Drawing on a lifetime of contemplation and including extensive personal commentary throughout, she offers an unparalleled window into the text’s awe-inspiring, immediately relatable teachings and their inestimable value for our troubled world. Le Guin presents Lao Tzu’s time-honored and astonishingly powerful philosophy like never before. And in Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, we are treated to Le Guin’s unique take on Taoist philosophy’s founding classic. Fewer know just how pervasive Taoist themes are to so much of her work. Le Guin for her extraordinary science fiction and fantasy. This is one of the translations that frequently uses Lao Tsu’s words to talk about something that might be a true and wonderful thought but something very different from what Lao Tsu meant.A rich, poetic, and socially relevant version of the great spiritual-philosophical classic of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching -from a legendary literary icon Though at times we found Mitchell’s choice of words better than any other translation, more often it seemed like he completely missed the point. Though we really liked Mitchell’s translation and commentaries on Chuang Tzu, and though this is the most popular translation today on Amazon, we were disappointed in this one.

Here is a list with commentaries on other translations that we found the most helpful.Īnd here's what they say about Mitchell's translation: Our translation here sometimes goes back to the original Chinese characters but most of it is a “best of the best” words and phrases taken from other translations as well as our own understanding. Like the famous story of the grandmother pointing at the moon and the young child thinking the moon was her finger, Lao Tzu did all he could to undermine our proclivity toward believing that his words are the same as his meaning. Trying to express that sense made his communication ambiguous and paradoxical, more symbolic rather than literal. Lao Tzu's dedication was to the sense, not to the words.

The Tao Te Ching has more translations than any other book in the history of the world and, if you read passages from two, it's often impossible to tell that they are translations of the same book. The website had some interesting things to say about their translation which I think puts this discussion in context. After a quick look through the first 10 chapters, I kind of like it. I hadn't seen the laotzu.xyz version before.

Ursula k le guin tao te ching