Lining the walls of office hallways, meetings rooms, and yoga studios run by woke-brahs who changed their names to Raven Chakra or Sky Eagle or Journey Prana, the Tao Te Ching has found its modern niche in picture-framed inspirational posters for the boomer/post-boomer "find myself" generations.  Sure, maybe the postmodern uprising flooding our streets intent on tearing down, both literally and figuratively, everything Americans hold sacred will spare not central and east Asian imports.  But, enough time has passed since the 50s and 60s and these venerated texts and practices have solidly entered into the American zeitgeist - for the time being. 
 
Reprinted and overdone to the point of campy or phony for some, the Tao Te Ching is a perennial favorite for others servicing as an endless well of timeless wisdom that can realign intentions and refocus thoughts.  Indeed, the nature of the Tao Te Ching is not unlike another text I reviewed recently, The Upanishads, which offers similar remedies.  Both of these texts share not only similar ideas and themes, but possibly even common roots, (including the Vedas).  And both texts take a very non-western approach to knowledge.  Whereas our current scientific approach to knowledge discovery has its roots in Greek-Roman rational discourse and the Socratic Method, and much later with the object-subject scientific method coming out of the Renaissance, the Tao Te Ching dictates fundamental "truths" about reality from personal introspection.  Who this person was, who came up with these "truths", is subject to debate.  Lao Tzu, or Laozi, is credited by some with producing the text, although there is conflicting evidence, and some scholars believe it was written by many different people as a compilation.
 
The copy I read was a more recent version by Ursula K. Le Guin.  If her name looks familiar, it's because she's a famous science fiction novelist, known especially for her works like The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Earthsea.  Le Guin was very prolific, of course, and her literary interest went far beyond science fiction.  She had a deep interest in classic works.  In the Introduction to her translation of the Tao Te Ching she comments on the text, "It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out."  What of this mystery have so many found value, even today, thousands of years after it was written?
 
Certainly some of the mystery comes by way of paradox, as seen in a section of "On and Off", "So they say:  The Way's brightness looks like darkness; advancing on the Way feels like retreating; the plain Way seems hard going.  The height of power seems a valley; the amplest power seems not enough; the firmest power seems feeble.  Perfect whiteness looks dirty.  The pure and and simple looks chaotic."
 
Or again in "Telling it True", where there is a mix of both paradox and parallel thought, "True words aren't charming, charming words aren't true.  Good people aren't contentious, contentious people aren't good.  People who know aren't learned, learned people don't know.  
 
"Wise souls don't hoard; the more they do for others the more they have, the more they give the richer they are.  The Way of heaven profits without destroying.  Doing without outdoing is the Way of the wise."  
 
At the least, we can ponder these passages and wonder what they hell they were all smoking back then.  "Bro, forward is backward and backward is forward.  The sky is the ocean and the ocean is the sky.  God, I'm high as fuck."  We can think deeper about these passages too.  When I do this with my peanut brain, some of the simple, humble messages in these passages can get me and others to stop, and consider for a moment what their actions and thoughts are intended for.  Without patience and the skill of observation, simply seeing the world for what it is, becomes a monumental task.  The constant flood of information, online brainwashing, advertisements on TV, on billboards, on our phones, all distract our attention away from seeing reality as it is. 
 
I think we can all use a reminder, that the world is both much more simple than we believe, and not at all as it seems.  This is where the Tao Te Ching can be useful for us now.     
    
Summary:  Whether on a coffee table for a casual read, or part of a deeper program of self-discovery, the Tao Te Ching acutely breaks reality down into thoughtful prose.     
 
Rating:  4.5

-E.B.
 2020-10-27