Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching - Review

Whole Earth, Spring, 1999 by Howard Rheingold

LAO TZU: TAO TE CHING A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way

A new English version by Ursula K. Le Guin. 1998; 125 pp. $12. Shambhala.

I fell in love with the Too Te Ching at sixteen; I own a dozen translations and cherish three. The moment I knew I was going to edit the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, I knew the Too Te Ching belonged on the first page. But now, finally, a truly great English version has appeared, by a wise woman, a storyteller and poet who took decades to accomplish the task. I gave a copy of this book to my daughter for her fourteenth birthday, and inscribed inside my advice to read it every year for the rest of her life.

"Returning To The Root

   Be completely empty,
   Be perfectly serene.
   The ten thousand things arise
   together;
   in their arising is their return.
   Now they flower,
   and flowering
   sink homeward,
   returning to the root.

   The return to the root
   is peace.
   Peace: to accept what must be,
   to know what endures.
   In that knowledge is wisdom.
   Without it, ruin, disorder.

   To know what endures
   is to be openhearted,
   magnanimous,
   regal,
   blessed,
   following the Tao,
   the way that endures forever.
   The body comes to its ending,
   but there is nothing to fear.

"The Uses of Not

   Thirty spokes
   meet in the hub.
   Where the wheel isn't
   is where it's useful.
   Hollowed out,
   clay makes a pot.
   Where the pot's not
   is where it's useful.
   Cut doors and windows
   to make a room.
   Where the room isn't,
   there's room for you.

   So the profit in what is
   is in the use of what isn't.

[Note from Ursula Le Guin] One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He's explaining profound and difficult truth here, one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.