Customer Reviews

Lao-tzu's Taoteching

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I have bought several copies of this translation in the past and all have managed to take paths different from mine. One copy couldn't resist even an hour in my hand before hopping into another's...and away. It is a magnificent translation and I am trying once more to add it to my library, where it may stay for a while.

One shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but here I find the simple, evocative cover aids my interpretation of Lao Tzu's message. A hardcover would give the book a durability more in line with the ancient wisdom inside. (Nudge, nudge, publishers!)

This is the most helpful book on Taoism I have ever read. After years of reading different translations, overtly loose or too stiff interpretations, and inaccurate relativistic teachings by some Taoist "experts", I have never found a better translation and study book on the Tao concept. The commentaries are very insightful and very useful with several comments on each chapter to look through and compare. The whole book is very practical and nice to read. I'm fairly skeptical at heart (indeed, a skeptic), but there is plenty of wisdom here that is just plain obvious and helpful. If I could only choose one book on Taoism to have, THIS WOULD BE IT. I even bought a spare. I think that much of it.

This is one of the short-list finest English translations of this indispensable work of cosmic insight and practical wisdom (the two are, as Lao Tzu repeatedly points out, identical in effect). Like Jonathan Star's translation (in his wonderful verbatim text), Pine's work is the rendering of a person with a scholarly background who clearly has made a heart-connection with his subject; in short, this is the work of man who loves the Tao and refuses to hide behind a cloak of academic pretence in his translation. The only distraction to the book is its inclusion of commentary from various sources directly on the page with the poems: I much prefer having the translator's or others' commentary in the back of the text, so that the reader can fully experience the poems in the main part of the text independently, without the distraction of "expert insight." These are poems that should be read and re-read, time and again, year after year, for this is a work that always refreshes itself and its readers. In other respects, however, Pine's translation is well worth a spot on the shelf of any lover of the Tao.

This is the best translation of the Tao Te Ching that I've seen. I'm confident that I will not live to see a better translation. This is the only translation I have found that conveys the profound clarity and simplicity of the Tao.

I will go one step further: This is the greatest holy book I have read.

I plan on reading every book by Red Pine/Bill Porter.

The TAO TE CHING is one of the most translated books in the world, surpassed only by the BIBLE and the BHAGAVAD-GITA. In his reflective verse, Lao-tzu speaks to those searching for a meaningful way of mastering one's life in a society degraded by economic, militaristic and modern values. More than one hundred translations of Lao-tzu's "Book of the Way" have been published in Western languages, including more than forty versions in English alone. This translation is notable for two reasons. First, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter) draws from the recently discovered Ma-wang-tui texts of the TAO TE CHING to successfully convey the Tao essence of Lao-tzu. Those texts were discovered in 1973 preserved in the tomb of an official's son; that tomb has been dated to 168 BC. Second, although it takes only an hour to read the TAO TE CHING, it requires a lifetime to understand it. Red Pine's book includes selected commentaries from the past 2000 years that provide line-by-line insights into Lao-tzu's difficult verse.

Red Pine's bare-verse translation follows the classic two-part, eighty-one verse format of the TAO TE CHING. It is less scholarly than Robert Henrick's translation, more literal than Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendering of the TAO TE CHING, and as readable as Robert Moss's translation. Red Pine's translations of THE DIAMOND SUTRA and THE COLLECTED SONGS OF COLD MOUNTAIN demonstrate a deep understanding of his subjects, and his translation of Lao-tzu is no exception. Red Pine's TAOTECHING is a well-travelled path to the Tao on my bookshelf, and a recommended translation of "The Old Master."

G. Merritt

Remember sitting around a campfire at night, listening to elderly friends and relatives? And high above, the stars seemed to twinkle at you. Drowsily you heard a few shrewd comments, and someone laughing, another profound voice, and then maybe someone uttered what you were thinking?
Red Pine have collected comments to Tao Te Ching that explore, expand and sometimes explains a verse of wisdom from Lao-Tzu. Many comments are flat and literal, a few have been too influenced by Buddhism to understand Lao-tzu, and then suddenly there's a star.
This companion with selected commentaries provides more perspectives and augments your understanding of Tao Te Ching, although you sometimes need a pinch of salt to grasp the irony of a statement or to ward off the influence of Buddhist thought.
I usually consult the translations of Henricks and Lau, because they are seldom tempted to oversimplify. I often find Bill Porter's translation of Tao Te Ching strangely heavyfooted and unpoetic, but the memory of some comments - shooting across the sky - remains.

This Tao te Ching, translated by Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, is the best edition I've come across. In one day reading this version, I feel I've gained more insight into the book even though I have read various translations for years. Porter gives you the Chinese characters for the text next to the translation, and then commentary from around 6-10 various Eastern figures from throughout history (Confucius, Mencius, Lu Tung Pin, etc.). Reading the various comments adds greatly to your understanding of the text, I recommend this as the best version of the Tao te ching to own.

Anyone looking for an approachable edition of the Tao Te Ching, one that gives us the Chinese and Taoist point-of-view in clear and simple English, and that isn't overburdened with extraneous or purely scholarly matter, should certainly consider that of Red Pine. The translator has spent much of his life in the East, has experienced the life of a Taoist ascetic, and we could ask for no better guide to the meanings of this simple but elusive text, a text that is one of the greatest glories of the Ancient Chinese literature of the Chou period.

