> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
Having done a similar "rendition" to a book of poetry, I agree it is not the same as translating directly. It does open up a question about the fuzziness of "what is even translation?"
Especially when we talk about translating historic writing. Yes, not knowing the source language is a huge barrier. But so is not knowing specific cultural touchstones or references in the text. In-depth translations usually transliterate as a part of the process. Many words and language patterns are untranslatable, which is why perfect translations are impossible.
When translating poetry, issues of meter and rhythm are even more important. It comes down to what the purpose of a translation is meant to achieve. Yes, there are ideas and themes but there is no hiding the fact that translators always imprint their own perspective on a work - it's unavoidable and personally shouldn't even be the goal.
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
I like the term "rendition" because it throws away the concept of the "authoritative translation". I like to think of translations the same way as cover songs. The best covers may be wildly different from the original but they share the same roots.
As a reader, if you can't ever "hear" the original because you don't know thr language you can still appreciate someone's "cover version", or triangulate the original by reading multiple translations.
Beautifully, this reads like it came right out of Le Guin's rendition of the Tao Te Ching:
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.
It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.
The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.
The Library of Congress very generously provides a scan of the Paul Carus translation [1].
The transliteration of the Tao starts on page 159 and consists of columns of the characters each with a literal meaning and occasional comments by the translator. I found the first few chapters in that presentation very interesting, like a kind of puzzle (I don't read Chinese to any extent at all).
I didn't encounter the Dao de Jing until later in life, but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me. I first saw it as "the way that can be described is not the Way", but also "the way that can be traveled is not the eternal Way". That is, the eternal (spiritual) Way cannot be concretized, just as a name is not the real thing. Or, given that this is HN, "the software development methodology that can be executed like a program is not software development methodology". ("The Agile that can be PM'd is not Agile.")
However, I think it might require some life maturity to recognize that. Certainly a recovery from Englightenment rationalism. My person experience is that an understanding that "the name that can be named/identified is not the eternal Name" and "the way that can be walked is not the eternal Way" took me until around my 40s to appreciate.
Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically). The book "Taoism: the Parting of the Ways" [1], by (former) Harvard Professor Holmes Welch, interprets the text as being a guide to a mystical way of living, similar to St. John of the Cross (minus the Christian part), which is fascinating. Then he describes how the two main factions took the text literally, and how that evolved.
> but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me
the a/symmetry of the opening bits in Chinese, visually echoes a taiji:
> 道可道，
> 非恆道；
> 名可名，
> 非恆名。
given the diversity of translations available for those bits, I think it's fair to say that there's room for debate regarding their exact meaning − dare I say
amusingly, by being certain one understand what it means, somehow one really does not. Lao-Tseu may have been way, way wiser than average.
> It subtly hints at the limitations of language in capturing true understanding
and that's still one interpretation ^_^
> Almost every other ancient text starts of being full of certainty
I can't say for sure about ancient texts, but famous wise men certainly (always?) encouraged a fair amount of humility (e.g. Shakyamuni, Socrates, Jesus, Confucius). But few actually wrote.
however, in general, their followers − and popular interpretations − embarrass themselves much less with humility.
in case this isn't known to you − I find this delightful − note that the (respectful) "子" suffix used in names (e.g. Lao-tseu is 老子, Confucius is 孔夫子) means "small thing", "seed", "child".
This is straight-up Baudrillard simulacra/simulation.
The moment you say "Dao" (or "Agile", or "methodology"), you've already moved from the thing-in-itself to a sign living inside a sign system. That sign can be useful, but it can't be identical to what it points at.
> “The Agile that can be PM’d is not Agile.”
That’s exactly the stages of simulacra in miniature:
- Faithful copy: "Agile" names a set of lived practices that correspond to reality.
- Masks/denatures: cargo-cult rituals distort it (standups-as-status-reporting).
- Masks absence: the org performs Agile theater to hide that genuine agility is gone.
- Pure simulacrum: "Agile" becomes a self-referential brand/signifier (certs, metrics, tooling) that relates primarily to other signs ("Agile maturity model", "story points velocity"), not to any actual working output.
For a reductionist, it might be better understood as - step outside of your usual mode of thinking. Remember that you don't know everything. Or just - take time to stop and smell the flowers. Try to spend more time noticing and less time analyzing.
There are things that are difficult to communicate directly in the reductionist mode of thought - and are intended to have meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. You have to think a bit more laterally.
Jean Baudrillard is a fraud/charlatan. Semiotics is a fake field. Him and all his friends (i.e. Foucualt, Derrida, DnG, Althussar, etc) are at Chiropractors/ Homeopaths for the mind and at worst actual useful idiots for western intelligence agencies.
> Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically).
It's incredibly ironic. To those who wonder where the irony is, imagine writing a book of poems on "freesbeing", which you describe as an ineffable experience that one gets when they play the freesbee. In your book, most passages allude to subtleties that escape any reader who isn't a freesbee enthousiast. And so, only those who pick up a freesbee and start throwing it unlock the meaning in your book. Then thousands of years later, intellectuals try to explain "freesbeing" without knowing what even is the freesbee.
