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Comment by dantondwa | Hacker News Reader

“The above is the most accurate translation of the ancient classic available anywhere at any price.”

Quite a bold statement that immediately makes me very sceptical. When reading ancient classics in translation, the wisest approach is comparing multiple translations. Only then a more complete picture will emerge.

This website allows one to compare some translations side by side: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

With this said, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most astonishing texts to ever be written. It hovers around what I see as an essential truth, pointing at it while intentionally avoiding defining it. Any translation and any form is worth being read.

I have recently been reading a new Italian translation of it, by Luigi Maggio and published by Bompiani, and I have been really appreciating its care for the mystic, shamanic origin of the text, and the deep discussions of each translation choice, together with the presence of the original text.

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FWIW, I've wrote a tool to help translate from Chinese on a per-word basis using open ressources (dictionaries, decomposition table, etc.). In particular, it helps to recover some of the information lost when translating from Chinese.

It's a personal project for now, so some things are still rough (e.g. no way to add new books, and I haven't bothered with the Tao Te Ching yet). You can see how it works on the San Zi Jing here[0].

If some of you are interested or have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out; my email should be on the "about" page.

[0]: https://zhongmu.eu/trbook.html#c=1;w=6;b=san-zi-jing

Frankly, I found this "translation" the best: https://aui.me/text/the-dude-de-ching/ ,but Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Is this your homework, mkovach?

If you haven't read it yet I can highly recommend the Italian collection of translations by Augusto Shandena Sabbadini (curator), which also provides translations to each individual Chinese character in the book.

(btw looks like we commented almost the same thing at the same time.)

The problem of language is a common thread in eastern philosophies, and Western Idealist.

Language can't express the idea, but Language is the only way to pass the idea to others, but then what others hear is something not quite right and can be misinterpreted, which can lead to problems.

Huang Po - Zen

Wittgenstein - West

To me, this is one of the most interesting differentiations between western philosophy and eastern philosophy.

Western philosophy tries to get around the language problems by writing thick volumes with excruciating detail and pedantry to help their idea get across as accurately as possible.

Eastern philosophy tries to get around the language problems with allusion and metaphor, leaning on the reader/listeners own experiences as foundation and trying to help them extrapolate from those experiences.

It's a fascinating contrast to me. I can't say with any certainty which delivers better, but I lean towards the eastern approach.

To be fair, it's far easier in written Chinese[1] to have allusion and metaphor because of the multifaceted nature of meaning in the characters. For instance, 行 (pronounced xing or haeng in Mandarin) has an absolute laundry list[2] of meanings even though originally it meant an intersection of roads. It's also possible (but to my knowledge less common) to play with the actual character shapes to induce other meanings, or to use replacement characters that are direct (or close) homophones to construct a play on words. The example that immediately pops to mind is the use of "river crabs" (河蟹 or héxiè) to replace "harmonized" (和谐 or héxié) in order to evade censorship.

I'd honestly be willing to say that there is no real accurate translation of the Dao de Jing into English. Ancient Chinese commentators (including Confucius) note the difficulty of understanding the Dao de Jing, and they could read and speak the language! Not to say that it's impossible, but it's just extremely difficult to replicate. I look at it as being akin to translating Shakespeare into Mandarin. Even English speakers struggle with Shakespeare and when translated it loses the lyricism and a lot of the underlying meaning.

[1] Noting here that when speaking the context will generally make it less ambiguous. Additionally, Mandarin and ancient Chinese at the time of Lao Zi share very little in common phonetically. [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...

My experience reading ancient Greek philosophy has been indeed that many philosophers use allusion and metaphor and are focused on leading a good life.

Yeah, the ancients Greeks are a mix. Plato in particular finds a way to do both well.

But then with Aristotle we have the foundation of writing to excess. Documentation instead of communication.

This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mistakenly assume that it is representative of the entirety of Western philosophy. It's not.

Likewise, we in the west are in a period when certain specific Eastern philosophies, notably Buddhism and Taoism, have become widely known and popular for the first time in the West. It's easy to mistakenly assume that they are representative of the entirety of Eastern philosophy. They're not.

Western philosophy has a deep and broad mystical and esoteric tradition that routinely does what you describe as an essentially "eastern" practice. More recently, postmodernism discards all that analytic precision in favor of vague impressionistic primacy for one's personal experience, and has become by far the dominant philosophy in many parts of the west. Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger, who was incidentally a Nazi) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has its own well-developed "excruciating pedantic detail" traditions such as Legalism[1] (among others) that routinely do what you describe as an essentially "western" practice. They have been profoundly influential in Asian thought, yet they are not currently popular in the West, so we just don't think about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)

I want to upvote this for its good points about the relationship between Eastern thought and "Eastern thought" in the "West", but man, what is this?

> Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger...) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

- Heidegger as the "progenitor of postmodernism" is... contentious, at best.

- Even if he was, he never defined "postmodernism" himself; mostly his critics associated him with it.

