But if you’re an intelligent person, and if you have a little time to spare and an interest in philosophy, give this a try and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. People who write books with titles that include “before you die” in them should immediately die themselves before they can write more such books. There are, for instance, a lot of ebooks available that give you an old translation of this work-which may be a fine translation for all I know-but without some context, you will lose much of the pleasure of reading. I highly recommend reading this well-done translation and its commentary. Not to mention being easier to explain to your friends if your act goes wrong. How many times can we think of when not doing something would have served us better? But we just felt compelled to act, since that seems to be part of our human nature. We do, for instance, act far more often than we should.

Just trying to wrap your mind around these concepts and spending a while contemplating them is beneficial. I’m sure they wouldn’t fly at my house when it’s time to wash the dishes. I’m not sure how following the precepts in this book would work in most people’s lives, unlike, for example, applying a few Buddhist tenets. No wonder some famous Daoists were monks. Putting such ideas into practice, however, seems problematic. It is full of things such as, “He who speaks doesn’t know.” And “He who knows doesn’t speak.” You’ll be nodding your head at things like that, comparing them to your own life experience. Daoist philosophy (or Taoist, if you want to use the old spelling-but Daoist is how you pronounce it) is intriguing because it seems to rely on not taking action rather than on actually doing anything. Since the Teaching Company doesn’t have a course on this book as they do for the Analects, I’ll just have to rely more on my own first impressions. Compared to the Analects of Confucius, this is a shorter, easier read, but like that work, I’m sure it benefits from reading in multiple translations and from reading more about it-not just of it. There are also certain ideas that are repeated in nearly identical phrases in different parts of this very short work. Like the Analects of Confucius, there are passages that are corrupted and whose meaning is either unfathomable or in dispute. Instead, the contents of the Tao Te Ching seem to be a distillation and compilation of early Daoist thought. Lau points out in his highly readable introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, it is highly unlikely that Lao Tzu was an acutal person, despite stories of Confucius once going to see him.

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell