Jerome Potter Seaton

Sure, there's wisdom here. But much of it sounds like Aristotle and Aquinas' bumpkin cousin. You'll find "natural law" and even an unmoved mover here. You'll find dislike of what is new, and what feels to me like a constrained, joyless golden mean as well.

Underwhelmed. I love Le Guin and appreciate that for her and many, this book is a wellspring. I'm sorry; I haven't found much water here.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read this, but it’s not enough.

That may be ironic — the way to read the Tao Teh Ching more times may be to read it fewer times. Just kidding, but if you’ve read it, you get it.

Reading it, for me, is a way of restarting, a reboot in the midst of life, a reminder of what’s important and what isn’t, what to concern myself with and what to forget. Unfortunately, when I read it I’m usually a little late. You shouldn’t wait until you need to show more reboot to reboot.

It shuts down the noise and the busy-ness, the ambitions, the wants, the compulsions to control, to know, or to contend.

Its style is paradox, because maybe what you are doing is exactly the thing that will prevent you from getting where you should be going. Maybe wanting to get someplace and striving to get there is exactly the wrong way to get there.

Here’s something that slaps me in the face but makes me smile every time I read it — “He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.”

*Adding Some Remarks from Reading Stephen Mitchell’s translation —

Actually Mitchell’s “translation” isn’t strictly speaking a translation. He refers to it as a “version”. He exercises a great deal of author’s privilege in rendering what he believes the meaning of the book to be, often departing considerably from anything like a literal translation. I don’t know Chinese, much less ancient Chinese, but I do know that “tractors”, “warheads”, “electrons”, and “galaxies” were not part of the vocabulary of the time.

That’s not actually a complaint. Academic purity is, I suspct, antithetical to the Tao.

What I can say though is that his “version” is eminently readable. It flows, and it makes the kind of ready sense that the book can make, allowing for its paradoxical form. As a reader, you do need to remember to slow down — passing your eyes over the words, as easy as it is to do, is a loss.

It’s worth reading more than one translation/version. Like seeing from as many angles as you can.

*Adding More Remarks from Reading Ursula Le Guin’s version —

Like Stephen Mitchell’s version, Le Guin’s is not a translation. She used the 1898 Carus translation, which included the original characters, transliterations, and character-by-character translation in order to put together her own rendering. She also consulted a number of other translations, and her own readings of those.

I was interested in reading her version because she was, after all, an accomplished writer in her own right, both in prose and fiction. And her version shows that. Like Mitchell, she is liberal in her re-telling, relying on context and overall understanding of the text, to re-render each chapter, along with short commentaries on many of them. My impression though is that she is more faithful to the text and more careful to place her rendering within the tradition.

Le Guin is strong on featuring the concept of “wu wei,” action that is not action. And this is the concept that may most attract me, at least at the time of this reading. While the Tao is ineffable, and maybe mystical, it is absolutely realistic. There are ways in which the world moves and works. Working against them is effort (“action”), working with them is action that is not effort (“inaction”). Denying, fighting against, competing with them is frustration, defeat, unhappiness. Accepting, even in some sense using them, is the path to “success” where success may be redefined in the doing. All that again sounds a bit mystical, but, again, the message is realism and acceptance.

I think that any translation or re-telling of the Tao Te Ching is going to be a particular interpretation. Reading each is valuable, almost like reading a new book with new insights, both from the new telling and from your own new experience. I intend to read more versions. show less

I had been intending to read a different translation/interpretation of this, when I came upon Le Guin's version which is clean, exquisite and spare. I am wondering whether one will always favour the first version one reads. As well as studying this version more fully, next year I will read the version I originally planned to read, with its academic disquisition.

Lovely and unexpected. Slippery with playful twists and turns to upturn conventional logic. Thinking about how figuring out my own politics and how to exist in the death spectacle of capitalism has led me to many similar conclusions, especially where it concerns ambition, greed, envy, "being competitive", "being the best", "climbing the corporate ladder", "surviving the rat race", and other similar "common sense" notions that make me want to die.

Read it alongside A Wizard of Earthsea and it show more made me appreciate that book better despite having a bit of a rocky start with it. show less