Which Translation of the Tao Te Ching Should You Read?

The question comes up early and the usual answer is a name. Somebody recommends the version they read first, which is the version that worked on them, and that is genuinely useful information about one reader.

It is less useful as a recommendation, because English versions of this book differ more than translations of most books do — sometimes to the point where two of them appear to be making opposite claims about the same chapter. Knowing what produces that spread is worth more than a name, and it takes about five minutes to learn.

Two Different Jobs

Classical Chinese leaves out a great deal that English requires. It often does not mark who is acting, whether one thing or many is meant, or when it happened, and the Tao Te Ching is compressed even by that standard — lines of four or five characters carrying what takes an English sentence to unpack.

This means every English version is doing two jobs at once, and they pull against each other. One is fidelity: staying as close as possible to what the Chinese says, including the parts that stay ambiguous. The other is readability: producing something a person can actually read in English, which requires supplying much of what the original left out.

Neither job is the wrong one. But a version cannot fully do both, and most of the disagreement between English editions is not a disagreement about the Chinese — it is a difference in where a translator sat on that line. Knowing which end of it you want is most of the choice.

Made From the Chinese, or From Other English

There is a second distinction, and it is less often stated on the cover. Some versions are translations, made from the Chinese by someone who reads it. Others are renditions: an English writer working from existing English translations, aiming to produce a better English poem.

Both can be worth reading, and some renditions are the reason people love this book at all. But they answer different questions. A rendition tells you what a gifted English writer made of the accumulated tradition; a translation tells you, as far as English allows, what the text says. Trouble arises only when a reader takes the first for the second — building an argument about what the Tao Te Ching claims, on wording no Chinese line stands behind.

The practical test is simple: look for a translator's note explaining which text was used and what choices were made. Editions doing the scholarly job almost always say so, at length. Editions that do not mention the source are usually telling you something by the omission.

From the Tao

Most disagreement between English editions is not disagreement about the Chinese. It is a difference in where the translator sat between fidelity and readability.

What One Word Can Do

A concrete case, and one this site has to handle on every page. Paul Carus, whose 1898 version is among the clearest of the older ones, did not leave the word Tao untranslated. He rendered it as "Reason".

That single decision changes the book. "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao" invites the reader into something they are not expected to have a definition for. The same line about Reason invites a nineteenth-century European philosophical argument instead, and a reader meeting the text that way is quietly steered toward a different book. Carus had his grounds, and they were not careless ones — but the word arrives carrying freight the Chinese does not have.

This site publishes Carus for a number of chapters, because his English is often the plainest available, and substitutes "Tao" where he wrote "Reason" — a substitution named openly on each verse that uses it. The point of the example is not that Carus was wrong. It is that a version can be excellent and still have one decision inside it that reorganises everything, and that decision is rarely announced on the cover.

The Same Book in Five Registers

The fastest way to feel the spread is to read a few translators one after another. All five below are public domain, all are used on this site, and each is quoted from the chapter where it is published here.

James Legge, 1891, is literal and Victorian, and will keep the original's awkwardness rather than smooth it: "Without going outside his door, one understands all that takes place under the sky" (chapter 47).

Paul Carus, 1898, is compact and will reach for rhyme: "Homeward is the Tao's course, weakness is the Tao's force" (chapter 40).

Walter Gorn Old, 1904, is plain and declarative, closer to prose argument than to verse: "Avoiding distinctions of merit among the people prevents jealousy" (chapter 3).

C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905, tends to the aphoristic and will compress hard: "Birth is an exit; death an entrance" (chapter 50).

Dwight Goddard, 1919, keeps Chinese terms in transliteration rather than finding English for them: "The essence of teh is comparable to the state of a young boy" (chapter 55).

Those are five renderings of five different chapters, so they are not competing on the same line — but the registers are unmistakable, and register is what a reader lives with for eighty-one chapters. It is worth choosing deliberately rather than inheriting.

A Reasonable Way to Decide

Read two, not one. A single version reads as though the book simply says that; two versions of the same chapter show where the English is load-bearing and where the Chinese is genuinely open. It is a cheap habit — it costs nothing when one of the two is out of copyright — and it changes what reading the book is like.

Pair them deliberately: one nearer the fidelity end, one nearer readability. The first shows you the shape of the problem, the second gets you through the book. Where they agree, you are on solid ground. Where they diverge sharply, you have found a line that scholars also argue about, and noticing that is not a failure of your reading — it is the actual state of the text.

And do not judge a version by the opening chapter. Most readers have already met it, quoted on its own somewhere else, which means any rendering of it is heard through the renderings they have absorbed already. Some of the plainer middle chapters are better ground for deciding whether a version is talking to you, because you come to them without an existing echo.