Tao Te Ching: The Book of Meaning and Life

"Tao Te Ching," also commonly known as "Lao Tzu," is perhaps the most important of Chinese classical texts, with an unparalleled influence on Chinese thought. This bilingual edition consists of two parts. The English text in Part One is a reprint of the earlier translation of the so-called "Wang Pi" text, first published by Penguin Books in 1963. Part Two is the fresh translation of a text which is a conflation of two manuscripts of the "Lao Tzu," dating at the latest from the early Western Han and discovered at Ma Wang Tui in December 1973. The result is a text with a fuller use of particles, free from the scribal errors and editorial tampering of subsequent ages.