Thursday, January 06, 2011

#1



"A man is supple and weak when living, and stiff and hard when dead."

There's a hundred-odd pages of this stuff, riddled with asterisks footnoting doubts about textual authenticity and thee accuracy of translation. I'll have to seek the Tao elsewhere.

3 comments:

Earth Dragon said...

For a couple of years now, I've been slowly making my way through a translation of the Tao, courtesy of Daniƫlle.

I've found that if I read too much at any one sitting, I get nothing out of it. If, however, I read a little bit, then a bit more another day, it slowly starts to make sense. While proceeding in this fashion, and letting the readings float in context against the episodes in my life, I've had moments of clarity.

Like all great things, these pass too quickly.

For everyone's benefit, I've been slowly transcribing the Tao onto my blog pages. They're not searchable (not yet), but the text is there. I am 30 pages away from having the entire book online.

Geoff said...

I read this book very slowly, on the can, for over a year. Sometimes I thought I had an "aha" moment, but it never stuck.

The translation I'm sure is an issue. I've heard from Taoist devotees that there are better books/sources for Tao available. I'm likely to dig into those before trying another translation of this.

Earth Dragon said...

I'd enjoy any recommendations you may have.