Laozi’s Dao De Jing translated by Ken Liu

subtitled A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time.

I probably would never have picked up this book if it weren’t for the fact that Ken Liu is the translator. I have so many books and so little time, and reading about religion in my free time is not high on my list of priorities. However, I really enjoyed what he did with Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, and while I haven’t had time to read his original speculative fiction yet, I very much want to. When I heard that he was tackling a classic of Chinese literature and philosophy, I absolutely had to take a look at the result.

I freely admit that I did not know much about the original Dao De Jing before starting this, so my reading of this book comes entirely from the perspective of a novice who is only mostly familiar with East Asian culture, having grown up in Southeast Asia myself (yes, there is a difference. Yes, I am better positioned to discuss the subject than the average Westerner. Yes, there is still so much I have to learn.) I also realized as I was reading this that I have no interest in critiquing the content of what’s basically a foundational text for a major world religion. While such commentary may occasionally creep into this review, I really only want to talk about the experience of reading Mr Liu’s interpretation, as well as the insight he gives to his own process of translation, in addition to the choices he makes to interject other anecdotes of Daoism into the text. For adequate compensation, I’d definitely take the considerable time I’d need to think out the parallels between my work as a reviewer navigating that challenge with the translator’s as a conduit for messages left by the great. Alas that this website is primarily a labor of love of the written word, and not something that (yet, I hope) pays a living wage.

But love, ah love is one of the foundations of Daoism, at least as expressed in this text. Love and humility and a surrender to the order of the cosmos: those are the cornerstones laid out here for an existence of harmony and contentment. But, as Mr Liu himself points out near the beginning of the book, what is love? How do you explain the many ways in which a concept as large and varied as love can be expressed and aimed and felt, without the benefit of context and culture? How do you take a book written in ideograms and effectively translate its poetry and intimations to a people entirely removed in time and influence and language from the circumstances that originally birthed it?

Mr Liu tackles that challenge first by treating his work here less as a magisterial effort and more as a conversation with the original text. This approach makes the entire thing feel a lot more relatable and understandable for newbies like myself, while also adhering to Daoism’s emphasis on humility and, to a certain extent, unknowability. The Dao is meant, if I’m reading this correctly, to be felt more than explained. But since language is the way human beings best convey emotions and thoughts, Mr Liu takes on the unenviable task of putting the nameless into words, acknowledging as he does so the fallibility of communication and the necessarily active role of both transmitter and receiver:

Moreover, the text, as a string of symbols, is not the locus of meaning–understanding comes at the moment when a reader’s mind fills the text with their own language of experience and expectation and transforms the dead text into a living story, one unique to them and them alone.

In addition to grappling with words and form, Mr Liu takes time to illuminate both the historical and political context in which the originals were written and, later, popularized. I had never even realized that there was a significant difference between Daoism and Confucianism till this book, peppered as it is with Zhuangzi’s acerbic putdowns of both Confucius and Legalism as a whole.

The only parts where I felt Mr Liu misstepped were when he became more advocate/apologist than conversationalist. The De Of Babies is one of the least convincing chapters of the Dao De Jing because it is clearly written in a way that either willfully misunderstands babies or is weirdly naive about their care. Mr Liu argues that Laozi is just trolling in an effort to get people to think, which I think is quite a stretch for a passage that claims that babies are unharmed by nature because they’re “at the peak of harmony”. I get what the text is driving at — the ones least concerned with thoughts and most in touch with feelings are the ones most attuned to the cosmos — but it’s an unsuccessful metaphor that does not, in my opinion, enhance the message of the rest of the chapter. And that’s fine. Frankly I wish that people were okay with religious texts sometimes just being weird and not great. The reverence, as Laozi strives again and again to tell us, should be for our great connection to the tapestry of being. So what if there are a few dropped stitches in one small part conveying the key to understanding it? The imperfect doesn’t need to be justified or, worse, outright glorified so as to seem not to detract from the whole.

That aside, Mr Liu does an astonishingly great job of making the Dao De Jing accessible for people who’ve never really encountered it before and, I imagine, for those who already have but want to revisit its ideas. This is a wonderful book for any modern student of religion or philosophy, and certainly taught me a lot more than I imagined it would when I opened its pages. Recommended.

Laozi’s Dao De Jing translated by Ken Liu was published August 20 2024 by the Scribner Book Company and is available from all good booksellers, including