Taoism revisited

Since I wrote my first article on Taoism, I've read some different versions of the Tao Te Ching. I'd like to recommend the book by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo as a good place to start if you are interested in learning about Taoism ("Tao Te Ching", 1993, Hackett Publishing).

This version presents a mostly literal translation that preserves a lot of the characteristics of the original Chinese. Like the original, it is terse and ambiguous, with a poetic feel. This book leaves the interpretation up to the reader, rather than trying to explain everything.

If you would like to dig deeper into the Tao Te Ching, there are two books by Robert Henricks that I recommend. These books are based on recent discoveries of ancient versions of the Tao Te Ching, and contain more discussion about the text. One of the books is called "Lao-Tzu Te-Tao Ching" (1989, Ballantine Books), and is based on mostly complete texts found at Ma-wang-tui. The second book is called "Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching" (2000, Columbia University Press). This book is a translation of texts found at Guodian, which are a subset of the traditional Tao Te Ching, with a different ordering of the chapters.

Both of these books give the reader a better feel for the problems of translation of this text, and also talk about the meaning of some of the more obscure passages.