About this edition

A complete edition of the surviving works of Laozi (老子) (fl. c. 6th–4th century BC), translated in a single voice with the Classical Chinese alongside.

What's here

The complete Tao Te Ching in its received (Wang Bi) text — eighty-one chapters in their traditional order, the Tao ching (1–37) followed by the Te ching (38–81) — translated from the Classical Chinese. Every chapter carries the source text facing the English, a brief headnote, and an apparatus of glossary links and cross-references. Where the Chinese is genuinely ambiguous, the rendering keeps the ambiguity visible rather than resolving it into something prettier than the text.

From the Classical Chinese

Every translation was produced by reading the Classical Chinese text directly, not by copying or adapting any prior edition. The Classical Chinese comes from open scholarly sources.

How to use this

The Works index opens the text; chapters read in sequence with the Chinese parallel a toggle away. The glossary is the registry of every recurring term and name — Tao, te, wu-wei, the sage, the uncarved block — with every chapter each appears in. Search spans the whole corpus.

Citation and reuse

The translation, the headnotes, and the editorial apparatus are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — share and adapt with attribution, non-commercial use only, derivatives under the same licence.

Status

1 work translated in this language.