The Tao Te Ching (Daodejing, 道德經) — the “Classic of the Way and of Power” — is a collection of eighty-one short chapters of rhythmic verse-prose attributed to Laozi, the “Old Master,” a figure tradition places in the sixth century BC and modern scholarship treats as legendary; the text itself most likely took shape in the fourth century BC, and its earliest surviving witnesses are the Guodian bamboo slips of about 300 BC. This edition translates the received text of Wang Bi (226–249), the recension through which the book has been read for most of its history: chapters 1–37 form the canonical “Way” half, 38–81 the “Power” half. Unlike the best-selling English versions, which are paraphrases composed by authors who did not read Chinese, this translation is made directly from the Classical Chinese, with the source text facing every chapter; where the original is genuinely ambiguous, the ambiguity is kept visible or named here rather than silently resolved into the prettier reading.

The book speaks in compressed, balanced, often paradoxical aphorisms — antithesis, chain argument, refrain — and the translation keeps that compression rather than relaxing it into explanation. A few terms are held constant throughout: dao 道 is “the Way” where it names the absolute (chapter 1 plays the word against its ordinary senses of “way” and “to tell,” a pun no English word carries); de 德 is “power” in the sense of inherent potency, not moral approval; wu-wei 無為 is “non-action,” a precise paradox and not a counsel of passivity; ziran 自然 is “so of itself”; pu 樸 is “the uncarved block.” The “dark” (xuan 玄) of chapters 1, 6, 10, 51, 56 and 65 is darkness as depth and mystery, not gloom. Where the text is contested the printed Wang Bi reading is followed: in chapter 1 the received punctuation “constantly without desire\,\ constantly with desire” is printed, though the line can also be cut so that “non-being” and “being” are the constants; chapter 16 reads “whole” (全) where other recensions read “king”; the famous “great vessel is completed late” of chapter 41 appears in the earliest manuscripts as “the great vessel is never completed.” Such choices are logged, with alternatives, in the edition’s translator’s notes.

What the chapters argue is one sustained case made from many sides: that yielding outlasts force, that emptiness is what makes a thing useful, that the low position is the commanding one, and that the ruler governs best whose people can say, when the work is done, “we are so of ourselves.” The political chapters are as cold-eyed as the cosmological ones are vertiginous; the book’s serenity, so prized in paraphrase, sits beside straw dogs, war horses foaled in the outskirts, and executions. It is the most translated book in the world after the Bible, and the foundational text of both philosophical and religious Taoism.