Daoism is a practical guide to a mystical way of life. Similar to the teachings of Buddhist mystics, Advaitist mystics, Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, and so forth. Most such teachings are very practical and somewhat point in the same (inner) direction. A shared core tenet is that experiences are infinitely more valid (i.e. true) than the content of thoughts (i.e. concepts, philosophy, beliefs, labels, words, etc) used to describe them. Said more commonly, the mind -- the craddle of thoughts, the mother of all concepts, explanations, and philosophies -- is a liar. This is peppered everywhere in the Tao Te Ching, starting from the very first line. Yet, most interpretations of it are conceptual, trying to make it into some kind of a philosophy.
To clarify, that sentence is not from a Spanish translation of the Tao Te Ching; it is a fragment of Antonio Machado's poem 'Caminante no hay camino':
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
One reading I came across claimed the author of `art of war' had his foot amputated in a form of punishment. You had to be careful with your language at court in those times.
It is possible to associate passages from the Tao Te Ching to memes that just pop up in your social media feeds. A native speaker and writer will have rich associations in the language you can get a sense of in the language used to cover Chinese philosophy at the SEP entries.
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president.
From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality.
Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
Thank you, this there is the first version I see that feels like it's got solid cultural context. I like Ursula's version and have read her books over the years, but for example when she write "mystery" in there I always felt she was dropping the ball a bit.
It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.
EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.
How can something translate into both of those things? The second translation doesn't have the concept of "saying" anything and the first translation says nothing about "wealth".
"dao" has multiple meanings; a road or path (extended by metaphor into philosophy), as well to speak or explain. So "dao ke dao fei chang dao", which dao has which meaning? How about the other characters, alone or in multi-character readings?
The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous.
This is kind of how it translates in English:
'Light light moon
green grass mountain
snow sun together'
For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it
>"The simplicity of Lao Tzu's language can present an almost impenetrable density of meaning. The reversals and paradoxes in this great poem are the oppositions of the yin and yang — male/female, light/dark, glory/modesty — but the knowing and being of them, the balancing act, results in neither stasis nor synthesis ... reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward."
Thanks for your literal character interpretation / perspective.
This is one of my favorite versions, mostly for nostalgic reasons. My initial exposure to the Tao te Ching was this "rendition" and Stephen Mitchell's version. Comparing the two was always very thought provoking; the approach is very different between them.
Does the book describes binary mathematics (via the ying and yang) and how it can be used to describe basically all complexity and complex interactions ? Have you read that bit? I heard Alan Watts mention it and I thought it was interesting.
I picked up Tao Te Ching as an American teenager and was moved by how it cuts against the American faith in visible dominance and self-assertion, proposing a form of strength that is low, quiet, and unseen. It's much more than that of course, but that aspect had immediate impact on my thinking.
It’s a cultural thing. If a Chinese person steeped in that culture of “low, quiet, unseen” strength came to America as an immigrant, that person would likely not do very well. If the person immigrated as a child, schooling in America will quickly change that.
I don’t doubt that the aspect had immediate impact on your thinking, but I would be very surprised if it also had lasting impact on your behavior.
I really liked Brook Ziporyn's translation of the Dao and particular his deep dive into the A / B / True A move that the Dao does all the time. There's a nice small lecture on YT on this as well: https://youtu.be/EJ1bB2w2gBk
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.
From the her postscript:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.
This is wonderful. Ursula K. Le Guin is a great thinker and I’d highly recommend her novels. I’ve read Ken Liu’s, who many here probably know at least from translating The Three Body Problem and Death’s End, Tao Te Ching and it was remarkably poetic. Excited to read another person’s interpretation.
Agreed! I really liked Ken Liu's translation of T3BP.
I don't speak any Chinese or Asian-based lingo for
that matter, but am a fan of the culture and rich
history. Some of us that don't know the lingo, have
issues with reading subtitled movies, for example,
can only enjoy the art via audio dubbing. Godzilla
Minus 1 comes to mind, as a good example of a movie
that generated some controversy when translated and
people claimed that it lost something in the translation.
I'm sure they were right, but I thoroughly enjoyed it
and was glad when it was dubbed into other languages.
The original author is a little surprised how little traffic this receives considering how often he sees people linking to it all over the internet :)
Around 5k visits a month, including scrapers for LLM training. Somehow I still don't feel this "LLM scrapers have destroyed my website". Seems they don't care about any of my websites. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that, but I feel somewhat slighted - are my websites not good enough to be constantly scraped?
I would add "The Tao is silent" by Raymond Smullyan to this list. It's not a translation, or even a rendition, but I should guess anyone with a real interest in the Tao will find that book interesting as well.
I'm imagining a hoard of angry Taoists led by the ghost of Le Guin very upset that the wisdom was not paid for in accordance with the inscrutable decisions made by capitalist lawmakers.
"Everybody on earth knowing
that beauty is beautiful
makes ugliness."
That resonates with so much of the discussion on this site. We're all trying to make good technology that helps people! Why does it so often fall short?
UKLG deliberately wrote Earthsea in the guise of a Western high fantasy, but its philosophical core is the Tao Te Ching. It was set in the archipelagos similar to SW Asia, with similar ethnicity.
The producers who made the movie casted the crew ignoring UKLG though I think contractually, they were supposed to listen to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they swapped out the philosophical core.
my first exposure to the Tao Te Ching was listening to the audiobook 'the tao of pooh', which I was listening to on an airplane and found myself doubled-over gobsmacked with the simple complexity it was exposing to me, and how I had already absent mindedly followed a few of their principles, and nowadays it's all I see, is don't think, just do; go back to the beginning; become an uncarved block. it's all so great.
