Dharma & Dao

The Tao Te Ching in English — a guide to the translations

The Tao Te Ching has been translated into English more than two hundred and fifty times — more than any book except the Bible. The translations differ wildly. The text is short enough (about 5,000 Chinese characters) and ambiguous enough that every translator effectively writes a new book.

Here is a sorted guide to the ones worth knowing.

The public-domain options

James Legge (1891) — what we host on this site. Legge was the founding Oxford Professor of Chinese and the giant of 19th-century Sinology. His Tao Te Ching is precise, literal, scholarly, and slightly stiff. It will not move you the way Mitchell will, but it will tell you what the text actually says. Use it as the reference against which to read the more interpretive modern versions.

Paul Carus (1898) — a German-American philosopher’s rendering. Smoother than Legge, more interpretive. Includes the Chinese text with character-by-character gloss. Excellent for serious students.

Lionel Giles (1905) — short, lucid, less literal than Legge but more faithful than the modern poetic versions. A reasonable middle ground.

Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (1972, Vintage) — the iconic 70s edition with brush calligraphy and black-and-white photographs. Feng was a Chinese-born scholar; English was an American photographer. Together they produced the version that introduced the Tao Te Ching to a generation of Americans. Still beautiful, still in print.

Stephen Mitchell (1988, HarperCollins) — the bestselling English Tao Te Ching. Mitchell does not read Chinese; he works from existing translations and his own meditation practice. The result is a free poetic rendering of unusual beauty — and the version sinologists complain about most loudly. Read it for how it sounds, not for what it says.

Red Pine / Bill Porter (1996) — a translator and longtime resident of Asia. Includes substantial Chinese commentary tradition alongside the text. The most serious modern version for a non-academic reader.

Victor H. Mair (1990) — a Sinologist’s translation based on the recently discovered Mawangdui silk manuscripts (older than the received text by several centuries). Reorders the text in places and includes a substantial scholarly apparatus. The version for readers who want to know what the text looked like before the standard tradition.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1997) — the novelist’s version. Free, literary, opinionated, often very beautiful. Le Guin acknowledges she doesn’t read Chinese and worked from existing translations. Read it after Mitchell as a counterpoint.

David Hinton (2000) — a translator-poet’s rendering with deep grounding in Chan and Daoist commentary. Spare and elegant.

A reading path

The Tao Te Ching is short — you can read any version in under an hour. The point is not to finish it but to live with it. A recommended path:

  1. Read Legge here, free, in one sitting. Get the literal sense.
  2. Then read Mitchell or Le Guin — for the music.
  3. Then read Red Pine or Mair — with commentary, slowly.
  4. Keep one copy by your bed for life.

Single chapters worth returning to: 1 (the famous opening), 8 (water), 11 (emptiness), 17 (the best ruler), 25 (the four greats), 33 (knowing oneself), 38 (the loss of the Tao), 78 (water again), 81 (the closing).

→ Read the Tao Te Ching on this site (Legge, 1891)