I’m planning to read the Tao Te Ching over the next couple of weeks. Why? Curiosity. And I’m interested in eastern philosophy and philosophy generally.

Oh, and it’s short.

I’m going to read the book in 14 installments starting Monday which are going to be emailed to me for free by a site called Daily Lit. You can subscribe for free by clicking here. If you’d like to read along with me, subscribe sometime this weekend and ask to receive an installment each weekday.

I plan to post about the book at least 4-5 times during the course of the subscription. Not a review, but rather my impressions of the text, attempts at interpretation, discussion, and questions.

Comments

1. fyngyrz on 2007-08-16 19:08:15 wrote: Friendly suggestion: Get yourself a copy in Chinese, a good Chinese character dictionary, and then read it. Otherwise, you’re not reading it. You’re reading someone else’s impression of what it says, and if you look at any two translations, you’ll find out immediately just how much of a filter that can be. Might as well do it yourself. In the process, you’ll develop a hand-holding-level familiarity with many classical Chinese characters that will serve you well because they are also used, with almost unchanged meanings, by the Japanese (Katakana) Koreans (Hanja) and many other Asian societies. You’ll find new meaning (and bad translations) in everything from soy sauce labels to Chinese restaurant signs and book covers. It isn’t nearly as difficult as it seems. You don’t have to learn how to speak Chinese (or any other language), you just learn the meaning of the characters. “This means rice”… “This means the way or path”… “This means person”… and so forth. Then instead of saying “The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao”, perhaps you might say “The way we can follow is not the perfect way.” (Dao, or Tao, is way, or path, a word with both small and large meanings.)

2. fyngyrz on 2007-08-16 19:12:37 wrote: One more thing - you want a dictionary that does classic Chinese characters, not modern ones. The Chinese government put into practice a bunch of “simplified” characters that aren’t used in classical texts such as Tao Te Ching; modern Chinese is very likely to use the simplified characters. High school fluency is one to two thousand characters; deep modern literacy is about 5000; historically, counting all the obscure and no longer used ones, there are about 50,000. You can read very well with a one to two thousand character vocabulary.

3. Elaine on 2007-08-16 21:26:06 wrote: I once read “The Tao of Pooh.” Can we start with that one? I think Dr. Wayne Dyer on PBS referred to “Tao Te Ching” in his lecture, didn’t he? He seems like such a peaceful man and I believe he practices a lot of eastern philosophy. The health guru, Dr. Andrew Weil does too.

4. Simon on 2007-08-18 16:13:11 wrote: I shall read along :) Starting tomorrow or when ever they send me the first installment.

5. mc on 2007-08-20 14:54:05 wrote: i’m excited for you. this is an amazing book. i recommend reading a brief history of why it was written for a slightly richer experience. i wrote personal ‘interpretations’ of the first dozen or so chapters using multiple translations (they can be pretty different from one to the next) based on what i thought the original author was trying to express combined with my own personal sense of poetic style and philosophy. you should do the same, it’s great!

6. Pat J on 2007-08-22 12:29:56 wrote: I’ll probably join in, though I think I’m a little late to the party. I read the Tao Te Ching years ago: checked it out of the university library and read it outside on the lawn on my lunch breaks. It just seemed…right.

7. david on 2007-12-02 12:29:31 wrote: I see Wayne Dyer again and again on PBS pledge drives explaining that the Tao Te Ching means “the way” blah blah blah. But Tao Te (道德) is a very common word in Chinese - it means morality! At least he is honest and says that Ching just means “book.” But this guy is a charlatan who tries to make some assholes feel good about themselves. Sure some people might be victims of childhood abuse, but for a PBS fundraising crowd I am kind of thinking that they are targeting a demographic of managers - government assholes who implement the unsattvic policies of capitalism. And they feel bad about denying education to undocumented workers, denying health services and sending people to war. Hey, how about just having some principles - some morals - when you’re young and sticking to those.