The concept of *unlearning* in Chapter 48 and the Y Combinator (YC) model represent two fundamentally opposing approaches to action, leadership, and success. While C emphasizes accumulation, urgency, and overcoming obstacles to "win," Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching argues that true power comes from "shrinking," "not doing," and flowing like water to avoid obstacles entirely.
Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching draws a sharp distinction between conventional learning and the Way. Le Guin translates this as: "Studying and learning daily you grow larger. / Following the Way daily you shrink".
Y Combinator exemplifies "growing larger." It describes a process where founders "work intensively," "compress months of growth into weeks," and strive to build companies into massive entities like OpenAI ($500B) and Airbnb ($100B). This aligns with the worldly pursuit of accumulation and "being bright" or "keen," which Le Guin notes leads to the "greatest evil: wanting more".
Le Guin argues that to follow the Way, one must "get smaller and smaller" until arriving at "not doing". This "unlearning" is the removal of the "fuss," desire, and intellectual rigidity that creates resistance.
The relationship between Unlearning and Not Doing is that unlearning strips away the ego-driven need to force outcomes. The YC text quotes Paul Graham defining a formidable founder as "one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way." This defines success as the imposition of will upon the world—an act of force. In contrast, Le Guin’s commentary states that wei wu wei (Action by Inaction) is "power that is not force". A Taoist leader does not overcome obstacles by crashing through them; rather, like water, they go "right / to the low loathsome places, / and so finds the way". To the Taoist, the "formidable" approach of forcefully removing obstacles is dangerous because "Those who think to win the world / by doing something to it, / I see them come to grief".
The YC website highlights that "the sense of urgency is so infectious among founders" that it creates maximum productivity. Le Guin’s translation warns explicitly against this state—she writes: "Racing, chasing, hunting, / drives people crazy". Le Guin notes that "To run things, / don't fuss with them," and that "Nobody who fusses / is fit to run things". The "fuss" (or shi) is interpreted by Le Guin as "diplomacy" or "meddling"—essentially, the intense activity and "doing" that YC celebrates.
Instead of infectious urgency, the Taoist relies on "doing without doing," which Le Guin describes as "uncompetitive, unworried, trustful accomplishment".
The YC website describes "formidable founders" who do—they build, pivot, and acquire vast valuations through intense effort. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching suggests that this is the path of "growing larger". In the Taoist view, these founders are "doing something to" the world, which is a "sacred object" that should not be seized. While YC founders "get what they want," Le Guin observes that "the ever-wanting soul / sees only what it wants," blinding them to the "mystery" and the true nature of the Way. Unlearning, therefore, leads to not doing by dismantling the very ambition that drives a founder to become "formidable" in the first place.
Edit: TBH, IMHO, "the low loathsome places" are not dissimilar from the indignities which a founder should be prepared to suffer, and so maybe startups aren't completely anathema to the Dao.
The very first sentence misses the point. (It might be a literal translation. Perhaps. But that's not the essence.) I couldn't go (pun intended) beyond the first sentence. There are much more "essential" translations out there.
As another comment points out, Le Guin herself does not call this a translation, so we shouldn't misrepresent it (although it might be my favorite English version).
However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
I think the way to do it is to notify her estate and let them pursue it or not. But I'm really just here to say how I'm happy to pay her estate and publishers and everyone else should too.
> Does github have a way to report copyright violations?
What would reporting this GitHub repo do? Is the late Ursula K. Le Guin going to get a check in the afterlife? Her historical stance on copyright was based on consent. What happens when the author passes away?
I was wondering whether GitHub has a process for dealing with reports of obvious copyright violations. They don’t need thr copyright owner to weigh in.
What on earth is it about intellectual property that breaks someone's mind so much that genuinely, when presented with a translation of a 2000 year old text that itself is based on another authors translation and who's translator is now dead, they go onto a website to proclaim "it's not in the public domain!".
I have 0 confidence that I could understand the Tao even if I read the best most classical translations available.
Take the bible, which is translated from languages that are closer to mine, and which refers to a culture which is closer to mine, with family and scholars whose interpretation I can understand directly. Still I don't have much confidence that I understand the bulk of it, it takes years of reading and lived experiences to understand both the modern and past contexts in which it was written.
By the same token, I'm certain actual chinese people read the Tao and are like "Lmao what does this mean", and for the most part these books are meant to be mysterious, iirc there's actual sections of the Tao that translate to "You can't understand the Tao".
I don't mean to be overly religious here, it's just that the Tao happens to be religious, but consider Beowulf, which is written in an old form of the English language, surely you would be able to understand it? Not a chance, try it. But ok, surely the translators are able to understand it and provide you a translation without losing much meaning. No, not only can they not provide a translation that you can understand without losing context and signal, but they can't understand a lot of what they are reading anyways. Consider that for just the first word of the whole epic, they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means, nobody can even settle on what the first word means! Imagine the rest of the text.
So to think that one has a chance to understand the Tao, or even that it is worth it at all to understand something from a culture so different. Not for me.
Unless you are Asian, by all means go for it, but if you are not, I would invite you to question whether you first have any chance at understanding at all, or whether you will interpret "being like a Straw Dog" from whatever translation you chose through your own lens, like a Rorschach.
You can't understand the tao because there is nothing to "understand".
That is the whole point. If you walk in the woods on a beautiful day and hear birds chirping, there is nothing to "understand". It isn't an intellectual exercise.