- As far as I know he never explicitly said any particular program was influenced by Taoism (although he definitely was). I would even say this is a specific case of what you're criticizing, as that influence came from his dialogue with the Kyoto school, a syncretic form of Buddhism that itself (IMO somewhat tenuously) claimed it represented also Taoism.

Maybe just a German influence? The zeitgeist of the time?

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influenced by Buddhism. Think so was Kant, and Hume (Scottish).

In general, during that time period, a lot of philosophers were discussing Buddhist ideas, don't think it is stretch that Heidegger had been 'influenced'.

I'm explicitly not contesting that Heidegger was influenced by Taoism! I said "he definitely was". I'm contesting that you'll find a statement by Heidegger like "my work, as extended by postmodernism to which I also lay some intellectual claim, grows out of Taoism," which doesn't check out for at least those three major reasons.

I think we are agreeing on Tao. And on postmodernism. I don't know enough to have an opinion.

I asked GPT 4 and it seemed GPT 4 also agrees Heidegger was NOT a postmodernist.

"No, Martin Heidegger was not considered a postmodernist. He was a German philosopher who is generally associated with phenomenology and existentialism, and he is best known for his work "Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit"), published in 1927. His philosophical work laid some of the groundwork for postmodern thought, but he himself belonged to an earlier philosophical period.

Postmodernism as a philosophical movement didn’t emerge until after World War II, and it is characterized by skepticism toward grand narratives, doubt about objective reality, and a focus on the relative and the subjective. Heidegger's work, particularly his exploration of "being," language, and hermeneutics, influenced many postmodern thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, but he was not himself a postmodernist.

Heidegger’s own philosophy is complex and cannot be easily categorized. It includes elements of existentialism, hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation), and phenomenology (the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view)."

That is correct. You are very correct with this. I was using the 'common' understanding.

I was really surprised how much of Descartes and Leibniz were really about religious arguments. Completely about mystical metaphysical ideas. Surprised because I thought Western Philosophy would be all 'sciencey' and about logic. But really it all had a lot of religious reasoning in it.

And then also surprised that in India, with Buddhism, with Nagarjuna, extreme analytical logical arguments. There were centuries of extreme logical arguments.

So guess, if you try to make a quick summary on the internet, it will be wrong. Because if you go back over the centuries, at some point in time everything was done before by everyone else. Everyone went through similar phases at some point.

"Marrying" the eastern and the western mindsets is a big, maybe even the biggest, goal of this age. There is a saying that, freely translated, means "the east is where the wisdom was born, the west is where it will assume a definite shape."

"The myth about communication is that it has ever happened."

-- Somebody. We're not really sure who. Maybe that's the point. (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/31/illusion/)

Ha, this reminds me of Wiio's laws -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws

"1. Communication usually fails, except by accident."

> It hovers around what I see as an essential truth

Yeah, and it opens with basically saying "look, we know that we're going to talk about things ill suited to be captured by language, so keep that it mind"

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

Words are placeholders for meaning. Once you lose the words, you lose the ability to retain the thought with any reliable accuracy due to how our brains work.

Words are just a lossy inefficient stand-in for a vector embedding database.

Not me. I'm keeping my traps and my words so I can keep using them tomorrow.

And I'm keeping my trap shut

It's indeed a big statement coming from the original ideas taken from an ancient language and by some anonymous monk's recounting of the facts.

The whole thing is fascinating to me.

> by some anonymous monk's recounting of the facts

The DDC what not written by one person. Laozi just complied old writings from several sources.

It is also worth noting that as of time of writing, the idea of whether or not Laozi was a single person that ever existed is less clear than originally interpreted.

One of the translations I've read more recently takes note of how it, and Zhuangzi were likely penned within the same century, and that Chinese culture of the time did not frown upon "borrowing" or "building" upon knowledge bases and presenting them as "yours".

Actually kind of an interesting attitude towards communal wells of knowledge compared to many modern attitudes, I think. The Tao Te Ching may technically be the ultimate work of textual "sampling" if there's any truth to it.

It also has to do with how legitimization works within the Chinese culture. Things with lineages and ancestors are more seen as more legitimate, and the Chinese (historically at least) are not above borrowing it.

Related is the complex and rich history of Chinese martial arts. If you ask for the oral tradition for any modern school claiming a lineage, it is often founded by a mythical founder — maybe some Shaolin monk, or a Taoist monk. There is a good case that martial art lineages are much more likely to have evolved out of military skills. It does not help that most practitioners were illiterate, and often not well-educated.

What I don’t know is if the literate class also borrowed legitimacy. I don’t think they did, because I don’t think they had to.

> This website allows one to compare some translations side by side: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

Most of those are not translations from Chinese, they are interpretations from already translated Chinese texts.

> With this said, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most astonishing texts to ever be written. It hovers around what I see as an essential truth, pointing at it while intentionally avoiding defining it. Any translation and any form is worth being read.

I agree.

There is a lot missing in any translation of the Dao De Jing, because nothing really captures the various layers of meanings from the original. There are also some meanings that are made clear with realizations and gnosis (for the lack of a better term).

