Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi, Jerome P. Seaton Read Free Book Online Page A

represents the
character tao .
    I consistently render the character te as
"power." "Virtue" ( virtus , vertú ) in its old sense of the inherent quality and
strength of a thing or person is far closer to the mark, but that sense is
pretty well lost. Applied obsessively to the virginity or monogamy of women,
the word lost its own virtue. When used of persons it now almost always has a
smirk or a sneer in it. This is a shame. Lao Tzu’s "Power is goodness"
makes precisely the identification we used to make in the word
"virtue." "Power," on the other hand, is a powerful word,
almost a mana -word for us. It is also a very slippery
one, with many connotations. To identify it with goodness takes a special, Taoistic definition of it as a property of—the virtue of—the
Way.
    The phrase t’ien hsia , literally "under
heaven," occurs many times throughout the text. More often than not I
render it as "the world." It is often translatable as "the Empire"—which
after all meant the world, to Lao Tzu’s contemporaries. I avoid this, in order
to avoid historical specificity; but often t’ien hsia indubitably
means one’s country, one’s land, as in chapter 26. Elsewhere I call it the
public good, the commonwealth, or the common good, and sometimes I render it
literally.
    The phrase wan wuh , occurring very frequently, means the material
world, all beings, everything. I often use the traditional literal translation,
"the ten thousand things," because it’s lively and concrete, but at
times I say "everything" or "the things of this world."
    I use "wise soul" or "the wise" for the
several words and phrases usually rendered as Sage, Wise Man, Saint, Great Man,
and so on, and I avoid the pronoun usually associated with these terms. I wanted
to make a version that doesn’t limit wisdom to males, and doesn’t give the
impression that a follower of the Tao has to be a professional, full-time
Holier-than-Thou who lives up above snowline. Unimportant, uneducated,
untrained men and women can be wise souls. (I thought of using mensch.)
    With the same intention, I often use the plural pronoun
where other translations use the singular, to avoid unnecessary gendering and to
keep from suggesting the idea of uniqueness, singularity. I appreciate the
Chinese language for making such choices available.
    Certain obscure passages and verses that change or obstruct
the sense of the poems may be seen as errors or interpolations by copyists. I
decided to eject some of them. My authority for doing so is nil—a
poet’s judgment that "this doesn’t belong here." It takes nerve
to drop a line that Waley has left in. My version is
openly dependent on the judgment of the scholars. But my aim was to make aesthetic,
intellectual, and spiritual sense, and I felt that efforts to treat material
extraneous to the text as integral to it weaken its integrity. Anyhow, rejects
are discussed and printed in the commentary on the page with the poem, or in the
Notes.
    The Titles of the
Poems: Carus is one of the few translators to use
titles; they are in both his Chinese text and his translation. I follow his
version sometimes, and sometimes invent my own.

The Two Texts of the Tao Te Ching
    We now have two versions of the Tao Te Ching : the
texts that have been standard since the third century CE, and the Ma wang tui texts of the mid-first century CE, not discovered
till 1973 . They differ in many details, but in only
one major respect: the order of the two books that constitute the text.
    The three words tao te ching ,
put into English without syntactical connection, are "way power
classic." The usual interpretation gives the meaning of this title as
something on the order of "the classic [text] about the way and [its]
power." The two books are titled (in some versions) Tao , "The Way," and Te , "The Power." (I
personally find that the poems do not consistently reflect that division of
subject-matter.) In the Ma wang tui , the Power comes
before the Way. I keep the