Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching is the foundational text of Taoism — a slim book of eighty-one short chapters attributed to Laozi, a sage traditionally placed in China in the sixth century BCE. Few works have been translated more often, more variously, or more contestedly into English. The book is short enough to read in an hour and dense enough to repay decades of return.

Its central teaching — the Tao, which the opening line says cannot be named — is approached not by doctrine but by paradox: water is stronger than stone because it yields; the sage rules best by doing nothing; what is most useful in a cup is its emptiness. The eighty-one chapters work by indirection, building the reader's intuition for a principle that direct statement would falsify.

This edition reproduces James Legge's 1891 translation, one of the first and still one of the most influential scholarly English renderings — the version that introduced Laozi to English-language philosophy.