The Tao Te Ching is one of the most translated books ever written, after the Bible, and the translations do not agree. Not on the wording. Not on the grammar. Sometimes not even on the subject of a sentence.
Lao Tzu, if he existed, set down about five thousand Chinese characters some twenty-five centuries ago. Classical Chinese has no tenses, almost no punctuation, and one word can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective depending on where it sits. Each translator has to decide what every line means before they can write it in English, and they decide differently. The first six characters are a fair warning of the rest.
道可道，非常道chapter 1, line 1 · six characters that have been turned into English several hundred ways
- The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.Legge, 1891
- The Tao that is the subject of discussion is not the true Tao.Gorn Old, 1904
- The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way.Waley, 1934
- Existence is beyond the power of words to define.Bynner, 1944
- The way you can go isn't the real way.Le Guin, 1997
- A Way become Way isn't the perennial Way.Hinton, 2002
Same line. One translator reads it as a road, one as a topic of conversation, one as plain existence, and one ties it in a knot on purpose. None of them is wrong, exactly. That spread is the subject of this page.
Below is the whole book, all 81 chapters. For each one you get the Chinese, a plain-language breakdown of what the chapter is doing and where the translators part ways, and then every English version I could find, stacked so you can read them against each other. Two dozen run the full length of the book; another hundred-odd show up where I could find them. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move between chapters.
Where the text comes from
Every translation here is reproduced verbatim. I pulled the text with scripts and parsed it, so nothing was retyped or paraphrased by hand or by a model. The corpus is 139 translators in total: 24 who translated all 81 chapters, and a long tail of others who appear where a chapter-by-chapter anthology happened to carry them.
- The Chinese is the received (Wang Bi) text, from the Chinese Text Project.
- The complete translations (Legge, Waley, Lin Yutang, Bynner, Blakney, D. C. Lau, Wu, Chan, Henricks, Feng and English, Mitchell, Le Guin, Hinton, and others) come from the per-translator pages at Terebess Asia Online and the side-by-side corpus at tasuki/sbs-ttc.
- The long tail of additional renderings is harvested from Michael Garofalo's enormous chapter-by-chapter collection at Green Way Research.
The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship for the contested lines, and where the oldest excavated copies (the Mawangdui silk and the Guodian bamboo) disagree with the familiar text, I have tried to say so rather than smooth it over. Many of the modern translations are still in copyright; they are quoted here for comparison and study, with every translator named.
The painting on the homepage card is Zhang Lu's Laozi Riding an Ox (Ming dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei), in the public domain. The legend is that Lao Tzu wrote this book and then rode west out of China for good.