alt Hacker NewsTao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hey, the last commit there is mine, fixing the line endings!
FWIW, I also made a website with comparison of the different translations/renditions of the Tao Te Ching, including the one by Ursula K. Le Guin[0].
This is one of my favorite versions, mostly for nostalgic reasons. My initial exposure to the Tao te Ching was this "rendition" and Stephen Mitchell's version. Comparing the two was always very thought provoking; the approach is very different between them.
I often come to this site and compare chapters across multiple versions: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh
Some are more poetic, some are more literal, and keeping with the theme, both of them are just as important.
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.
From the her postscript:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.
I also reference Le Guin's rendition a bunch here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense
I picked up Tao Te Ching as an American teenager and was moved by how it cuts against the American faith in visible dominance and self-assertion, proposing a form of strength that is low, quiet, and unseen. It's much more than that of course, but that aspect had immediate impact on my thinking.
> I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you can see it rightly, it contains everything.
I'm a simple man. I see Borge, I upvote
This is wonderful. Ursula K. Le Guin is a great thinker and I’d highly recommend her novels. I’ve read Ken Liu’s, who many here probably know at least from translating The Three Body Problem and Death’s End, Tao Te Ching and it was remarkably poetic. Excited to read another person’s interpretation.
Osho on Tao the pathless path is also pretty amazing! - https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-1-by-osho-01...
Is this not under copyright?
HN seems to like Tao Te Ching.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Ron Hogan's Getting Right with Tao is another interesting rendition: http://www.beatrice.com/TAO.pdf
my first exposure to the Tao Te Ching was listening to the audiobook 'the tao of pooh', which I was listening to on an airplane and found myself doubled-over gobsmacked with the simple complexity it was exposing to me, and how I had already absent mindedly followed a few of their principles, and nowadays it's all I see, is don't think, just do; go back to the beginning; become an uncarved block. it's all so great.
What a crazy coincidence seeing this on HN; I just started reading this today!
"Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness."
That resonates with so much of the discussion on this site. We're all trying to make good technology that helps people! Why does it so often fall short?
I am just noticing how those ideas are present in Wizard of Earthsea.
Love this version. I quoted the chapter about Leadership plenty of times at work.
`True leaders are hardly known to their followers.`
Ursula's notes really enrich the work. Fantastic ways to render insights in words.
The concept of *unlearning* in Chapter 48 and the Y Combinator (YC) model represent two fundamentally opposing approaches to action, leadership, and success. While C emphasizes accumulation, urgency, and overcoming obstacles to "win," Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching argues that true power comes from "shrinking," "not doing," and flowing like water to avoid obstacles entirely.
Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching draws a sharp distinction between conventional learning and the Way. Le Guin translates this as: "Studying and learning daily you grow larger. / Following the Way daily you shrink".
Y Combinator exemplifies "growing larger." It describes a process where founders "work intensively," "compress months of growth into weeks," and strive to build companies into massive entities like OpenAI ($500B) and Airbnb ($100B). This aligns with the worldly pursuit of accumulation and "being bright" or "keen," which Le Guin notes leads to the "greatest evil: wanting more".
Le Guin argues that to follow the Way, one must "get smaller and smaller" until arriving at "not doing". This "unlearning" is the removal of the "fuss," desire, and intellectual rigidity that creates resistance.
The relationship between Unlearning and Not Doing is that unlearning strips away the ego-driven need to force outcomes. The YC text quotes Paul Graham defining a formidable founder as "one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way." This defines success as the imposition of will upon the world—an act of force. In contrast, Le Guin’s commentary states that wei wu wei (Action by Inaction) is "power that is not force". A Taoist leader does not overcome obstacles by crashing through them; rather, like water, they go "right / to the low loathsome places, / and so finds the way". To the Taoist, the "formidable" approach of forcefully removing obstacles is dangerous because "Those who think to win the world / by doing something to it, / I see them come to grief".
The YC website highlights that "the sense of urgency is so infectious among founders" that it creates maximum productivity. Le Guin’s translation warns explicitly against this state—she writes: "Racing, chasing, hunting, / drives people crazy". Le Guin notes that "To run things, / don't fuss with them," and that "Nobody who fusses / is fit to run things". The "fuss" (or shi) is interpreted by Le Guin as "diplomacy" or "meddling"—essentially, the intense activity and "doing" that YC celebrates.
Instead of infectious urgency, the Taoist relies on "doing without doing," which Le Guin describes as "uncompetitive, unworried, trustful accomplishment".
The YC website describes "formidable founders" who do—they build, pivot, and acquire vast valuations through intense effort. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching suggests that this is the path of "growing larger". In the Taoist view, these founders are "doing something to" the world, which is a "sacred object" that should not be seized. While YC founders "get what they want," Le Guin observes that "the ever-wanting soul / sees only what it wants," blinding them to the "mystery" and the true nature of the Way. Unlearning, therefore, leads to not doing by dismantling the very ambition that drives a founder to become "formidable" in the first place.
Edit: TBH, IMHO, "the low loathsome places" are not dissimilar from the indignities which a founder should be prepared to suffer, and so maybe startups aren't completely anathema to the Dao.
For people who like The Big Lebowski, there's "The Tao of the Dude"
"The way you can go isn’t the real way."
Nope. This ain't it.
The very first sentence misses the point. (It might be a literal translation. Perhaps. But that's not the essence.) I couldn't go (pun intended) beyond the first sentence. There are much more "essential" translations out there.
This is most likely a copyright violation. I follow these translations and I’ve seen no evidence that the publisher put it in the public domain.
As another comment points out, Le Guin herself does not call this a translation, so we shouldn't misrepresent it (although it might be my favorite English version).
However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
I have 0 confidence that I could understand the Tao even if I read the best most classical translations available.
Take the bible, which is translated from languages that are closer to mine, and which refers to a culture which is closer to mine, with family and scholars whose interpretation I can understand directly. Still I don't have much confidence that I understand the bulk of it, it takes years of reading and lived experiences to understand both the modern and past contexts in which it was written.
By the same token, I'm certain actual chinese people read the Tao and are like "Lmao what does this mean", and for the most part these books are meant to be mysterious, iirc there's actual sections of the Tao that translate to "You can't understand the Tao".
I don't mean to be overly religious here, it's just that the Tao happens to be religious, but consider Beowulf, which is written in an old form of the English language, surely you would be able to understand it? Not a chance, try it. But ok, surely the translators are able to understand it and provide you a translation without losing much meaning. No, not only can they not provide a translation that you can understand without losing context and signal, but they can't understand a lot of what they are reading anyways. Consider that for just the first word of the whole epic, they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means, nobody can even settle on what the first word means! Imagine the rest of the text.
So to think that one has a chance to understand the Tao, or even that it is worth it at all to understand something from a culture so different. Not for me.
Unless you are Asian, by all means go for it, but if you are not, I would invite you to question whether you first have any chance at understanding at all, or whether you will interpret "being like a Straw Dog" from whatever translation you chose through your own lens, like a Rorschach.
From the bottom:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.