Quibbling about translations of the Tao Te Ching is really quite comical. A better taoist "teaching" would be to throw your copy in the garbage and go for a walk in the woods. This is where the cultural problems come in though. That is not really what is meant by the English word "teaching". Then you are expecting to "learn" some kind of new symbolic representation when the whole point is to get rid of symbolic representation.
The idea you can't understand concepts from other humans because you were born into a different cultures is really stupid.
That's exactly what someone that doesn't understand a text would say.
Not saying thay you don't understand it or that your interpretation is wrong, but it is indistinguishable from misunderstanding, and you could get it from any text you don't understand.
The idea that you can throw the text and still understand it just shows how connected to the text you are.
This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.
> they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means
I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.
>Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia.
But these cultures and texts are much closer to us than the Chinese Tao te Ching.
Taxonomically Latin and English have a common ancestor in ProtoIndoeuropean sure, but English and the Romances (I'm spanish native), but there's a lot of horizontal influence of Latin in English. Netwon, (and many other English writers) wrote in both Latin and English. The aphabet is the same.
Regarding the Epic of Gilgamesh, I haven't read much about that, cuneiform must be insanely hard to read, even through translations, that said, the fact that it seems to be an influence for Noah's Ark story seems to bring it much closer to western culture than Asian culture.
Same thing with Greek literature, it's a bit farther away, but some stuff like ficticious Oddyssey will be somewhat approachable through a translation, the rhymes and a million temporal references will be completely lost obviously.
Even some Arabic math texts I would consider to be somewhat more approachable by virtue of being so foundational to maths in general.
But religious Chinese? must be one of the most unapproachable combos for reading as a non native reader.
Dao is the way of life, it teaches the proper way to live. This teaching exists in every culture. Westerners call it the Way, Indians call it Dharma, Chinese also call it Fa. The simpler it looks, the higher its level. Its written forms have many layers of meaning because readers are of different levels. A well known example is statements like "love your enemy." It has a surface level meaning, a deeper meaning and so on. What you can ultimately see corresponds to your character level. To raise your level you need to apply what you've learned into practice, to live in the Dao, in other words. Intellectual understanding isn't enough, it must change the way you live. Then you can read the Dao again and see a higher level of meaning.
From the bottom:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
Having done a similar "rendition" to a book of poetry, I agree it is not the same as translating directly. It does open up a question about the fuzziness of "what is even translation?"
Especially when we talk about translating historic writing. Yes, not knowing the source language is a huge barrier. But so is not knowing specific cultural touchstones or references in the text. In-depth translations usually transliterate as a part of the process. Many words and language patterns are untranslatable, which is why perfect translations are impossible.
When translating poetry, issues of meter and rhythm are even more important. It comes down to what the purpose of a translation is meant to achieve. Yes, there are ideas and themes but there is no hiding the fact that translators always imprint their own perspective on a work - it's unavoidable and personally shouldn't even be the goal.
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
I like the term "rendition" because it throws away the concept of the "authoritative translation". I like to think of translations the same way as cover songs. The best covers may be wildly different from the original but they share the same roots.
As a reader, if you can't ever "hear" the original because you don't know thr language you can still appreciate someone's "cover version", or triangulate the original by reading multiple translations.
Beautifully, this reads like it came right out of Le Guin's rendition of the Tao Te Ching:
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.
It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.
The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.
also recommended: After Babel by George Steiner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Babel
See also the preface[1] to Hofstadter's translation[2] of Eugene Onegin.
[1] https://jasomill.at/HofstadterOneginPreface.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-465-0209...
The Library of Congress very generously provides a scan of the Paul Carus translation [1].
The transliteration of the Tao starts on page 159 and consists of columns of the characters each with a literal meaning and occasional comments by the translator. I found the first few chapters in that presentation very interesting, like a kind of puzzle (I don't read Chinese to any extent at all).
[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/34009062/
Honestly, even if you know Chinese, it's very hard to translate Tao Te Ching into English.
Hell, it's hard to translate it into Chinese. Even the first paragraph is controversial. For example this rendition says:
> The name you can say
> isn’t the real name.
However, in a 5th century interpretation[0], it's more akin to:
> The fame and wealth the mortals praise are not a natural state.
(My extremely simplified paraphrasing)
[0]: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=491818
I didn't encounter the Dao de Jing until later in life, but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me. I first saw it as "the way that can be described is not the Way", but also "the way that can be traveled is not the eternal Way". That is, the eternal (spiritual) Way cannot be concretized, just as a name is not the real thing. Or, given that this is HN, "the software development methodology that can be executed like a program is not software development methodology". ("The Agile that can be PM'd is not Agile.")
However, I think it might require some life maturity to recognize that. Certainly a recovery from Englightenment rationalism. My person experience is that an understanding that "the name that can be named/identified is not the eternal Name" and "the way that can be walked is not the eternal Way" took me until around my 40s to appreciate.
Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically). The book "Taoism: the Parting of the Ways" [1], by (former) Harvard Professor Holmes Welch, interprets the text as being a guide to a mystical way of living, similar to St. John of the Cross (minus the Christian part), which is fascinating. Then he describes how the two main factions took the text literally, and how that evolved.
[1] I have a summary at http://geoffprewett.com/BookReviews/TaoismThePartingOfTheWay...
