Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu (trans. James Legge) · 1891
5.0 · 5 ratings
About the book
Eighty-one short chapters that keep insisting the useful part is the empty one — the hole in the wheel, the space in the cup, the ruler nobody notices. Legge's Victorian rendering is stiff in places and scrupulously honest everywhere.
Try the short course
Part 1 · The Way that cannot be walked. The first six slides, free.
1 / 6
Most books earn your trust before they admit their limits. This one admits them in its first sentence: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao." A second line follows at once, saying the same of names.
Read slowly, that is not false modesty. It is exact. Whatever you are about to be given, a way to walk or a word to hold, will be one particular version of the thing, never the thing itself.
This is the book's first honest move, and almost everything strange that follows rests on it. Eighty more chapters of advice come after this sentence, and every one of them sits underneath it.
Inside the course
12 parts- «The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao»Free above
- Opposites that make each other: the trick of chapter two
- Wu wei — action that does not force
- Water, the book's favourite teacher
Questions
Is Tao Te Ching free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Tao Te Ching is waiting in the app’s library.