As many know, Classical Chinese is an extremely concise and powerful language, a language of great masculine vigor, and one of the first things to look for in any translation from Classical Chinese is a comparable economy and energy. Some people don't seem to understand this, and I think it's because they fail to realize that words, besides expressing meaning, can also serve to limit meaning, especially in grammatically fussy Indo-European languages such as English where sentences are intended to convey as precise a meaning as possible and in doing so can become (as mine are here) rather wordy.

But ancient Chinese writing isn't like this. Rather than attempting to narrow and delimit meaning, and to pin us down to something particular and explicit, it aims instead to open and expand our understanding. In other words, although it can look deceptively simple, it is in fact richly suggestive, rich in implications. And this rich suggestiveness will suggest many things to different readers. That is why no Chinese reader would even think of approaching an ancient classic without a commentary. For no matter what a text may suggest to a given reader, we may be sure that it has suggested many more things to earlier and possibly more acute readers.

Red Pine does not fail us on either of these counts. His translation is spare, pure, even austere, but whereas most English editions of the Tao Te Ching give us only the comments of the individual translator, Red Pine has gone one further. He has had the brilliant idea of giving us, on pages facing the text, a selection of passages from over twenty of China's most outstanding commentators, figures ranging from the famous philosopher Wang Pi (+ 226-249) through to the Sung Dynasty Taoist nun Ts'ao Tao-Ch'ung (+ 960-1278), and this is something which has never been done before in English.

Red Pine tells us that he "envisioned this book as a discussion between Lao-tzu and a group of people who have thought deeply about his text" (page xxi). Many of the comments, which are intended "to provide important background information or insights," are truly luminous, and to read them along with the text can be an overwhelming experience.

Here is Chapter 47 of Red Pine's translation, slightly rearranged since it should be set out as verse: "Without going out his door / he knows the whole world / without looking out his window / he knows the Way of Heaven / the farther people go / the less people know / therefore the sage knows without moving / names without seeing / succeeds without trying." (page 94).

I was led to ponder this particular passage by Ingo Swann, the noted US exponent of Remote Viewing, who quotes it in one of his writings. The chapter itself, for anyone who knows anything at all about Remote Viewing, is powerfully suggestive. But the comments (which really need to be read in full to be properly savored) add even more.

The first comment which struck me was that of Su Ch'e, who tells us that "The reason the sages of the past understood everything without going anywhere was simply because they kept their natures whole" (page 94). The second remarkable comment was that of Ch'eng Hsuan Ying, which reads in part: "'without trying' means to focus the spirit on the tranquility that excels at making things happen" (page 95).

But doesn't all this suggest that superpowers, as Ingo Swann asserts, are part of everyone's inheritance as a human being? Doesn't it also suggest a getting in touch with the Collective Unconsciousness? the Universal Mind? The ONE? The TAO? And isn't this in fact what Remote Viewers such as Ingo Swann have rediscovered today? Have we, in other words, finally begun to re-acquire something of the lost Wisdom of the Ancients...? It would certainly seem so to me.

Besides the excellent translation and valuable commentaries, Red Pine has thoughtfully given us, printed vertically alongside the English translation, the Chinese text in full form characters. This text, it should be noted, is the translator's own new and original recension, and is based on a careful study of the many extant editions of the Tao Te Ching including that discovered at Mawangtui in 1973.

Red Pine's edition also comes with a map; an informative 12-page historical introduction; several interesting photographs among which is one of the Mawangtui text; and a very full bilingual glossary of Chinese names and terms. My one criticism is that, although Red Pine often refers us to specific lines (e.g., "In line sixteen..."), line numbers have not been printed alongside either the English or the Chinese texts and it can sometimes take time to locate the line he's talking about.

Although intended for a popular readership, Red Pine's edition, which I believe was out-of-print for a while, is certainly scholarly in the best sense of the word. The wise would be well advised to snap up a copy before it goes out-of-print again. It may be the only Tao Te Ching you will ever need.

Not only is this a good translation of the Tao Te Ching (mixing several versions with a lot of Mawangtui), but there is excellent commentary from both the author and selected quotes from other authors, thinkers, documents, etc. Add in a helpful guide in the back about where these quotes and analyses came from, and you have an excellent resource to help you learn more on the subject. If you study Taoism, or if you must have one copy of the Tao Te Ching, this is a must-have.

As every reader of Lao Tzu's magnum opus is well aware, there is perhaps no other work produced by the human mind which has appeared in as many translations, quasi-translations, pseudo-translations, non-translations and mistranslations as Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Why then, the reader will wonder, do we need yet another? Because, with the possible exception of Prof. Mair's excellent rendering, there is none other comparable to this one. Red Pine is no dabbler in these matters. A quick reading of the Introduction (which, with its photographs is itself worth the price of the book) should convince the reader of that. But the book offers even more than a lucid translation of the ancient classic (and it IS a translation, not a paraphrase of someone else's): there is a bonus on every page, a judicious selection of commentaries from ancient writers, who have interpreted the verses, and have found in them a source of inspiration which readers have acknowledged over the past two millennia. If you decide to buy only one translation of Tao Te Ching, you won't be disappointed if this is the one you choose. Justin Thacker, Los Angeles, California