> but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me
the a/symmetry of the opening bits in Chinese, visually echoes a taiji:
> 道可道，
> 非恆道；
> 名可名，
> 非恆名。
given the diversity of translations available for those bits, I think it's fair to say that there's room for debate regarding their exact meaning − dare I say
amusingly, by being certain one understand what it means, somehow one really does not. Lao-Tseu may have been way, way wiser than average.
Exactly. It subrly hints at the limitations of language in capturing true understanding.
This is something I was impressed with. Almost every other ancient text starts of being full of certainty or being the authoratitve truth.
> It subtly hints at the limitations of language in capturing true understanding
and that's still one interpretation ^_^
> Almost every other ancient text starts of being full of certainty
I can't say for sure about ancient texts, but famous wise men certainly (always?) encouraged a fair amount of humility (e.g. Shakyamuni, Socrates, Jesus, Confucius). But few actually wrote.
however, in general, their followers − and popular interpretations − embarrass themselves much less with humility.
in case this isn't known to you − I find this delightful − note that the (respectful) "子" suffix used in names (e.g. Lao-tseu is 老子, Confucius is 孔夫子) means "small thing", "seed", "child".
This is straight-up Baudrillard simulacra/simulation.
The moment you say "Dao" (or "Agile", or "methodology"), you've already moved from the thing-in-itself to a sign living inside a sign system. That sign can be useful, but it can't be identical to what it points at.
> “The Agile that can be PM’d is not Agile.”
That’s exactly the stages of simulacra in miniature:
- Faithful copy: "Agile" names a set of lived practices that correspond to reality.
- Masks/denatures: cargo-cult rituals distort it (standups-as-status-reporting).
- Masks absence: the org performs Agile theater to hide that genuine agility is gone.
- Pure simulacrum: "Agile" becomes a self-referential brand/signifier (certs, metrics, tooling) that relates primarily to other signs ("Agile maturity model", "story points velocity"), not to any actual working output.
That's a reductionist take.
For a reductionist, it might be better understood as - step outside of your usual mode of thinking. Remember that you don't know everything. Or just - take time to stop and smell the flowers. Try to spend more time noticing and less time analyzing.
There are things that are difficult to communicate directly in the reductionist mode of thought - and are intended to have meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. You have to think a bit more laterally.
Jean Baudrillard is a fraud/charlatan. Semiotics is a fake field. Him and all his friends (i.e. Foucualt, Derrida, DnG, Althussar, etc) are at Chiropractors/ Homeopaths for the mind and at worst actual useful idiots for western intelligence agencies.
What about Steven Pinker
You should have posted your comment at the top.
> Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically).
It's incredibly ironic. To those who wonder where the irony is, imagine writing a book of poems on "freesbeing", which you describe as an ineffable experience that one gets when they play the freesbee. In your book, most passages allude to subtleties that escape any reader who isn't a freesbee enthousiast. And so, only those who pick up a freesbee and start throwing it unlock the meaning in your book. Then thousands of years later, intellectuals try to explain "freesbeing" without knowing what even is the freesbee.
Daoism is a practical guide to a mystical way of life. Similar to the teachings of Buddhist mystics, Advaitist mystics, Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, and so forth. Most such teachings are very practical and somewhat point in the same (inner) direction. A shared core tenet is that experiences are infinitely more valid (i.e. true) than the content of thoughts (i.e. concepts, philosophy, beliefs, labels, words, etc) used to describe them. Said more commonly, the mind -- the craddle of thoughts, the mother of all concepts, explanations, and philosophies -- is a liar. This is peppered everywhere in the Tao Te Ching, starting from the very first line. Yet, most interpretations of it are conceptual, trying to make it into some kind of a philosophy.
I wonder if those who have come to realize that their thoughts are an unreliable narrator are less prone to be upset by the confabulations of genAI.
In Spanish we say "caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar" (roamer, there's no path, the path it's built upon walking".
To clarify, that sentence is not from a Spanish translation of the Tao Te Ching; it is a fragment of Antonio Machado's poem 'Caminante no hay camino':
Yep, but everyone said similar stuff and got parallel ideas across centuries. Especially in Math and Logic.
One reading I came across claimed the author of `art of war' had his foot amputated in a form of punishment. You had to be careful with your language at court in those times.
It is possible to associate passages from the Tao Te Ching to memes that just pop up in your social media feeds. A native speaker and writer will have rich associations in the language you can get a sense of in the language used to cover Chinese philosophy at the SEP entries.
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president. From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality. Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
Thank you, this there is the first version I see that feels like it's got solid cultural context. I like Ursula's version and have read her books over the years, but for example when she write "mystery" in there I always felt she was dropping the ball a bit.
> it's hard to translate it into Chinese.
It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.
EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lao-tzus-Taoteching-Lao-Tzu/dp/155659...
How can something translate into both of those things? The second translation doesn't have the concept of "saying" anything and the first translation says nothing about "wealth".
"dao" has multiple meanings; a road or path (extended by metaphor into philosophy), as well to speak or explain. So "dao ke dao fei chang dao", which dao has which meaning? How about the other characters, alone or in multi-character readings?
I have a hard copy of that book.
She’s captured the poetry and beauty of the received text very well. (I’ve tried my own hand at a translation and read a few other translations).
Hey, the last commit there is mine, fixing the line endings!
FWIW, I also made a website with comparison of the different translations/renditions of the Tao Te Ching, including the one by Ursula K. Le Guin[0].
