IT is believed that Tao Te Ching, which ranks with the Bible as one of the most translated books of all time, was composed by Lao Tzu on the request of a commander of one of the passes of his country. He made no claims for its originality, and considered it a summation of the learning and knowledge of the ancient masters of his land, who are invoked in the text at many places. People who followed Tzu tinkered with it for several hundred years. This stopped when Wang Bi consolidated the changes and finalized the text in its present shape, which has become the basis of philosophical and religious Taoism.
Tao Te Ching is a short, terse text, highly metaphorical and teasingly paradoxical, which is meant to help human beings to live in this world. It explains how the cosmos functions and how human actions impact our lives. The complexity of the text can be seen in its very opening lines, and I quote only the first four:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things.
The lines imply that the Tao is not something that has to be spoken or explained; it is to be experienced. For whatever is spoken or explained gets delimited. Tao initiated the creation and everything else, and then whatever the humans saw, they named it.
Each and every line of the text is pregnant with meaning that most of us would have found difficult to get at without Linn’s elaborate explanations. Consistently, the text operates through paradoxes that are largely the result of the peculiar character of its original language. For example:
End sagacity, abandon knowledge
The people benefit a hundred times.
Or
Yield and remain whole
Bend and remain straight
Be low and become filled
Be worn out and become renewed
Tao Te Ching is a guide to wise and virtuous living, which stresses the importance of simplicity, authenticity, and spontaneity in our lives. It needs to be read, re-read, savoured, and reflected upon. The scholarly introduction by Derek Linn is useful and informative and helps the reader to get the maximum out of it.
(Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 7/16 Ansari Road, Darya Gang, New Delhi-110 002.)
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