One of my favorite is Ursula K Le Guin’s rendering. Her version captures some of the poetry that I rarely find in more straightforward translation.

>When reading ancient classics in translation, the wisest approach is comparing multiple translations. Only then a more complete picture will emerge.

But if I can't read the original ancient Chinese, what good does comparing the translations do? I can tell which ones read better to me, but I have no idea if any of them are actually accurate.

So right at the beginning it says this -- you can talk about Tao, but not the eternal Tao[1].

From a philosophy perspective, it is a good idea to read different versions because there isn't really a "right way to put it". This kind of Taoism is meant to make you think and relate to the universe in a certain way.

If you're more interested in studying an authentic version of the text though, almost all of the English "translations" are inadequate and misleading. This was a book about dynastic China.

The oldest sources appear to have been compiled from multiple sources themselves, and then underwent further revision, eg the order of Tao and Te was probably reversed at some point, the text became less regionally specific as it traveled across China, acquired different vocabulary and grammar, was appropriated by Confucians, separated into chapters, etc. So in this sense it's interesting to read multiple translations and analysis. To get the full picture you have to consider the sinology around the text too.

[1] John C. H. Wu's translation: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/wu.html#Kap01

Not to make it sound hopeless, but Old Chinese is lossy because it tended to favor conciseness at the expense of unambiguous clarity. There is no total truth and a bit of subjective interpretation is required.

持而盈之 for instance is "持=hold 而=yet 盈=overflow 之=[implied subject or this]" while the translator decided to add a cup, writing "Holding a cup and overfilling it." It's a great assumption as 盈 has the etymology of a vessel being filled, but still an assumption nonetheless.

I think the idea is that "the real content" will be nearest where all the translations have consensus. Aberrational translations are quickly discounted this way.

Even the single best translation will probably be worse than reading the top three best translations since translation is as much an art as a science.

Not any different from a potato chip brand claiming themsleves as the best tasting.

They do this because consumers fall for this crap, collectively encouraging the behavior.

If they said "we think it's the best translation but you should read multiple and decide for yourselves", they wouldn't make it to the top of news sites.

> This website allows one to compare some translations side by side:

> https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

Hey that's my website! Thanks for linking :)

Can you recommend something similar to tao the ching? I don't mean anything like tao of pooh/new age stuff/alan watts, but similar in the spirit of tao.

The obvious second book to read after Laozi is Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu). His book is a joy to read, full of humor and anecdotes, where Laozi's reads like cryptic poetry. Both books describe a common worldview of harmonious living with the natural world, from complementary perspectives.

I personally recommend Burton Watson's translation of Zhuangzi.

Trying Not To Try by Slingerland is a great accessible introduction to the different modes of Chinese philosophy, and the two approaches to Daoism by Laozi and Zhuangzi are discussed.

For more depth I highly recommend Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. I took a course that used this book as its text and it was really life changing and made me hopeful that there are some more practical philosophies out there for us.

I personally like Angus Graham's translation, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu, as well as his essays on it, A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu.

For one thing, it gave me some significant sympathy for analytic philosophy for the first time.

Seconding this-- and I can recommend the Merton translation. Great for late night reading, or if you are feeling especially unsettled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)

Not OP but "Wandering on the Way" is a great collection of later daoist writings

https://www.google.de/books/edition/Wandering_on_the_Way/dpF...

An interesting contrast is the later work of Xunzi (aka Hsun Tzu; not to be confused with Sun Tzu), which is a sort of synthesis of Taoism and Confucianism. He tempers the idealism of Laozi (Lao Tzu), finding "freedom from obsession" also in the perfection of the social contract.

A similar transformation occurred around the same time in the West, as the idealism of Cynicism was refined in Stoicism.

It is a bit more concrete and has no reference to Taoism unlike the other shared recomendations, but I also enjoyed Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. To me it is in the spirit of the Tao. Finding the balance and harmony and not declaring dogmatic truths.

(but it is a imaginary prophet sharing wisdom, so there is maybe a association of dogmatism, but I did not perceive it like that)

A recent "Hermetic Theory of Everything [Evolution, Morality, Structures, Simulation, Alchemy]", by a programmer IIRC. However, I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BjCpLh_myY

The Heart Sutra, an extremely condensed version of core Buddhist teaching. But, in my opinion, such texts are useless without explanations. Bernie Glassman explains it in the book "Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen".

In the spirit of the Tao, there is also the I Ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

I love the I Ching for divination. Not in the "tell me my fate!" sense, but as a way to use randomness as a means to look at things differently. It's like Oblique Strategies but even obliquer.

- the "shin jin mei" of sen ts'an

- "On Zen" by Daio Kokuchi

- "Shobogenzo" by Dogen. I especially venerate the loose translation (or paraphrasing) by Brad Warner.

personally, i can only extract so much meaning from the text itself without rely on experts and explanations. i find it helpful to have it interpretted as well by people like Jason gregory.

I currently learn from a master in a living lineage of Shifu and you get so much context from that than “just” reading the text. You also get the living reality of the text which is beneficial.

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