Tao Te Ching — Commentary

In brief

The Tao Te Ching is eighty-one short chapters, about five thousand Chinese characters in all, on the way the world works and how a person, above all a ruler, should act in it. It is traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu, a name that means no more than “Old Master”. Neither the author nor the date is known. The oldest fragments come from a tomb of about 300 BC, and the fourth century BC on this page’s cover is a convenience, standing for a text that probably grew over generations.

It has been read as mysticism, as scripture and as a manual of government, and all three readers can quote it. Its claims are few and strange: that the soft beats the hard, that the empty is what gets used, and that “Governing a great state is like cooking small fish” (ch. 60). My own view is that the third reading, the one most Western readers skip, is the one that holds the others together.

Who wrote it

The first biography is by the historian Sima Qian, around 100 BC, and it is an admission of defeat. He offers three candidates: Li Er, an archivist and older contemporary of Confucius, who wrote a book in two parts at the request of the keeper of a pass as he left for the west; Lao Laizi, who wrote fifteen parts; and Lao Dan, an astrologer of the fourth century BC. Modern opinion is still divided. Alan Chan finds little reason to doubt the contemporary of Confucius, while Thomas Michael, in the line of A. C. Graham’s late dating, doubts that anyone had heard of Lao Tzu before a late compilation made use of the name.

The book itself suggests an assembly. It quotes others: “the sentence-makers” (ch. 41), “A master of the art of war has said” (ch. 69), “a sage has said” (ch. 57), and “That saying of the ancients” (ch. 22). Lines recur in different chapters, as when “We should blunt our sharp points” (ch. 4) returns in 56. Most scholars now treat it as a compilation, as with other long early Chinese texts. Whoever shaped it took pains to leave no name, place or event in it, which I think deliberate.

The argument

The governing idea is reversal. “The movement of the Tao by contraries proceeds” (ch. 40), so what looks strong is near its end: “Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong” (ch. 76). Hence “The soft overcomes the hard; and the weak the strong” (ch. 36), and hence water, the book’s favourite image, which occupies “the low place which all men dislike” (ch. 8) and yet attacks what is firm and strong better than anything else (ch. 78). Emptiness works the same way: thirty spokes meet at a hub, but “it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends” (ch. 11).

From this comes a rule of stopping. “It is better to leave a vessel unfilled” (ch. 9), and the man who keeps pushing brings about the thing he fears. The other target is morality as a programme. “When the Great Tao (Way or Method) ceased to be observed, benevolence and righteousness came into vogue” (ch. 18): that is, Confucian virtues are symptoms of what they claim to cure. Confucius himself seems to answer the book. The Analects (14.34) reports the saying about repaying hatred with virtue, which chapter 63 has as “to recompense injury with kindness”, and rejects it: repay hatred with uprightness.

The shape of the book

The received text has two parts: Part I, chapters 1 to 37, opening on Tao, and Part II, chapters 38 to 81, opening on Te, usually rendered “virtue” or “power”. Hence the title, the classic of the Way and its power, which came later still. The first half is often called the more metaphysical and the second the more political, though both words run through both.

The division into eighty-one is not original. Traditional sources report versions of sixty-four, sixty-eight or seventy-two chapters, and the number we have is credited to the commentary of Heshang Gong. Nothing leads from one chapter to the next. The Gutenberg text marks them only with a bare number at the start of a paragraph (“Ch. 1.” at the head and then plain “2.”, “3.”), which is easily confused with Legge’s verse numbers inside each chapter, and it has no anchors. The links on this page therefore jump to each chapter’s opening words.

The first line

Three characters use one word twice: dao ke dao. Dao is a road or way, and it can also be a verb, to speak of something. The line says that the dao that can be dao-ed is not the constant dao. English cannot do this. Legge chooses the road: “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao” (ch. 1). Alan Chan, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, gives the commoner reading: “The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way.” Ursula K. Le Guin, surprisingly, goes with Legge: “The way you can go isn’t the real way.” Both senses are live, and any translator has to give up one.

So many English versions, Legge’s among them, leave the word in Chinese, which only moves the trouble. Chapter 25 admits as much: “I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Tao”. A name is a stopgap. That raises the old difficulty that “He who knows (the Tao) does not (care to) speak (about it)” (ch. 56) in a book of five thousand characters. The paradox is less fatal than it looks: the book never claims to deliver the Tao, only to point at how things go.

Mawangdui and Guodian

Until the 1970s the text meant the version handed down with the commentaries of Wang Bi, who died young in 249, and Heshang Gong. Then in 1973 archaeologists opened a tomb at Mawangdui, near Changsha, sealed in 168 BC, and found two silk copies, the earlier probably from the first decade of that century. Both put the Te part first and the Tao part second. Robert Henricks titled his translation Te-Tao Ching for this reason. The wording is close to the received text, and it is the same book. But the most famous opening in Chinese philosophy turns out, in the oldest full copies, to stand in the middle.

In 1993 a tomb at Guodian in Hubei, dated before about 300 BC, yielded bamboo slips with material from thirty-one of the chapters, around two thousand characters, in three bundles and a quite different order. Chapter 1 is not among them, and neither is anything from chapter 67 onward. Scholars disagree about what this shows. It may be a selection from a larger book, possibly chosen for a ruler’s education, or an early stage of a book still growing. Most striking is chapter 19. The received text says “If we could renounce our sageness and discard our wisdom” and then “our benevolence and discard our righteousness”, a frontal attack on Confucian ideals. The Guodian version, as Chan reports it, tells the reader to “cut off artificiality, discard deceit”. On that evidence the book’s hostility to Confucians hardened with time.

