About this Dao De Jing site

Why I made it

The Dao De Jing is one of my favorite works of ancient Chinese philosophy. I could not find a practical way to learn it on the go, so I built a simple app for myself. Friends wanted to use it too, so I put it online for everyone. This site is its second version.

The translation

Many translations drift into fanciful spiritual readings. I chose a plain one that stays close to the Chinese, line by line, so that a learner can match each English line with the Chinese above it. I kept it as simple and literal as I could, which leaves you room for your own interpretation.

The text and the audio

The Chinese is the Wang Bi received text in simplified characters, checked against the Wang Bi edition on Wikisource. Where editions differ, the displayed text follows what the narrator recites.

How to read it

The text can feel hard at first, even for native Chinese speakers. Treat it as a puzzle: one chapter at a time, one line at a time, and make sure you understand a line before you move on. One chapter a day is a good pace. Many ideas come back in different images across the 81 chapters, so the whole becomes clearer as you go.

Dao De Jing or Tao Te Ching?

道德经 and 老子 are written here in pinyin, the romanization adopted by ISO and the United Nations: Dao De Jing and Laozi. Tao Te Ching and Lao Tzu are older spellings of the same names.

Credits

• Chinese text: Wikisource, Dao De Jing (Wang Bi edition), public domain.
• English comparison: James Legge (1891), public domain, via Wikisource.
• Word card: the "Other senses" are taken from CC-CEDICT, shortened and reordered in places, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; the glossary built on them is shared under the same license. CC-CEDICT also helped draft the pinyin.
• Fonts: AR PL KaitiM GB (Arphic Public License) and Source Serif 4 (SIL Open Font License).

Contact

Comments and corrections are welcome: send me an email.