Reviews and Comments

I enjoy Alan Watts' expositions of Eastern philosophy and mysticism, and his final novel, Tao: The Watercourse Way, is no exception. However, it's a posthumously released book, which was not finished in Watts' life. The introduction promises two chapters on the importance of Taoism to the modern world, which would probably have improved my opinion of the book a lot, but alas, Watts died before he could write them. (As an aside - between the posthumous nature of the book, the introduction and notes by a second author, and the strange formatting that included Chinese calligraphy in face, I was getting House of Leaves flashbacks from this whole thing.)

All that aside, this book does a decent job of introducing Taoist ideas to a Western audience, and has flashes of intellectual brilliance that make the read eminently worth it, but it should not be relied on to understand the history and practice of Taoism in China.

Not a translation - rather, this is Le Guin’s personal rendition of the book, based on a verbatim translation by Paul Carus, commentaries on various other translations, and some help from J. P. Seaton, a professor of the Chinese language. As one might expect from a translation by an English novelist, Le Guin does a good job of keeping the text’s poetic form and even makes it more accessible in some ways. Unlike Stephen Mitchell, Le Guin never confabulates large parts of the text to make it more poetical, but sometimes she does stretch the interpretation beyond that which might be reasonable. She also deletes several passages that she considers to conflict with the meaning of the text. Her commentary is just as fun to read as the translation itself. I appreciate that where most translators gender the sage or Master as “he”, or switching between “she” and “he” as Mitchell did, Le Guin eschews gendered pronouns entirely. Those seeking a literal reading, or looking for mystical truth, may be disappointed, but this remains one of the easiest versions of the Tao Te Ching to recommend.

Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching is by far the most approachable version I’ve read, but it comes at the cost of a highly, often deliberately Westernized text, far removed from the context of the original. Several chapters reference modern technology and science in lieu of Laozi’s metaphors, which are sometimes based on ancient Chinese ways of living - and sometimes this works, but sometimes it significantly weakens the text, as in chapter 49, where “horses hauling manure” is replaced with “factories making tractors and trucks” - which in my view is pointless and conflicts with the Daodejing’s naturalistic theme. Mitchell also “improvises” entirely new stanzas where he finds the source text to be unusually “narrow-minded”, which again makes the text more practical in some ways, but takes it further from anything that could reasonably be interpreted from the original Chinese.

(If you'd like a better translation of the Tao Te Ching, I suggest Red Pine's 2009 revised translation, which comes with several commentaries, or John C. H. Wu's pocket edition.)