This is my evolving hacker-oriented version of the Dao De Jing (literally "way power classic").
Disclaimer: I don't actually know any Chinese. I'm working from Jonathan Star's Verbatim Translation, an amazingly helpful spreadsheet in book form giving character-by-character glosses for each of the 5000-odd characters of the Dao De Jing. I'm also using the online Chinese text with clickable characters at zhongwen.com.
Not much is known for sure about the Dao De Jing, except that it's Chinese, it's very old, and people have loved it for twenty-five hundred years, as Ursula K. LeGuin says in her version, which I dearly love.
But I will say this much. The Dao De Jing can be given philosophical interpretations, political interpretations, religious interpretations. In some translations the original sinks under the weight of them. But it has survived and is read today because it is, at bottom, immortal poetry, as beautiful and meaningful as any that humanity has ever known.
Here are the 81 chapters (or the ones I've written so far) in the usual order. Book One ("The Way") comprises chapters 1-37; Book Two ("Its Power") comprises chapters 38-81.
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
Other resources:
Here's a tanka I wrote belonging to the same tradition:
Newbies always ask: "Elements or attributes? "Which will serve me best?" Those who know roar like lions; Wise hackers smile like tigers.And here's a nice three-liner salvaged from an email by Len Bullard:
Raised floors hide the chaos. Facades hide the boilerplate. A good designer enables upgrades.
Comments and suggestions are solicited; write to cowan@ccil.org.