Table of Contents

Introduction Translation and Commentary 1. Excellence That Is Not Outstanding 2. Stillness and Contentment 3. Self-Cultivation 4. Knowledge, Learning, and Teaching 5. Majesty That Is Not Awesome 6. The Soft Way 7. Against Disquieting "Improvements" Additional Textual Notes Hermeneutics: A Reasoned Approach to Interpreting the Tao Te Ching Social Background The Composition of the Tao Te Ching: What Kind of Writing Is It? Analyzing Laoist Sayings: Nonliteral Interpretation The Laoist "System"

About the Author

Michael LaFargue is the author of Language and Gnosis and teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Reviews

"This translation and commentary takes a novel, even controversial approach to the Tao Te Ching, presenting the reader with a full-blown culturological understanding of this core Taoist classic. In its resolute attention to the detail of historical context, it is engaging, plausible, and for those close to the text, importantly revealing. LaFargue, taking full advantage of recent archaeological finds to inform his reading, is very contemporary. Here at last we have a translation which combines philological responsibility with the imagination necessary to unfold this powerful text." - Roger T. Ames, University of Hawaii "I want to urge straight away that this is one of the very best books I have ever read on Chinese philosophy and culture. LaFargue's book is the work of a refined, well-informed, sensible, straightforward, honest, candidly self-confident (yet somehow unassuming), imaginatively independent and, yes, wise individual who-largely because these gifts are exploited by an extremely well-trained mind-manages to say persistently fresh and evocative things about a much abused text and the vision it informs. "More than any other classical Chinese work, perhaps, the Tao Te Ching has been ripped from its historical, culture and concretely experiential context and employed (like a set of transcultural Rorschach images) to tickle the meditative fancies of Mystical Everyman. LaFargue's worry about the origin and evolution of the text, its intended audience and the 'purpose' of its aphorisms allows him to ask relevant hermeneutical questions the response to which opens the text in a new way. In place of near-sighted readings of the Tao Te Ching which find it to be simply another comforting example of philosophia perennis, LaFargue's method is to dispense with the corrective lenses of philosophical semantics and to bring the text into focus by holding it at arms' length. By thus distancing the text from its contemporary readers, LaFargue, paradoxically, makes possible a much more intimate relationship to the Tao Te Ching than has heretofore been possible to Western readers." - David L. Hall, The University of Texas-El Paso