[0]: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh,uklg
Thank you for your website.
The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous.
This is kind of how it translates in English:
'Light light moon green grass mountain snow sun together'
For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it
Note from UKLG (Tao#28):
>"The simplicity of Lao Tzu's language can present an almost impenetrable density of meaning. The reversals and paradoxes in this great poem are the oppositions of the yin and yang — male/female, light/dark, glory/modesty — but the knowing and being of them, the balancing act, results in neither stasis nor synthesis ... reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward."
Thanks for your literal character interpretation / perspective.
This is one of my favorite versions, mostly for nostalgic reasons. My initial exposure to the Tao te Ching was this "rendition" and Stephen Mitchell's version. Comparing the two was always very thought provoking; the approach is very different between them.
I often come to this site and compare chapters across multiple versions: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh
Some are more poetic, some are more literal, and keeping with the theme, both of them are just as important.
I have the physical book, translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English.
Every night, I read one new passage — then every morning, I read that same passage again.
Presuming you miss a few readings, you can then complete the entire Tao in less than three months (or: four times per year, cyclically).
This gives you time to digest each passage, be it in dreams or daytime. Nobody will ever fully understand these texts.
>#23 — "he who does not trust enough will not be trusted"
For my next read-through, I will paste Ursula's words alongside Ms. English's.
----
If you have not read The Dispossessed, this is a great intro to LaGuin's perspectiveS.
Does the book describes binary mathematics (via the ying and yang) and how it can be used to describe basically all complexity and complex interactions ? Have you read that bit? I heard Alan Watts mention it and I thought it was interesting.
From Tao #42
>The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
>They achieve harmony by combining these forces.
...
>For one gains by losing.
>And loses by gaining.
----
From Tao #28
>Knowing light and staying dark, be a pattern to the world.
>Being the world's pattern of eternal unerring power is to go back again to boundlessness.
I picked up Tao Te Ching as an American teenager and was moved by how it cuts against the American faith in visible dominance and self-assertion, proposing a form of strength that is low, quiet, and unseen. It's much more than that of course, but that aspect had immediate impact on my thinking.
Reading the Tao te Ching makes it clear why the best engineers are the soft-spoken individuals who refrain from talking until the end of the meeting.
That’s because good engineering is mostly listening to the system.
If you talk too early, you end up arguing abstractions. If you listen long enough, the constraints introduce themselves.
By the end of the meeting, the quiet person isn’t trying to win the room — they’re just reporting what reality already said.
>"If you listen long enough, the constraints introduce themselves."
This could be a line from [the non-existant] Tao #82.
It’s a cultural thing. If a Chinese person steeped in that culture of “low, quiet, unseen” strength came to America as an immigrant, that person would likely not do very well. If the person immigrated as a child, schooling in America will quickly change that.
I don’t doubt that the aspect had immediate impact on your thinking, but I would be very surprised if it also had lasting impact on your behavior.
Had to share the creation of Ea from the Earthsea cycle… very Tao…
“Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk’s flight On the empty sky.
“The Creation of Éa,” Ursula K. Le Guin
I really liked Brook Ziporyn's translation of the Dao and particular his deep dive into the A / B / True A move that the Dao does all the time. There's a nice small lecture on YT on this as well: https://youtu.be/EJ1bB2w2gBk
> I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you can see it rightly, it contains everything.
I'm a simple man. I see Borge, I upvote
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.
From the her postscript:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.
I also reference Le Guin's rendition a bunch here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense
This is wonderful. Ursula K. Le Guin is a great thinker and I’d highly recommend her novels. I’ve read Ken Liu’s, who many here probably know at least from translating The Three Body Problem and Death’s End, Tao Te Ching and it was remarkably poetic. Excited to read another person’s interpretation.
Agreed! I really liked Ken Liu's translation of T3BP. I don't speak any Chinese or Asian-based lingo for that matter, but am a fan of the culture and rich history. Some of us that don't know the lingo, have issues with reading subtitled movies, for example, can only enjoy the art via audio dubbing. Godzilla Minus 1 comes to mind, as a good example of a movie that generated some controversy when translated and people claimed that it lost something in the translation. I'm sure they were right, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and was glad when it was dubbed into other languages.
HN seems to like Tao Te Ching.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I found these. Others?
Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886419 - July 2024 (118 comments)
Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 - Oct 2023 (99 comments)
Tao Te Ching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37686713 - Sept 2023 (170 comments)
175 translations of of the Tao Te Ching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945605 - July 2020 (1 comment)
Translations of the Dao De Jing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953938 - April 2018 (59 comments)
In one of those threads a user, thadk, posted their really cool tool that shows a side by side comparison of English translations for each verse
https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,uklg,jc,rh/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887305
Glad it was a helpful remix! Since that post, the original tool author added UKLG's full version to the tool: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh,uklg/sectio...
The original author is a little surprised how little traffic this receives considering how often he sees people linking to it all over the internet :)
Around 5k visits a month, including scrapers for LLM training. Somehow I still don't feel this "LLM scrapers have destroyed my website". Seems they don't care about any of my websites. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that, but I feel somewhat slighted - are my websites not good enough to be constantly scraped?
Ah I missed that tasuki was the original author of the tool. Thanks to both of y'all
I would add "The Tao is silent" by Raymond Smullyan to this list. It's not a translation, or even a rendition, but I should guess anyone with a real interest in the Tao will find that book interesting as well.