None of this overturns the text, which Chan describes as on the whole consistent with the slips. What it changes is the idea of a single sage’s fixed scripture. Translators can now choose: Victor Mair preferred the silk text as more authentic, while most editions still print Wang Bi’s order, as Legge did and as this page’s links follow.

Advice to a ruler

Popular versions tend to make this a book for the private soul. Read it as written and it keeps addressing someone who has a state to run. The sage here is usually a sovereign, and Legge’s own brackets concede it: “the (ruling) sage” (ch. 77), “the (sage) king” (ch. 25). Chapter 17 grades governments, with the best being one whose people barely know it exists and say “We are as we are, of ourselves!”. Chapter 57 says that “the more display there is of legislation, the more thieves and robbers there are”, and 75 that “The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes”. Chapter 30 warns that “Wherever a host is stationed, briars and thorns spring up”, and 31 that a victor should be received with the rites of mourning. A. C. Graham thought it was aimed at the ruler of a small state, which suits the little state of chapter 80.

The advice is also harder than its admirers tend to admit. “The sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones” (ch. 3). The ancients practised the Tao “not to enlighten the people, but rather to make them simple and ignorant” (ch. 65). And “when he is going to weaken another, he will first strengthen him” (ch. 36). Small wonder that the Han Feizi, the great handbook of state control, gave it two chapters of commentary, among the earliest we have. The stillness that a mystic cherishes is also what makes a ruler impossible to read, and I do not think the book separates the two. The self-cultivation is the statecraft.

Wu wei

Wu wei means, literally, not-acting, and it is the book’s best-known and worst-understood term. Legge shows the difficulty by never settling. The sage “manages affairs without doing anything” (ch. 2); there is “abstinence from action” (ch. 3); the Tao “does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do” (ch. 37); one arrives “at doing nothing (on purpose)” (ch. 48). Those brackets are not in the Chinese. They are Legge rescuing the sentence from nonsense, and they settle by fiat what scholars still argue over. Edward Slingerland’s “effortless action” is now common. Herrlee Creel distinguished a contemplative wu wei of withdrawal from a purposive one of control, and traced the second to the administrator Shen Buhai and its use in the Han Feizi for a ruler who delegates and watches.

The book’s own practical gloss is timing. “Action should be taken before a thing has made its appearance; order should be secured before disorder has begun” (ch. 64), the same chapter that says “the journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step”. It is no recipe for doing nothing. It means working so early and so lightly that nobody sees a deed, and then taking no credit: “The work is done, but how no one can see” (ch. 2).

The voice

The book is mostly impersonal, in compressed rhythmic Chinese which Legge prints as prose broken by his own rhymes. One chapter breaks out. “I alone seem listless and still”, it says, “My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos” (ch. 20). Nowhere else does a person seem so plainly to be speaking. The other surprise is the feminine imagery, unusual in this literature: “The valley spirit dies not” and “The female mystery” (ch. 6), and the Tao as “the Mother of all things” (ch. 25).

The people

Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu may be no one. Later tradition made him a god, and the Way of the Celestial Masters, the first organised Taoist sect, took the text as his revelation. The Tang emperors claimed him as an ancestor.

Wang Bi

Wang Bi (226 to 249) wrote the commentary that fixed the standard text and read it as philosophy. Almost every translation before the 1970s rests on his version.

James Legge

James Legge, a Scottish missionary in Malacca and Hong Kong and from 1876 the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, translated the Confucian classics with Chinese collaborators, and published this version in The Texts of Taoism (1891) for the Sacred Books of the East. He had also taken a side in the missionaries’ quarrel by arguing that Shangdi was the Christian God, which is worth remembering at chapter 4.

Readers and afterlives

The early Han court read it as policy, and the Empress Dowager Dou was a keen student. The first English version was John Chalmers’s of 1868, and translations now run into the hundreds. Holmes Welch called it “a famous puzzle which everyone would like to feel he had solved”. Arthur Waley’s The Way and Its Power (1934) made it literature in English. Brecht’s poem of 1938 on Lao Tzu’s journey into exile has the customs officer as its hero, the man who asked. Ronald Reagan quoted it in his State of the Union address of 1988: “Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish; do not overdo it.” Murray Rothbard called Lao Tzu the first libertarian. They have chapters 57 and 75 on their side, but chapter 3 makes an odd charter for free citizens.

How to read it

Know what the free text is. Legge’s version is complete, all eighty-one chapters, but this file is the bare text without the introduction or notes of 1891. Its weaknesses are a Victorian missionary’s. The brackets constantly explain as they go, as in “Those who are skilled (in the Tao) do not dispute (about it)” (ch. 81), so you read Legge’s interpretation as if it were the text. “It might appear to have been before God” (ch. 4) puts a Christian word on the Chinese di. And the rhymes, such as “Colour’s five hues from th’ eyes their sight will take” (ch. 12), are all his.
Get a modern version. D. C. Lau’s (Penguin, 1963; revised for the Mawangdui text, Chinese University Press, 1982) is the sober one. Henricks’s Te-Tao Ching (Ballantine, 1989) translates Mawangdui and his Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (Columbia, 2000) translates Guodian. Mair’s (Bantam, 1990) also follows the silk.
Know what Le Guin’s is. Her version (Shambhala, 1997) is the most beautiful to read, but she called it “a rendition, not a translation”. She knew no Chinese, and worked from Paul Carus’s word-by-word edition of 1898 with help from the scholar J. P. Seaton.
Read it as a ruler, once. Ask who is being advised, then read it as if the advice were to you.