老子Laozi
Chinese philosophy · S. Y. Kelake

The Old Master

Laozi and the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way and Its Virtue

About five thousand characters, eighty-one short chapters, and one of the most translated books on earth. It asks very little of you except that you slow down, and it gives back something new every time you return.

The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.Chapter One, in James Legge's translation
A welcome from Shifu

A companion for a whole life

I have a profound attachment to this little book. I read it often, and I listen to it too, on long drives and quiet evenings. It has been a companion to me for many years, and it conjures a different contemplation at each stage of life, which is exactly what it was made to do.

The Tao Te Ching does not explain itself. It points. One year a chapter says nothing to you at all; years later the same lines stop you in your tracks, because something has happened in your life that they were quietly waiting for. You understand what you are ready to understand, when the time is ripe.

I wrote my own version, The Quiet Door, with a plain retelling and a reflection beside every chapter, for my children. My hope is that one day, when the time is ripe for them, they will find their way to this text and become close to it, as I have. This website exists, more than anything, so that all of my work is kept in one place for them.

If you have found your way here too, you are very welcome. Take what you can use. Leave what you cannot. Come back often.

S. Y. KelakeShifu Yalun Kelake

For my children — and yours.

The Old Master

Who was Laozi?

Honestly, nobody knows, and that suits the book rather well. Laozi simply means the Old Master. Tradition says he was a keeper of the royal archives at the court of Zhou, an older contemporary of Confucius, in the sixth century BCE. Everything else is legend, history, or the gentle space between them.

The tradition says

The gatekeeper at the pass

Seeing the Zhou dynasty in decline, the Old Master rode west, the story goes, on a water buffalo. At the frontier pass the gatekeeper, Yin Xi, recognised him and would not let him leave until he had written down what he knew. He wrote about five thousand characters in two parts, handed them over, and rode on. No one knows where he went.

The tradition says

Confucius meets a dragon

Confucius is said to have visited him to ask about ritual, and to have come away shaken. Birds fly and fish swim, he told his students, and we know how to catch them. But a dragon rides the wind and clouds up into the sky. Today I have met Laozi, and he is like a dragon. Meet Master Kong.

What history records

A biography with doubts built in

The historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, records Laozi's name as Li Er, and then honestly admits that he is not sure, offering more than one candidate for the man. Most scholars today think the book was gathered and shaped over time, reaching something like its present form by around the fourth century BCE.

What history records

Words from the tombs

In 1973 a copy written on silk was found in a tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE, with the two halves of the book in the opposite order. In 1993 bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian, around 300 BCE, preserved about a third of the text. The version we read today follows the commentary of the young scholar Wang Bi, who died in 249 CE aged just twenty-three.

Two halves, eighty-one chapters

道Dao, the WayChapters 1 to 37
德De, its VirtueChapters 38 to 81

One book, many spellings

道德經Tao Te Ching · Dao De Jing

The same three characters: the Way, its Virtue or inner power, and Classic. Tao Te Ching is the older English spelling; Dao De Jing is the modern pinyin.

老子Lao Tzu · Laozi

The Old Master. The book itself is often simply called the Laozi, after him.

無為Wu wei

Usually translated as non-action. It does not mean doing nothing. It means acting without forcing, the way water finds its way.

Where to begin

Six chapters to carry with you

Each chapter is given in James Legge's classic 1891 translation, from the SYK Publishing edition, beside Shifu's own plain retelling from The Quiet Door. Read one. Read it again tomorrow.

Chapter 8上善若水

Be Like Water

The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike. Hence (its way) is near to (that of) the Tao.

In plain words

The highest kind of goodness behaves like water. Water helps everything it touches, asks for nothing back, and quietly takes the lowest place in the room — the spot nobody else wants. That is why it is so close to the Tao.

Chapter 11當其無

An Architecture of Absence

Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends.

In plain words

We tend to give all the credit to what is solid and ignore what is hollow. Lao Tzu is pointing out that the hollow is doing most of the work.

Chapter 33自知者明

Six Lines, Six Pieces of Lifelong Advice

He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent. He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty. He who is satisfied with his lot is rich; he who goes on acting with energy has a (firm) will.

In plain words

If you can win against other people, you are strong. If you can win against yourself, you are genuinely powerful. If you know when you have enough, you are rich.

Chapter 60若烹小鮮

Cook a Small Fish

Governing a great state is like cooking small fish.

In plain words

Govern a large country the way you would cook a small fish — gently, without too much poking and turning.

Chapter 67我有三寶

The Three Treasures

But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others.

In plain words

I hold three treasures, and I guard them carefully. The first is love. The second is moderation. The third is a refusal to push myself in front of the world.

Chapter 76柔弱者生之徒

The Living Are Soft

Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. … Thus it is that firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness, the concomitants of life.

In plain words

When people are alive, they are soft and tender. When they die, they become hard and stiff. … So: hardness and stiffness belong to death; softness and tenderness belong to life.