I wish HN would align itself with the Dao instead of just liking the Dao.
Up voting and down voting comments is an affront to the Dao.
Osho on Tao the pathless path is also pretty amazing! - https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-1-by-osho-01...
Ron Hogan's Getting Right with Tao is another interesting rendition: http://www.beatrice.com/TAO.pdf
This is most likely a copyright violation. I follow these translations and I’ve seen no evidence that the publisher put it in the public domain.
I'm imagining a hoard of angry Taoists led by the ghost of Le Guin very upset that the wisdom was not paid for in accordance with the inscrutable decisions made by capitalist lawmakers.
Well, her three children might care.
in accordance with the inscrutable decisions made by capitalist lawmakers
Love this version. I quoted the chapter about Leadership plenty of times at work.
`True leaders are hardly known to their followers.`
What a crazy coincidence seeing this on HN; I just started reading this today!
Just read one per day.
Some days it will feel "too simple" — others "too much."
Enjoy your bedtime Tao.
Ideas have people
"Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness."
That resonates with so much of the discussion on this site. We're all trying to make good technology that helps people! Why does it so often fall short?
I am just noticing how those ideas are present in Wizard of Earthsea.
They're present in almost all of her work.
Eastern thought had quite a moment in the sun in the 60’s and 70’s. All I can say is lead poisoning does terrible things to the mind over time.
Sounds similar to some of the historic criticisms neo-Confucian had about Taoism.
Are you familiar with the Western non-dual traditions?
UKLG deliberately wrote Earthsea in the guise of a Western high fantasy, but its philosophical core is the Tao Te Ching. It was set in the archipelagos similar to SW Asia, with similar ethnicity.
The producers who made the movie casted the crew ignoring UKLG though I think contractually, they were supposed to listen to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they swapped out the philosophical core.
my first exposure to the Tao Te Ching was listening to the audiobook 'the tao of pooh', which I was listening to on an airplane and found myself doubled-over gobsmacked with the simple complexity it was exposing to me, and how I had already absent mindedly followed a few of their principles, and nowadays it's all I see, is don't think, just do; go back to the beginning; become an uncarved block. it's all so great.
For people who like The Big Lebowski, there's "The Tao of the Dude"
https://dudeism.com/taoofthedude/
Oh please stop.
Love, Someone who studied Daoism for 16 years.
I'm sure. But can you explain more? Share that 16 years of knowledge, even a little bit?
Ursula's notes really enrich the work. Fantastic ways to render insights in words.
Is this not under copyright?
The concept of *unlearning* in Chapter 48 and the Y Combinator (YC) model represent two fundamentally opposing approaches to action, leadership, and success. While C emphasizes accumulation, urgency, and overcoming obstacles to "win," Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching argues that true power comes from "shrinking," "not doing," and flowing like water to avoid obstacles entirely.
Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching draws a sharp distinction between conventional learning and the Way. Le Guin translates this as: "Studying and learning daily you grow larger. / Following the Way daily you shrink".
Y Combinator exemplifies "growing larger." It describes a process where founders "work intensively," "compress months of growth into weeks," and strive to build companies into massive entities like OpenAI ($500B) and Airbnb ($100B). This aligns with the worldly pursuit of accumulation and "being bright" or "keen," which Le Guin notes leads to the "greatest evil: wanting more".
Le Guin argues that to follow the Way, one must "get smaller and smaller" until arriving at "not doing". This "unlearning" is the removal of the "fuss," desire, and intellectual rigidity that creates resistance.
The relationship between Unlearning and Not Doing is that unlearning strips away the ego-driven need to force outcomes. The YC text quotes Paul Graham defining a formidable founder as "one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way." This defines success as the imposition of will upon the world—an act of force. In contrast, Le Guin’s commentary states that wei wu wei (Action by Inaction) is "power that is not force". A Taoist leader does not overcome obstacles by crashing through them; rather, like water, they go "right / to the low loathsome places, / and so finds the way". To the Taoist, the "formidable" approach of forcefully removing obstacles is dangerous because "Those who think to win the world / by doing something to it, / I see them come to grief".
The YC website highlights that "the sense of urgency is so infectious among founders" that it creates maximum productivity. Le Guin’s translation warns explicitly against this state—she writes: "Racing, chasing, hunting, / drives people crazy". Le Guin notes that "To run things, / don't fuss with them," and that "Nobody who fusses / is fit to run things". The "fuss" (or shi) is interpreted by Le Guin as "diplomacy" or "meddling"—essentially, the intense activity and "doing" that YC celebrates.
Instead of infectious urgency, the Taoist relies on "doing without doing," which Le Guin describes as "uncompetitive, unworried, trustful accomplishment".
The YC website describes "formidable founders" who do—they build, pivot, and acquire vast valuations through intense effort. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching suggests that this is the path of "growing larger". In the Taoist view, these founders are "doing something to" the world, which is a "sacred object" that should not be seized. While YC founders "get what they want," Le Guin observes that "the ever-wanting soul / sees only what it wants," blinding them to the "mystery" and the true nature of the Way. Unlearning, therefore, leads to not doing by dismantling the very ambition that drives a founder to become "formidable" in the first place.
Edit: TBH, IMHO, "the low loathsome places" are not dissimilar from the indignities which a founder should be prepared to suffer, and so maybe startups aren't completely anathema to the Dao.
