Cecil Kleakins

My graduate thesis involved collecting English translations of the Tao Te Ching and using the various translations to concoct narratives. In those pre-Google days, I was translating the original text character by character using an old weighty character dictionary. Now, you can literally read the entire 500 word classic in the original classical Chinese with every character linked to an amazing online Chinese-English Dictionary. Translations are also provided in English, French, and German for reference.

For those who prefer their information served on dried pulp with an ink glazing, Jonathan Star has compiled a printed reference of essentially the same information in his excellent “Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition”.

Other sites have more comparative studies of the English translations, such as this page with 100 translations of Chapter 1.

For those who haven’t read it, a few free online translations are available, plus the ancient but ubiquitous Legge translation at Project Gutenberg.

For the curious, here’s a piece I wrote in 1994 in conjunction with my thesis: Lao Tzu’s Tomb

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