Tao Te Ching

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By contrast," he says, "it had taken me seventeen years to finish my translation of the Book of Job. Later, the querent asks: "You knew what Lao-tzu was talking about, through direct experience [in Zen meditation] of your own?

Stephen Mitchell (translator) - Wikipedia

In eighty-one brief chapters, the Tao Te Ching looks at the basic predicament of being alive and gives advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit. Stephen Mitchell's translation of the same line is: "If you overesteem great men, / people become powerless. One of the qualities I most treasure in Chuang-tzu is his sense of the spontaneous, the uncapturable. I love this book, it is an awesome help to all humanity right now, even though Lao Tze lived in the 6th century BCE, what he said back then is related to what is happening right now. I’ve been banging on about this one for years to my fiancé and she just tells me I’m a lazy fu… sod!

He also discusses what is known about the history of the text and the period in which it was, traditionally, thought to have been compiled in and addresses inconsistencies in the text, giving convincing arguments for the case that the book was likely not written by one wise old sage named Lao Tzu at all, but in fact was a compilation of many different Taoist thinkers, their disciples and, later, various commentators.

Stephen Mitchell’s Version of the Tao Te Ching: A Spiritual

Mitchell arbitrarily splits them into sixty-four "chapters", turns most of them to poetry despite the source, and then makes every single facing page a commentary of his own on his own translation. First, the content is less explicit when it comes to assuming a hierarchy and government, the only improvement I see in this book over the other. The left to the Tao Te Ching’s right, the yang to its yin, a companion volume and antimanual, The Second Book of the Tao is a great gift to contemporary readers. I realize (again and again) when I read books of this nature, there is always further to go when it comes to being at peace; like all things, it comes with mental, spiritual and physical health.In surrendering to the Tao, in giving up all concepts, judgments, and desires, her mind has grown naturally compassionate. You may feel that, as with Zeno’s paradoxes, there is something specious going on here, if only you could put your finger on it. Mitchell's reinterpretation is easy to read and flows well partially because it is Not loyal to the original text.

The Second Book of the Tao – Stephen Mitchell

As to method: I worked from Paul Carus’s literal version, which provides English equivalents (often very quaint ones) alongside each of the Chinese ideograms. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Laozi translated literally from Chinese means "old master" or "old one", and is generally considered honorific. Mitchell’s renditions are radiantly lucid; they dig out the vision that’s hiding beneath the words; they grab the text by the scruff of the neck—by its heart, really—and let its essential meanings fall out.Drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzussu, The Second Book of the Tao offers Western readers a path into reality that has nothing to do with Taoism or Buddhism or old or new alone, but everything to do with truth. Mitchell’s flights, his paradoxes, his wonderful riffs are brilliant and liberating, not least because they keep catching us off-guard, opening up the heavens where before we saw a roof. Later, he likens governing a large state to “boiling a small fish” because a small fish can be spoiled with too much handling.