What would be the easiest way to get this into an EPUB?
"The way you can go isn’t the real way."
Nope. This ain't it.
The very first sentence misses the point. (It might be a literal translation. Perhaps. But that's not the essence.) I couldn't go (pun intended) beyond the first sentence. There are much more "essential" translations out there.
we have a tendency to look thousands of years in the past for wisdom. weird.
Isn’t that because wisdom is mostly informed and validated through experience?
As another comment points out, Le Guin herself does not call this a translation, so we shouldn't misrepresent it (although it might be my favorite English version).
However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
> However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
I don't disagree. Does github have a way to report copyright violations?
I just bought the real book from Powell's. Several buying options: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching
I think the way to do it is to notify her estate and let them pursue it or not. But I'm really just here to say how I'm happy to pay her estate and publishers and everyone else should too.
> Does github have a way to report copyright violations?
What would reporting this GitHub repo do? Is the late Ursula K. Le Guin going to get a check in the afterlife? Her historical stance on copyright was based on consent. What happens when the author passes away?
I was wondering whether GitHub has a process for dealing with reports of obvious copyright violations. They don’t need thr copyright owner to weigh in.
What on earth is it about intellectual property that breaks someone's mind so much that genuinely, when presented with a translation of a 2000 year old text that itself is based on another authors translation and who's translator is now dead, they go onto a website to proclaim "it's not in the public domain!".
I have 0 confidence that I could understand the Tao even if I read the best most classical translations available.
Take the bible, which is translated from languages that are closer to mine, and which refers to a culture which is closer to mine, with family and scholars whose interpretation I can understand directly. Still I don't have much confidence that I understand the bulk of it, it takes years of reading and lived experiences to understand both the modern and past contexts in which it was written.
By the same token, I'm certain actual chinese people read the Tao and are like "Lmao what does this mean", and for the most part these books are meant to be mysterious, iirc there's actual sections of the Tao that translate to "You can't understand the Tao".
I don't mean to be overly religious here, it's just that the Tao happens to be religious, but consider Beowulf, which is written in an old form of the English language, surely you would be able to understand it? Not a chance, try it. But ok, surely the translators are able to understand it and provide you a translation without losing much meaning. No, not only can they not provide a translation that you can understand without losing context and signal, but they can't understand a lot of what they are reading anyways. Consider that for just the first word of the whole epic, they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means, nobody can even settle on what the first word means! Imagine the rest of the text.
So to think that one has a chance to understand the Tao, or even that it is worth it at all to understand something from a culture so different. Not for me.
Unless you are Asian, by all means go for it, but if you are not, I would invite you to question whether you first have any chance at understanding at all, or whether you will interpret "being like a Straw Dog" from whatever translation you chose through your own lens, like a Rorschach.
This is nonsense.
You can't understand the tao because there is nothing to "understand".
That is the whole point. If you walk in the woods on a beautiful day and hear birds chirping, there is nothing to "understand". It isn't an intellectual exercise.
Quibbling about translations of the Tao Te Ching is really quite comical. A better taoist "teaching" would be to throw your copy in the garbage and go for a walk in the woods. This is where the cultural problems come in though. That is not really what is meant by the English word "teaching". Then you are expecting to "learn" some kind of new symbolic representation when the whole point is to get rid of symbolic representation.
The idea you can't understand concepts from other humans because you were born into a different cultures is really stupid.
That's exactly what someone that doesn't understand a text would say.
Not saying thay you don't understand it or that your interpretation is wrong, but it is indistinguishable from misunderstanding, and you could get it from any text you don't understand.
The idea that you can throw the text and still understand it just shows how connected to the text you are.
This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.
> they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means
I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.
>I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English
A relatively recent new interpretation:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/69208/new-resea...
>Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia.
But these cultures and texts are much closer to us than the Chinese Tao te Ching.
Taxonomically Latin and English have a common ancestor in ProtoIndoeuropean sure, but English and the Romances (I'm spanish native), but there's a lot of horizontal influence of Latin in English. Netwon, (and many other English writers) wrote in both Latin and English. The aphabet is the same.
Regarding the Epic of Gilgamesh, I haven't read much about that, cuneiform must be insanely hard to read, even through translations, that said, the fact that it seems to be an influence for Noah's Ark story seems to bring it much closer to western culture than Asian culture.
Same thing with Greek literature, it's a bit farther away, but some stuff like ficticious Oddyssey will be somewhat approachable through a translation, the rhymes and a million temporal references will be completely lost obviously.
Even some Arabic math texts I would consider to be somewhat more approachable by virtue of being so foundational to maths in general.
But religious Chinese? must be one of the most unapproachable combos for reading as a non native reader.
Dao is the way of life, it teaches the proper way to live. This teaching exists in every culture. Westerners call it the Way, Indians call it Dharma, Chinese also call it Fa. The simpler it looks, the higher its level. Its written forms have many layers of meaning because readers are of different levels. A well known example is statements like "love your enemy." It has a surface level meaning, a deeper meaning and so on. What you can ultimately see corresponds to your character level. To raise your level you need to apply what you've learned into practice, to live in the Dao, in other words. Intellectual understanding isn't enough, it must change the way you live. Then you can read the Dao again and see a higher level of meaning.
I checked and "love your enemy" is not in the Tao Te Ching. Sounds very christian.
It's the Christian version of the Dao.