a hundredfold").

As to the edition, it has plenty of white space (this time, sarcasm aside, I think that's a very underrated aspect of works, especially translated ones). I've described the New-Agey side of the Tao's interpretation but there's also a dry and scholarly side which is concerned with manuscripts, variant readings and the like. This edition is a good introduction for someone with no ideological predisposition because it is quite in the middle, though a tad on the dry side. There are some explanatory notes but not to the extent of overwhelming the text. Basically, it's quite bare which is the point. If you're new to the text and are expecting profound insights of a new age, this is not the edition, as it presents the skeleton, and it's hard to process a skeleton into a profound insight.

An OK start if you want to see a fairly neutral translation before deciding if this is a mystical goldmine or accidental textual anomaly. But it seems there are better editions on both the scholarly and flowery ends of the scale.