Dao De Jing: A Minimalist Translation

Welcome to yet another translation of the Dao De Jing (DDJ), or Tao Te Ching in the old-fashioned spelling. Why should you want to read this translation? This version attempts to include an exact translation of every Chinese symbol in the original text, with as few added words and paraphrasing as possible. This results in sentences which hopefully provide a more literal translation, but are bare and minimalist, sometimes awkward, and often doesn’t make sense. You, the reader, will have to wrestle with some sentences, trying to wring out of them whatever meaning their author was trying to express 2300 years ago, instead of my simply telling you what I think they mean. I also show you what words were translated exactly, what was interpreted, and what was added or left out, so you can see exactly how much the English translation has in common with the original Chinese. I even point out alternative translations, so you can choose for yourself in some cases. Another difference is that while this translation is primarily based on the “Wang Bi” ancient manuscript (used by most translators), it presents some of the ideas from the earliest versions of the DDJ we have available, if those ideas are present in the majority of all the sources. Finally, scholars have long speculated that different parts of the DDJ were written by different authors at different times. By analyzing the symbols, phrases, and themes in each chapter, the chapters can be separated into at least three groups. The appendix presents the chapters in these groups, so that the reader may better see the common themes each group focused on. ============================================================== Who Wrote the DDJ and When? There is a great deal of debate over these questions, enough to fill a book in their own right! What follows is just a very brief introduction for the first-time reader who has no idea who “Lao Zi” was (please note that all dates are very approximate). Although the author of the DDJ is always given as “Lao Zi” or “Lao Tsu” (old spelling), we have no historical proof of his existence. A Chinese court historian named Sima Qian, who lived around 115 BCE, wrote a biography of Lao Zi (literally “old master”, unless Lao is a family name – in which case “master Lao”) that presents three different possible traditions, although the accuracy of any of them is doubtful.…