Chinese & Japanese

Laozi (Lao Tzu)

traditionally 6th century BC

Laozi, "the Old Master", is the traditional author of the Tao Te Ching (Daodejing), the foundational book of Daoism. Chinese tradition places him in the 6th century BC and calls him an archivist at the court of Zhou, but nothing of his life can be established, and scholars disagree about whether he existed as one person or whether the book was assembled over generations. The attribution of the work to him is traditional.

The book is a collection of eighty-one short chapters on the Tao (the Way), on government, and on the conduct of the sage, written in a terse and largely rhymed Chinese. The text here is James Legge's translation, published in 1891 in the Sacred Books of the East (vol. 39) as the Tao Teh King. It is in prose, with Legge's occasional rhymed renderings of the verse passages; the words in parentheses are his own supplied additions.

Poems (81)

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81

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