Tao Te Ching
An 81-chapter Chinese classic whose compression makes it endlessly quotable and endlessly mistranslated.
The Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) is a short Chinese text of about 5,000 characters in 81 brief chapters, traditionally ascribed to Laozi and dated in received form to roughly the fourth to third century BCE. Manuscript finds at Mawangdui (1973) and Guodian (1993) show earlier versions with different chapter order, so 'the' text is itself a scholarly construction.
Its language is dense, paradoxical, and grammatically open — classical Chinese often leaves subject and number unstated — which is why translations diverge so radically. Comparing Arthur Waley, D. C. Lau, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen Mitchell on the same chapter can yield four different arguments, and Mitchell's popular version is an English rendering rather than a translation from Chinese.
This has direct consequences for quotation. Widely shared lines such as 'a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' are looser than they appear; the received text says something closer to 'begins beneath one's feet', which shifts the emphasis from initiative to location. Quote the chapter number and translator, always.
Common mistake: attributing generic serenity quotes to Laozi. The internet's Laozi corpus is several times larger than the actual text.
“The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way.”
Keep reading the glossary
Verse composed largely of aphoristic sayings, usually didactic in intent.
A terse aphoristic formula from Indian religious and technical literature, designed to be memorised.
How faithfully a translated quote preserves the meaning and music of the original.
Naming the translator, because a quotation in translation is also that translator's wording.