This might be a good moment to mention the various translations of the Tao Te Ching that I have read and studied over the years and here and there referred to in this Meditation Journal. Chief among these in my life has been the most outdated translation of all, C. Spurgeon Medhurst’s Tao Teh King, published in 1905 and available online here. Medhurst was a Christian missionary to China with strong theosophical / mystical inclinations, and his regularly Christianizing commentary and footnotes will put most readers off today. I still find something in the language of his translation—perhaps no more than a formality and an occasional tone of reverence—that most contemporary translations do not deliver, and that gives me pleasure and insight. But it has been important for me in the last twenty years or so to measure him against many other translations. These can be so various in handling a single chapter or line that it is only in the aggregate, in the meanings glimmering among them all, that something like an original intention or ideal translation might emerge.
I have appreciated so much Thomas Cleary’s translations of Buddhist scripture and literature, and have cited him often in these entries. So I picked up volume one of his The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary with much excitement for his new translation of Lao Tzu. The experience has been mixed so far (I am still reading); his tone strikes me often as flat, and I wonder if he is catching well the concrete edge of Lao Tzu’s imagery and rhetoric. The poetry of the author is not often audible. (The book also contains his translation of Wen Tzu, which I remarked in an earlier entry as giving great pleasure and depth to my thoughts on the Tao Te Ching as well.)
Other translations of the Tao Te Ching I draw on frequently: Michael Lafargue’s quirky, scholarly, fresh translation, which rearranges Lao Tzu’s chapters freely but is packed with valuable reflections, textual notes, and clarifying historical and philosophical contexts and definitions; Robert G. Henricks’s translation of the Ma Wang Tui text of Lao Tzu’s classic, entitled the Te Tao Ching and with the two major sections reversed in order, as well as many fascinating variants from the standard text which reward study for those so inclined; and David Hinton’s recent The Four Chinese Classics, including Lao Tzu alongside Chuang Tzu, Confucius, and Mencius—though his showy translation of Taoist wu wei (“non-action”) as “nothing doing” grates badly and mars many chapters.
Finally, I mention with gratitude Tony Kline’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. So often the simplicity and lucidity of Kline’s language clarifies the more laboured or abstract language of his fellow translators. He has also produced a stunning e-book filled with moving reproductions of Chinese art adjacent to the texts. Kline made his many, many translations of East Asian scripture and other writings freely available online long before “open source” was a widespread discussion, and I am more grateful to him every day for that generosity. For the contemporary reader intolerant of the Victorian voice and values of a Medhurst, I recommend Kline most confidently.
March 8, 2024.