Best translations of the Tao Te Ching? I've seen a lot,

i get what you're saying about the mitchell but i still like it because he is a good poet.
there's no such thing as a great translation. the best we can do is read several.

as a side note, i've heard to reach the highest levels of tai chi, you HAVE to learn chinese.

>>7379789
>illegible because they're written by a scholar
Huh? Why would that make it illegible?

I just use the Waley one. Probably the broadest impact on Western understanding of it.

The Tao is the Tao

Victor Mair is both an unparalleled scholar and a skilled prose stylist. I prefer the Zhuangzi as a book, but I can't recommend his translations enough.

>>7379789
>written by some white hippie who doesn't know the first thing about ancient Chinese
Hey, it's that one elitist anon who gets btfo every eastern religion thread he enters.

>>7379789
B U R T O N
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>>7379789

A really good edition is actually by Gu Zhengkun, a prof from U Beijing. It has facing classical Chinese with interlinear Pinyin against a pretty solid English translation with notes regarding the differences between the received DDJ and those of Mawangdui (discovered in the 1970's) and the Guodian slips (unearthed in the 1990's).

Aside from that the Ames and Hall translation is excellent, done by two prominent sinologists.

Robert Hendricks translation is also very good, focusing mostly on received DDJ plus Mawangdui.

If you're historically oriented, the D.C. Lau translation is best. If you are more philologically concerned, John Wu or Wu Yi. LaFargue's is historical but also praxis-oriented.

We live in a golden age of DDJ translations. There's plenty of swill out there, but the good stuff is quite good. But you have to take any translation for what it is, just one perspective. Even if your classical Chinese is flawless, the DDJ is still an enigmatic text.

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>>7379789
>arguing over which symbols best represent a text that all but explicitly tells you symbols are empty and meaningless

>>7379813
Mitchell is for plebs who don't actually want to be enlightened

>>7380477
Thanks, I've been going crazy over this. I've just read a hundred versions of chapter 1 and nothing feels quite right, lots of under and over interpreting. I almost want to do my own version. In fact, I wish I could find one in plain English that preserved phrases like Dao and Wu Wei instead of trying to translate them, and I'm very tempted to make one myself.

>>7380532
Stop posting--your entire post is a pity, like a manifestation of Western shit

>>7380532
If you want to do your own translation then more power to you. But keep in mind that a lot of translations have already been done by scholars with decades of immersion in the world of classical Chinese. I understand, from a contemporary American perspective on Daoism (ala Tao of Pooh) how these "stuffy sinologists" can't possibly know the real meaning of the DDJ, and so one needs to do their own translation, because, as an Emerson individual your relationship to the DDJ is purely singular (how very protestant of you). So before you begin on your endeavor that is inevitably bound within a matrix of epistemological assumptions of which you aren't even faintly aware, you should at least Google Russell Kirkland's article

"THE TAOISM OF THE WESTERN IMAGINATIONAND THE TAOISM OF CHINA:DE-COLONIALIZING THE EXOTIC TEACHINGS OF THE EAST"

Then from there, God speed on your translation.

>>7380576
>wannabe Daoists BTFO

Seriously, though, very good article. Nothing wrong with putting forward your own ideas based on your interpretation of the Laozi, but you need to be honest about that.

It's great fun learning about real Daoism, though. IIRC Kristofer Schipper's book was a really good introduction- dude was actually ordained as a Daoist priest.

>>7380576
>THE TAOISM OF THE WESTERN IMAGINATION AND THE TAOISM OF CHINA:DE-COLONIALIZING THE EXOTIC TEACHINGS OF THE EAST

Thanks for that, I am not very knowledgeable about Daoism, most of what I know about it comes from its influence on Chinese Buddhism and Neo-confucianism.

>>7379789
Buddhism and Daoism and Hindusim are the definition of spooky slave morality.

>>7379789
Look up Roger Ames and David Hall's translation. It makes use of the earliest known scrolls of the text, contains a very useful glossary, and follows each chapter with concise commentaries, all very short.

Infinitely better than Mitchell's lame rendering.

>>7380532
>sperging about the tao te ching

how can you miss the point so fucking badly?

>>7382205
Buddhism is literally Escaping Spooks: the School of Thought

This thread is the disciple of death

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>>7382205
confucius say, "fuck off back to reddit"

>>7380528
No it doesn't. Just that the name-able Dao and name are not "eternal." If the authors of the Daodejing really believed that, they wouldn't have written the fucking book.