Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching — “the Classic of the Way and its Power” — is, with the I Ching and the Analects, one of the three foundational books of Chinese thought. Tradition attributes it to Laozi, an older contemporary of Confucius in the 6th century BCE, though most scholars now place its compilation in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. It is short — about five thousand Chinese characters — and densely poetic, written in a gnomic style that has invited and resisted translation for two thousand years.

We use James Legge’s 1891 translation, the most authoritative public-domain English version. Legge was a Scottish missionary and Oxford professor who spent decades on the Chinese classics; his Tao Te Ching is closer to a literal rendering than the freer modern versions readers may know from Stephen Mitchell or Gia-fu Feng. Where Mitchell paraphrases for beauty, Legge paraphrases sparingly and shows his work. It is the translation to read first if you want to know what the text actually says, then return to in counterpoint after reading the modern versions.

Where to start: chapters 1, 11, 25, and 33 give you the philosophical spine. Chapters 17, 57, and 80 give you the political reading. Chapters 8 and 78 — the water chapters — are the most quoted lines in the book.