Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

Read Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching for Free Online
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi, Jerome P. Seaton
Tags: Religión, Philosophy, Taoist, Taoism
body; where else is there to go? Heaven and earth
are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of heaven.

81 – Telling it true
    True words aren’t charming ,
charming words aren’t true.
Good people aren’t contentious ,
contentious people aren’t good.
People who know aren’t learned ,
learned people don’t know.
    Wise souls don’t hoard ;
the more they do for others the more they have,
the more they give the richer they are.
The Way of heaven profits without destroying.
Doing without outdoing
is the Way of the wise.

Notes
Concerning This Version
    This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any
Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus ,
in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching , printed the Chinese
text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My
gratitude to him is unending.
    To have the text thus made accessible was not only to have a
Rosetta Stone for the book itself, but also to have a
touchstone for comparing other English translations one with another. If I could
focus on which word the translators were interpreting, I could begin to
understand why they made the choice they did. I could compare various
interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much
explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could
discover for myself that several English meanings might lead me back to the same
Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain
an intuition of the style, the gait and cadence, of the original, necessary to
my ear and conscience if I was to try to reproduce it in English.
    Without the access to the text that the Carus edition gave me, I would have been defeated by the differences among the translations,
and could never have thought of following them as guides towards a version of
my own. As it was, working from Carus’s text, I
learned how to let them lead me into it, always using their knowledge, their
scholarship, their decisions, as my light in darkness.
    When you try to follow the Way, even if
you wander off it all the time, good things happen though you do not deserve
them. My work on the Tao Te Ching was very wandering
indeed. I started in my twenties with a few chapters. Every decade or so I’d do
another bit, and tell myself I’d sit down and really get to it, some day. The
undeserved good thing that happened was that a true and genuine scholar of
ancient Chinese and of lao Tzu, Dr. J. P. Seaton of
the University of North Carolina, saw some of my versions of bits of the Tao Te Ching ( scurvily quoted
without attribution by myself ) . He reprinted them
with honor, and asked me for more. I do not think he knew what he was getting
into. Of his invaluable teaching, his encouragement, his generosity, I can say
only what Lao Tzu says at the end of the book:
    Wise souls don’t hoard ;
The more they do for others the more they have,
The more they give the richer they are.

Sources
    Though the Tao Te Ching has been translated
into English very much more often than any other Chinese classic, indeed almost
overwhelmingly often, it wasn’t easy to get hold of more than a few of these
versions until quite recently.
    Carus’s word-for-word Chinese-to-English
was endlessly valuable to me, but his actual translation wasn’t very
satisfactory. "Reason" as a translation of Tao did not ring true. I
always looked at any translation of the book I found and had a go at it. The
language of some was so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond Western
comprehension. (James Legge’s version was one of
these, though I did find the title for a book of mine, The Lathe of Heaven , in Legge . Years
later, Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and technology,
wrote to tell me in the kindest, most unreproachful fashion that Legge was a bit off on that one; when Chuang Tzu was written the lathe hadn’t
been invented.)
    Listed

Similar Books

Gethsemane Hall

David Annandale

The New Penguin History of the World

Odd Arne Westad, J. M. Roberts

The Blonde

Duane Swierczynski

Maid to Order

Penny Birch

The Heart

Kate Stewart

Sally James

Lord Fordingtons Offer

Here With Me

Beverly Long

A Perfect Storm

Cameron Dane