The warrior's Laozi

The Tao Te Ching and the martial arts

The soft overcomes the hard. The best fighter is not ferocious. Strike when you must, then stop. In more than thirty years of Gong Fu, Shifu has found the whole of the martial way written into a handful of Laozi's chapters.

The one who does not look the part

He who in (Tao's) wars has skill Assumes no martial port; He who fights with most good will To rage makes no resort.Chapter 68

The best soldier does not look the part. The best fighter is not ferocious.

Be like water, again

There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it …Chapter 78

The weak overcomes the strong. The yielding overcomes the hard. Everyone knows this, and yet no one actually practises it.

Force is the wrong verb

A skilful (commander) strikes a decisive blow, and stops.Chapter 30

Even when violence is needed, force is not the point; the point is the result.

The same spirit runs through Shifu's martial arts writing, The Peaceful Warrior and Bajiquan Unveiled, and through Zhuangzi's cook, fighting cock and three swords.

The books

Two ways through the Tao Te Ching

One is Shifu's own walk through all eighty-one chapters, written for his children. The other is the classic text itself, in the translation that has been read and cited for more than a century. They sit well side by side.

Cover of The Quiet Door by S. Y. Kelake
Translation and reflections by S. Y. Kelake

The Quiet Door

A First Step Through the Tao Te Ching

All 81 chapters · about 330 pages in paperback · ebook

Written as the conversation you would have if you were sitting across the kitchen table from someone who has lived with this book for many years. Every one of the eighty-one chapters is given three ways: the verse, to be read slowly and aloud if you can; a plain prose retelling, the handrail for when the verse seems opaque; and a reflection on what the chapter has come to mean to one reader, with examples from the world we actually live in.

Each chapter has its own title, and many of them will stay with you on their own:

The Straw DogsThe Valley, Not the MountainBe Like WaterKnowing When to StopAn Architecture of AbsenceThe TiptoesForce Is the Wrong VerbThree Questions for a TuesdayDim Your BrillianceCook a Small FishThe Three TreasuresThe Living Are Soft

For my children — and yours.

Read the letter that opens the book

If you have just opened this book, here are a few things worth saying before you go any further. Think of this less as an introduction and more as the conversation we would have if you were sitting across from me at the kitchen table, holding a copy of the Tao Te Ching for the first time.

The second thing is that the book will sometimes seem odd. There are lines about straw dogs and bellows and infants who can grasp without understanding sex. There are passages that appear to recommend keeping people ignorant. There are long sections about how to govern a country, which you may not be planning to do this week. When you hit one of these moments, the advice is simple: do not get stuck.

One last word. The Tao Te Ching gives, in Chapter 67, what it calls the three treasures: love, moderation, and a refusal to push to the front. If you took nothing else from the book — if you read it once and put it on a shelf — and those three lived in you a little more than they had before, the book would have done its work. Everything else is commentary, including mine.

Go gently. Enjoy what you enjoy. Hold lightly what confuses you. Come back often.

Read from the closing letter

The fourth, and the most important, is that wisdom is not a thing you finish acquiring. The book is not a course you complete. It is a companion. The work of becoming the kind of person Lao Tzu describes — soft, attentive, humble, generous, quiet, present — is the work of a whole life. You will do it in small instalments. You will fail at it often. You will return to it. You will do it again.

Hold lightly what confuses you. Enjoy what you enjoy. Come back often.

Go gently.

Look inside: three chapters in full and all 81 titles

Cover of the SYK Publishing edition of the Tao Te Ching, translated by James Legge
The SYK Publishing edition

Tao Te Ching

The Book of the Way and Its Virtue · translated by James Legge

All 81 chapters · about 100 pages in paperback · ebook

James Legge's 1891 translation was the first scholarly English rendering by a sinologist of the first rank, prepared for the Sacred Books of the East, and it has been in print and cited ever since. His English carries the gravity of late-Victorian scholarship, and his habit of placing his own clarifications in brackets lets you see both the spare original and the choice he made.

This edition sets the rhymed passages as poetry and the prose as paragraphs, honouring Laozi's movement between saying and song, and follows Legge's division into two parts: the Tao, chapters 1 to 37, and the Te, chapters 38 to 81. It opens with a publisher's note and a foreword on the translator, the text and its hardest words.

Read from the foreword

Its central terms are notoriously difficult to render. Tao means a way, road, or path, but also a method, a teaching, a principle, or that which underlies all method and teaching. Te means virtue, but in the older sense of an inherent power or quality, closer to the Latin virtus than to its modern English descendant. Wu wei — usually translated "non-action" or "doing nothing" — does not mean inactivity but action without forcing, accomplishment without strain.

Read the book once for the surface; read it again, slowly, for what is left when the surface is taken away.

If you remember only one thing

"Wisdom is not a thing you finish acquiring. The book is not a course you complete. It is a companion."

Love

From love comes the only real bravery.

Moderation

From moderation comes the only real abundance.

Staying behind

From staying behind comes the capacity to be entrusted with great responsibilities.

The three treasures, Chapter 67, from The Quiet Door