Tao Te Ching

In my religion class, we read a few parts of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and learning about Taoism interested me very much. I decided that I would read the entire book, and so I got the 1988 Stephen Mitchell translation from the library. I was already thinking that I wanted to read another religious text (I've already read the entire Bible, and learning about religions has made me curious to read other texts), so this fit well, and it was something I could read even in my tight schedule.

The Tao Te Ching is a great book, full of some wonderful insights into the way the world works and how, through wu-wei (doing not-doing, acting inaction, going with the flow, etc.), we can live in such a way that we bring about harmony in the world. It's really not something that can be easily explained in a few sentences, but rather something that needs to be read, experienced, and studied on one's own.

That being said, maybe this translation isn't the best to do that with. Reading the notes to each poem, I was shocked to see Mitchell admit that he had "interpolated" and "improvised" some of the stanzas in the book. I felt like this was a bad thing for a translator to do. I can understand wanting to make a book that the non-Chinese public will find more accessible, but to be honest I couldn't see why he changed the ones he did (especially since he provides the "original text" for these in his notes: why not just put those in, and explain them in the notes instead?). I don't really know what the best translation is, but I figure that I'll just read from different ones to get a better sense of what the words are supposed to be.

Rating: 6.3/10

Reading some of them reinforced a lot of the ideas that I have about the world. For one, there was a common theme of letting go of possessions, and not putting so much importance on material things. After all, if you treasure something, then it is more likely that people will try to steal it. It's a very different philosophy from that of America, which is why it was so refreshing for me. After a semester of Environmental Lit. showing me how our culture is ruining the earth and destroying humanity itself, it was nice to see that someone once thought about these things.

If you call something good, then you create evil. If you are saying that it is good, then you are implying that there is a quality called not-good to compare it with. This idea made me think about the paradox of God creating good and evil--if all he creates is good, why is there evil? Well, he actually calls things "good!" Evil didn't rise because he created that explicitly, but because it is a natural byproduct of goodness: by creating good, he created the possibility of evil.

There are tons of things like that in the book, and I don't think I could possibly summarize it all in a way that would satisfy me. Instead, I'll just recommend that everyone read this book and really think about what it says. Here's a site with some different translations:

http://duhtao.com/translations.html