Tao Te Ching

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The CD introduction is also good in that it gives a background to the Tao and the speaker is a Zen Buddhist too. Just trying to wrap your mind around these concepts and spending a while contemplating them is beneficial. while I like the spare sensitivity of the language in this version, what makes this version extra special are the added bonuses: an engagingly detailed introduction exploring the life of Lao Tzu, what amounts to an original thesis on the very meaning of “tao”, and commentaries (on specific lines, even specific words) appended to each of the 81 entries that have been culled from centuries upon centuries of critical commentary, by scholars and eccentric mystics alike. As a result of being a a central figure in Chinese culture, both nobility and common people claim Lao Tzu in their lineage.

Tao Te Ching - TEOTS

The reader will notice that in the many passages where Lao-tzu describes the Master, I have used the pronoun “she” at least as often as “he. As Le Guin states so aptly in her rendition, there is a “temptation… to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words” but, on occasion, the slipperiness of the idea… Is the idea.A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. Taoism seeks harmony by freeing the individual from the caustic effects of judgmental thinking, desire, and greed, and its fulcrum is the concept of “non-action,” or literally “doing not-doing. This is not a translation (which Mitchell was at least gracious enough to make clear in the back of the book); it's a translation of various translations. Really enjoyed Mitchell's translations (notably his Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita) and this second book of the Tao is absolutely no different.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Goodreads Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Goodreads

There are many translations of the Taoteching, nearly every one of which is probably worth reading, but this is my favorite version. The vast universe, with its myriad chiliocosms within chiliocosms, became a single knife-blade gliding through empty space.Drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzussu, The Second Book of the Tao offers Western readers a path into reality that has nothing to do with Taoism or Buddhism or old or new alone, but everything to do with truth.

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell, Lao Tzu - Ebook | Scribd Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell, Lao Tzu - Ebook | Scribd

That is the sum of this book and learning to embrace that will free ones mind from the narrow limits of a 2 dimensional world where truth and reality has to be forced into "either, or". Beautiful and accessible; the English, as 'fluid as melting ice,' is a joy to read throughout' The New Republic. His bestselling Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, and Gilgamesh—which are not translations from the original text, but rather poetic interpretations that use existing translations into Western languages as their starting point—have also been highly praised by critics, scholars, and common readers. Anyone who has seen a t’ai chi or aikido master doing not-doing will know how powerful this softness is.The Second Book of the Tao is a gift to contemporary readers, granting us access to our own fundamental wisdom. The importance of this spiritual interpretation lies in the way Mitchell fuses the horizon of Chinese Taoism with his own Zen practice and the English-speaking reader's horizon of Christianity. Clearly, he never imagined someone like Prince Wen-hui’s cook: an artist of ox flesh, a saint of the bloody carcass. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so”. In eighty-one brief chapters, the Tao Te Ching looks at the basic predicament of being alive and gives advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit.