- Length
- 176 pagesIvanhoe, The Daodejing of Laozi, Hackett, 2003
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Daodejing
Five thousand characters that have been translated into English more often than any book except the Bible, arguing that yielding beats forcing and that the ruler who does least governs best. Two tomb finds in the last fifty years have shown that the text we inherited is one version among several.
- Date
- c. 4th century BC
- Attributed to
- attributed to Laozi
- Region
- The state of Chu, southern China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1868 English, John Chalmers First English version Consensus
- 1891 English, James Legge Public domain Attested
- 2003 English, Philip J. Ivanhoe With the Guodian and Mawangdui variants noted; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Among the most translated books in the world, and one whose earliest manuscripts, recovered in 1973 and 1993, differ from the received text in order, wording and length.
What the book says
Eighty-one very short chapters, about five thousand characters altogether, in a compressed and often paradoxical verse. The opening warns that the way that can be spoken of is not the constant way, and everything after it is written under that qualification. The recurring argument is that the things we take to be weak are strong. Water is the standard case: it yields to everything, wears down stone, and takes the low ground everyone else avoids. An empty room is what makes a room useful; the hole is what makes a wheel a wheel. The sage governs by not interfering, and the best ruler is one whose people barely know he exists and say afterwards that they did it themselves. Ambition, cleverness, accumulation and display are all treated as forms of weakness pretending to be strength - a full cup is easily spilled, a sharpened blade soon dulls. There is a political programme in this and it is more concrete than the mystical reputation suggests: small states, few laws, no arms race, taxes light enough that people are not driven to desperation. Several chapters attack the Confucian virtues directly, arguing that when the way was lost humaneness appeared, and that the appearance of a virtue is evidence that the thing it names has already gone.
What it argues
That the pattern of things favours what looks weak, and that most human effort works against it. Force provokes counterforce; sharpness dulls; what is full spills; what is high falls. The recommendation is therefore not passivity but a kind of skill - acting with the grain of a situation rather than imposing on it, which the text calls doing-nothing and plainly does not mean idleness. Applied to government it yields minimal interference, small scale and light taxation. Applied to knowledge it yields suspicion of distinctions, since to name something desirable is to create the wanting of it. And applied to itself it yields the opening warning: an account of the way is not the way.
What it answered
The Confucian programme, in the chapters that name it - though this is precisely where the manuscript evidence complicates matters. The general target is broader: any doctrine that proposes to improve people by supplying them with standards, on the argument that the standards are symptoms of the loss they claim to repair. Where the Analects wants ritual to reshape conduct, this text wants the machinery of improvement removed so that people can settle.
How it argues
By paradox and by image, in lines short enough to memorise. There is no sustained reasoning anywhere in it; the method is to set a familiar valuation beside its reversal until the reversal starts to look like the sober description - the soft overcomes the hard, the empty is what is useful, the sage does not accumulate and therefore has enough. The compression makes the book endlessly interpretable, which is why it has been read as mysticism, as statecraft, as military doctrine and as a manual of self-cultivation, all with textual support.
The moment
The Warring States, the same crisis that produced Confucius, Mozi and the rest, and a different response to it. Where the other schools offered rulers a programme, this one offers them a warning about programmes. The advice to keep states small and populations unambitious is addressed to an age of expanding armies and is a rejection of the whole competitive logic those armies served.
How it travelled
Everywhere, and then out of the ground. Within China it was commented on continuously from Wang Bi in the third century, and the first sustained commentary is in the Han Feizi, which reads the advice to do nothing as instruction to a ruler on staying unreadable to his ministers. It reached Europe through Jesuit and then nineteenth-century translation and has never stopped being retranslated. The decisive modern events are archaeological: the Mawangdui silk manuscripts in 1973 and the Guodian bamboo slips in 1993, which together showed that several versions circulated simultaneously and that the received order is not original.
The strongest objection
That it can be made to say almost anything, and has been. A text that recommends yielding, opposes distinctions and refuses to define its central term supplies no way of ruling out a reading, which is why it has served as a charter for quietism, for anarchism, for imperial statecraft and for military strategy in turn. The Han Feizi's use of it is the sharpest case: the same chapters that read as a plea for leaving people alone are read there as technique for a ruler who wants his ministers unable to predict him. The text has no resources for saying which of those readers got it wrong.
Why read it
Because it takes an hour and stays for years. Read a scholarly translation rather than a poetic paraphrase - the difference is larger here than for any other book in this section - and if possible read one that notes the Mawangdui and Guodian variants, since seeing the same chapter in three states is the best available lesson in what a received text is.
- First printed
- 1596
- First in English
- 1868
- Digitised
- Yes
Three states of the text are now known. The received version rests on Wang Bi's third-century recension. Two silk copies from a tomb sealed in 168 BC, found at Mawangdui in 1973, put the Virtue section before the Way section, reversing the familiar order. Bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian, found in 1993 and dated around 300 BC, carry material from about a third of the chapters in a different sequence.
Legge's 1891 and Waley's 1934 English are widely available and the first is public domain. Ivanhoe, Henricks and Lau are in copyright. There are more English versions of this book than of any other work in this section.
Where it stands
Live as philosophy and as practice. It is studied seriously in Chinese philosophy and comparative ethics, particularly for its account of skilled action and its political minimalism, and it has an enormous general readership that mostly encounters it in versions loose enough to be original compositions.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain and Legge is out of copyright, but the famous phrasings are translators' inventions and the recensions differ in wording. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Laozi's existence is doubtful and the earliest account of him gives three candidates. The received order and chapter division are late. The most philosophically loaded dispute concerns the anti-Confucian chapters: the Guodian slips give a variant of the best-known of them that does not name humaneness and rightness, which suggests to some scholars that the polemic was sharpened later and to others that the Guodian text is an abridgement made for a particular reader. Whether the book is a single composition or an anthology of sayings from a tradition is unresolved, and the second is now the more common view.