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Tao Te Ching A New English Version, with Foreword and Notes, by Stephen Mitchell
TO VICKI
Who can find a good woman? She is precious beyond all things. Her husband’s heart trusts her completely. She is his best reward. PROV. 31:10-11
Contents Foreword 1 The tao that can be told… 2 When people see some things as beautiful… 3 If you overesteem great men… 4 The Tao is like a well… 5 The Tao doesn't take sides… 6 The Tao is called the Great Mother… 7 The Tao is infinite, eternal… 8 The supreme good is like water… 9 Fill your bowl to the brim… 10 Can you coax your mind from its wandering… 11 We join spokes together in a wheel… 12 Colors blind the eye… 13 Success is as dangerous as failure… 14 Look, and it can't be seen… 15 The ancient Masters were profound and subtle… 16 Empty your mind of all thoughts… 17 When the Master governs, the people… 18 When the great Tao is forgotten… 19 Throw away holiness and wisdom…
20 Stop thinking, and end your problems… 21 The Master keeps her mind… 22 If you want to become whole… 23 Express yourself completely… 24 He who stands on tiptoe… 25 There was something formless and perfect… 26 The heavy is the root of the light… 27 A good traveler has no fixed plans… 28 Know the male… 29 Do you want to improve the world… 30 Whoever relies on the Tao in governing men… 31 Weapons are the tools of violence… 32 The Tao can't be perceived… 33 Knowing others is intelligence… 34 The great Tao flows everywhere… 35 She who is centered in the Tao… 36 If you want to shrink something… 37 The Tao never does anything… 38 The Master doesn't try to be powerful… 39 In harmony with the Tao… 40 Return is the movement of the Tao… 41 When a superior man hears of the Tao… 42 The Tao gives birth to One… 43 The gentlest thing in the world…
44 Fame or integrity: which is more important… 45 True perfection seems imperfect… 46 When a country is in harmony with the Tao… 47 Without opening your door… 48 In the pursuit of knowledge… 49 The Master has no mind of her own… 50 The Master gives himself up… 51 Every being in the universe… 52 In the beginning was the Tao… 53 The great Way is easy… 54 Whoever is planted in the Tao… 55 He who is in harmony with the Tao… 56 Those who know don't talk… 57 If you want to be a great leader… 58 If a country is governed with tolerance… 59 For governing a country well… 60 Governing a large country… 61 When a country obtains great power… 62 The Tao is the center of the universe… 63 Act without doing… 64 What is rooted is easy to nourish… 65 The ancient Masters… 66 All streams flow to the sea… 67 Some say that my teaching is nonsense…
68 The best athlete… 69 The generals have a saying… 70 My teachings are easy to understand… 71 Not-knowing is true knowledge… 72 When they lose their sense of awe… 73 The Tao is always at ease… 74 If you realize that all things change… 75 When taxes are too high… 76 Men are born soft and supple… 77 As it acts in the world, the Tao… 78 Nothing in the world… 79 Failure is an opportunity… 80 If a country is governed wisely… 81 True words aren't eloquent… Notes Acknowledgments About the Translator Books by Stephen Mitchell Credits Copyright About the Publisher
Foreword Tao Te Ching (pronounced, more or less, Dow Deh Jing) can be translated as The Book of the Immanence of the Way or The Book of the Way and of How It Manifests Itself in the World or, simply, The Book of the Way. Since it is already well known by its Chinese title, I have let that stand. About Lao-tzu, its author, there is practically nothing to be said. He may have been an older contemporary of Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) and may have held the position of archive-keeper in one of the petty kingdoms of the time. But all the information that has come down to us is highly suspect. Even the meaning of his name is uncertain (the most likely interpretations: “the Old Master” or, more picturesquely, “the Old Boy”). Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces. All he left us is his book: the classic manual on the art of living, written in style of gemlike lucidity, radiant with humor and grace and largeheartedness and deep wisdom: one of the wonders of the world. People usually think of Lao-tzu as a hermit, a dropout from society, dwelling serenely in some mountain hut, unvisited except perhaps by the occasional traveler arriving from a ’60s joke to ask, “What is the meaning of life?” But it’s clear from his teachings that he deeply cared about society, if society means the welfare of one’s fellow human beings; his book is, among other things, a treatise on the art of government, whether of a country or of a child. The misperception may arise from his insistence on wei wu wei, literally “doing not-doing,” which has been seen as passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth. A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.
Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame. This “nothing” is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body. Hence Lao-tzu’s emphasis on softness. Softness means the opposite of rigidity, and is synonymous with suppleness, adaptability, endurance. Anyone who has seen a t’ai chi or aikido master doing not-doing will know how powerful this softness is. Lao-tzu’s central figure is a man or woman whose life is in perfect harmony with the way things are. This is not an idea; it is a reality; I have seen it. The Master has mastered Nature; not in the sense of conquering it, but of becoming it. In surrendering to the Tao, in giving up all concepts, judgments, and desires, her mind has grown naturally compassionate. She finds deep in her own experience the central truths of the art of living, which are paradoxical only on the surface: that the more truly solitary we are, the more compassionate we can be; the more we let go of what we love, the more present our love becomes; the clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good. Until finally she is able to say, in all humility, “I am the Tao, the Truth, the Life.” The teaching of the Tao Te Ching is moral in the deepest sense. Unencumbered by any concept of sin, the Master doesn’t see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can’t shine through. This freedom from moral categories allows him his great compassion for the wicked and the selfish. Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn’t reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light. What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret. The reader will notice that in the many passages where Lao-tzu describes the Master, I have used the pronoun “she” at least as often as “he.” The Chinese language doesn’t make this kind of distinction; in English we have to choose. But since we are all, potentially, the Master (since the Master is, essentially, us), I felt it would be untrue to present a male archetype, as other versions have, ironically, done. Ironically, because of all the great world religions the teaching of Lao-tzu is by far the most female. Of course, you should feel free, throughout the book, to substitute “he” for “she” or vice versa. 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. I also consulted dozens of translations into English, German, and French. But the most essential preparation for my work was a fourteen-year- long course of Zen training, which brought me face to face with Lao-tzu and his true disciples and heirs, the early Chinese Zen Masters. With great poetry, the freest translation is sometimes the most faithful. “We must try its effect as an English poem,” Dr. Johnson said; “that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation.” I have often been fairly literal—or
as literal as one can be with such a subtle, kaleidoscopic book as the Tao Te Ching. But I have also paraphrased, expanded, contracted, interpreted, worked with the text, played with it, until it became embodied in a language that felt genuine to me. If I haven’t always translated Lao-tzu’s words, my intention has always been to translate his mind.
Tao Te Ching