Lao-Tse's Tao Te Qing: Small Book, Big Influence.

Tao Te Qing by Lao-Tse is a small, unassuming book that has influenced the culture of a huge nation for millennia. Brush up on your Eastern philosophy by reading the whole thing in mere minutes!

Lao-Tse (or Lao-Tsu, or Laozi, or….) was an ancient Chinese philosopher whose work forms the basis of Taoism. Lao-Tse is an honorific which means ‘old master’, and he lived (probably) in the 6th Century BC, which would make him an approximate contemporary of the Buddha and Confucius.

Lao’s main and most important work is the Tao Te Qing (or Daodejing), The Way of the Tao. In it, he outlines his philosophy of the importance of knowing when to act. To Lao, inaction and passivity are as important as action and activity, and a wise man is one who knows to choose between doing and not doing, leading and following, expressing an opinion and withholding it.

This is fondness for ‘letting go’ is sharply expressed where Lao says that a good ruler is feared, a better one is loved, but the best ruler of all is one who the people can forget about. Lao was an adviser to royalty and concerned himself with matters of state as much as those of personal lives, and might be construed to be the world’s first libertarian. Of course, considering the absolute (and divine, to boot) monarchies of Lao’s time, ‘libertarian’ might simply have meant a 25% tax instead of a 90% one.

For a book that has had so much influence on one of the most ancient and important cultures of the world, theTao Te Qing is surprisingly small and compact. The entire book fits in eighty-one stanzas, a fitting form for a text that preaches humility, limits, and moderation in all things.

An English translation of the Tao Te Qing by Gia Fu Feng may be found here.