The Sayings Of Lao Tzu Paperback – August 29, 2013

My interest was awakened in the wisdom of Lao Tzu when learning that his words are an important cornerstone in the 12 step program that as saved my son's life. His words are words to live by. Thank you for making this book available. 😊

For a taste of Tao this book of selected sayings across several fields is an excellent source. Very easy to follow.

Perfect

Great little booklet

For starters, there was no person, Lao Tzu, no one knows how "his" name was spelled, nor can the experts agree on the correct title of "his" work. Is it Tao te Ching? Tao teh King? No one knows.The Tao te Ching is a collection of aphorisms, little bits of wisdom collected by, arguably, many writers. The most popular and enduring translation is by Legge, though, truth be told, after 40 or so years of study, there is still a lot in his version that I just don't get.And while I'm a serious student of Taoism, Giles is the book I recommend to my non-Taoist friends. Not that it's a shallow bit of fluff. It isn't. Some of Giles' translation is as obscure as it gets, but he's taken the time to group the material into categories. So there's a cohesiveness to the work. Unlike the original which jumps all over the place, a further indication of its many authors.Finally, while his translation is not perfectly accurate in an academic sense, it retains a certain mystical quality, almost poetic, that direct translations often lose. Compared to Legge, reading Giles' Tao a pleasure not a chore.Five stars for sure!

This translation stands far above others in the way that it puts the jigsaw together. Traditional translations represent fragmented ideas scattered around, whereas Giles not only demonstrates a thorough appreciation of the content*, he takes time to piece the work together and you can see that he is absolutely right to. On reading this style of translation (and one where Giles absolutely justifies in his introduction), the reader acquires such an understanding of the real work. This is a masterpiece!*Chapter 2 - Giles is one of the very few translators that truly understand the concept of this chapter; it's the notion of comparative views. To have good, you need to have evil; to have darkness you also need to see the light; and to have yin, you must have yang. Each sets up its own opposite. It's the one (Tai Chi) that gives birth to the duality (Yin Yang). Richard Wilhelm, Leon Wieger, James Legge, Walter Gorn Old and Lionel Giles all agree.

The content of the book is excellent and the wisdom of Lao Tzu is segmented by theme which helps if you want to find a quote for a particular purpose. I guess this is a reasonable approach to take.My only disappointment was the discovery that the book was a short pamphlet of just 40+ pages of small font text, when I had assumed it would be a more standard layout with 100+ pages. I should have looked at the product specification.