From the author

Hello and welcome to the site!

When I first read the Tao Te Ching, more than fifteen years ago, I couldn’t understand a word of it.  In fact it was probably the strangest thing I had ever read at that time, and were I to view it objectively, it probably still would be.  It was mysterious, enigmatic and totally baffling.  And yet I could not just dismiss it.  How could I? This is one of the oldest texts known to mankind, and the experts tell us that it is as widely read today as it ever has been.  Although I couldn’t see it for myself, I believed that there must be something extremely special contained in these pages and I somehow felt it my duty to understand it better.

Of course, there was a reason why I was even turning to books like the Tao Te Ching, and it was because I was already a young person looking for truths.  I was studying all the major religions, and reading widely in both the sciences and philosophy.  Over the course of time I started to discern a central message that seemed to form the backbone of all the world religions, as well as any philosophy worthy of that name. 

The message is that the truth about reality is not quite the way we normally take it.  The normal perception we have is of a world existing in time and space, populated by individual humans, who occupy a portion of the earth for a certain duration.  But the great religious and philosophical traditions tell us that this is nothing more than a one-sided perspective, which, if assumed to contain the whole truth leads us into grievous error.  The truth is, there is a portion of our consciousness that is able to see that reality is infinite and eternal and quite beyond the vicissitudes of life in time and space.  To awaken to this truth, the sages say, is to discover that our anxious preoccupation with our individual survival and well-being is quite unnecessary. The peace and joy that this realisation brings is, they tell us, not only the crowning achievement of human consciousness but the goal towards which we have always been unconsciously striving.

The Tao Te Ching is one of the key texts for the religious Taoists, and provides a practical and ethical foundation for that Chinese religion.  In this commentary I shall treat the Tao Te Ching as an expression of that same wisdom that we might find in such texts as the Bhagavad Gita, The Diamond Sutra or the Fourth Gospel of the New Testament.  I am not interested in the text as a historical artefact, nor as a piece of Chinese poetry, but as a text that is of full relevance to the modern truth seeker of any religious, intellectual or cultural affiliation.

So start by selecting a chapter here, and I'd love to hear your comments!

Nick Jordan
 31st March 2014

NB - All chapters follow the translation by John C.H. Wu (1961), unless stated otherwise.