Tao Te Ching
Attributed to Laozi; James Legge translation
The founding text of Taoism: eighty-one brief chapters on the Way that cannot be named, effortless action, and the power of yielding, attributed to the sage Laozi.
- Composed
- Circa 4th century BCE
- Original language
- Chinese
What this text is
The Tao Te Ching is a book of eighty-one short chapters attributed to Laozi, "the Old Master," said to have written it in a single sitting when he departed civilization for the western mountains. It opens by declaring that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, and then spends the rest of its length speaking around what cannot be said: the unnamed source of things, the virtue of water that overcomes by yielding, action that accomplishes without forcing.
Manuscript finds at Mawangdui and Guodian pushed the text’s attested history back to the fourth century BCE and revealed early variant arrangements. It is among the most translated works in human history, and its brevity is deceptive: it compresses a complete cosmology, ethics, and theory of governance into about five thousand characters.
Why researchers read it
The Tao Te Ching describes an unnameable ground from which the world of forms arises, a structure that recurs in traditions that had no contact with China. Mapping where such independent agreements occur, and where they genuinely differ, is one of SOL’s core comparative methods, and this text anchors the Taoist column of that comparison.
Research that draws on this text
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