Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching : A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way

This is probably the third version of the Tao Te Ching I've owned, some more poetic, some more literal.
It presents a view on the spiritual that at gut level speaks to me more than other views.
It is as difficult and seemingly self-contradictory as any religious book, but more approachable.
Like most spiritual works, it uses aphorism and intuition instead of argument or reason.
It is usually terse, but still rambles in places, shorter than most religious books.
Tao Te Ching is more poetry than prose. Every translation is different.
It includes abstractions, analogies, advice to rulers, references to nature and work.
Its political advice is more problematical than other parts of the text.

I like Le Guin's version. She treats the book as show more poetry, says when she is uncertain about what a part of it means, references other versions, and uses simple, un-gendered language. show less

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 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 show more 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

LeGuin's translation is great. I don't know to what degree she adheres to the intention of the original text, but I found her translation profoundly inspiring and satisfying to read.

In her forward to "The Left Hand of Darkness" (1976) LeGuin writes: "The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words."

From that I infer that this [interpretation of the] text is the canonical Taoist foundation on which her speculative fiction rests, and perhaps that is one aspect which elevates hers above the pulp.

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 made me appreciate that book better despite having a bit of a rocky start with it.

I read this as part of my research for a paper I'm will be presenting on Le Guin's [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388229638s/18423.jpg|817527] in January at Mythmoot III. I was surprised to find how short the book is, and was able to read it in one sitting — though, having done so, I suspect it is not the intended method of consumption. It seems better suited to small, daily chunks for rumination or meditation. It's unlikely that I will read it in that manner, but I suspect I will revisit it a couple times in the next month or so.

Overall, I quite enjoyed it. I read more for feeling than sense, and Le Guin's brief, sporadic commentaries show more seem to uphold such a reading. Much of it is the sort of short, enigmatic, oscillating verse that one might expect, but I was surprised to find how much of it is fairly comprehensible. Indeed, there's plenty of strangeness and a tendency toward epigrammatic enigma, but on the whole there's a simplicity to the sensibleness of many of the verses. It's hard to say how much of that is inherent in the text itself, and how much of it is Le Guin's rendering. She warns, in her notes at the end, that she did not translate it, but created her own version based on a dozen or so prior translations that she has studied over many years, working on it bit by bit, sometimes with decade-long hiatuses.

Anyway, if I have one criticism, it's in a single comment she makes on chapter 53, "Insight," the last stanza of which reads:

People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes, carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn't the way.

Le Guin's comment: "So much for capitalism."

*sigh*

The obvious reply here is that when Lau Tzu (or whomever) wrote this, capitalism wasn't "a thing," so to call out capitalism in response to these statements is disingenuous at best. More to the point, the text seems to indicate that these things are not "the way" regardless of the political and economic situation one finds themselves. (In the prior stanza, there is a reference to splendiferous palaces, which seems distinctly anti-capitalist to me.) The idea that ornamentalism, ostentatiousness, warmongering, gluttony, greed and theft are solely the products of capitalism is simply absurd.

In fact, there are other moments in Le Guin's commentary that seem to favor capitalist — in particular, anarcho-capitalist — ideals. The author "sees sacrifice of the self or others as a corruption of power," she writes in her comment on chapter 13, "Shameless." "This is a radically subversive attitude. No wonder anarchists and Taoists make good friends." This idea is cognate with modern libertarian attitudes against so-called "crony capitalism," which is an oxymoron insofar as it isn't truly capitalism but more like fascism (in the original sense of the word). In chapter 57, "Being simple," are found the lines:

The more restrictions and prohibitions in the world,
the poorer people get
...
So a wise leader might say:
I practice inaction, and the people look after themselves.
I love to be quiet, and the people themselves find justice.

Le Guin's comment, in part, is, "No pessimist would say that people are able to look after themselves, be just, and prosper on their own. No anarchist can be a pessimist." Again, this fits well with libertarian/capitalist viewpoints. It was, after all, [a:Adam Smith|14424|Adam Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244624882p2/14424.jpg], the patron saint of capitalism, who wrote, "We may often fulfill all the roles of justice by sitting still and doing nothing."

Perhaps I've ranted too long. Overall I quite enjoyed the work. And bonus: I even found some stuff to use for my paper on Left Hand....


Edit: I feel compelled to add that I realize Le Guin's definition of anarchism is likely not anarcho-capitalism but rather anarcho-syndicalism. I mean, I have read [b:The Dispossessed|13651|The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #5)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1353467455s/13651.jpg|2684122]. Still, my objections stand. show less

One Berkeley professor I worked for encouraged students to memorize poems so they could reflect on them while waiting in line. This was not just a throw-away piece of "do as I say, not as I do" advice--he would frequently come to class with a story about how he contemplated a stanza by Yeats (or whoever we were studying that week) while walking to his car (or something) and had a profound philosophical insight.

The poems of the Tao Te Ching are perfect examples of the kind of verse you need to mentally chew on over time, to revisit again and again (although I feel rereading can be as useful as memorizing the short lines). The messages are still strikingly relevant after hundreds of years.

It's comforting to know that people from many show more different ages have struggled with distractions and have struggled to be mindful (to live in the moment). Often, modern technology is blamed for the inability to quiet the mind. The people in Lao Tzu's time did not have social media, but there were enough distractions that he wrote about the need to free oneself from fame and material goods.

Overvaluing objects and money--what we now call late capitalism in that it rules our social, economic, and political spheres--is also not new. This too is comforting because we can look to what did and didn't work in the past to deal with the present incarnation of greed. The Way is there and here, then and now. show less

Went down a rabbit hole with reading differing translations of 78, Ursula renders it:
Nothing in the world
is as soft, as weak, as water;
nothing else can wear away
the hard, the strong,
and remain unaltered.
Soft overcomes hard,
weak overcomes strong.
Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge.

Maybe ...nobody uses the time... Of course, water hurries too.