I do not know which is the most faithful, but the one I enjoy the most is the translation by Stephen Mitchell. The Tao Te Ching consists of 81 passages, presented like poems. As with my interest in buddhism I am not about to become a follower, but the ideas, the ways of being advocated by the Tao, hold great interest for me and in many ways it is closer to both how I feel and how I would like to be than any other philosophy I have encountered. It is a strange philosophy and yet it seems to encapsulate much of what I have been thinking and feeling over the past several months since I decided I needed to slow down, to restrict my reading and take more time over things. The Tao is like a logical puzzle, yet it is neither logical nor a puzzle. I have, for a long time, been interested in buddhism, not to the extent that I could become a ‘follower’ but rather because there are ideas in buddhism which intrigue me, and the Tao has similar appeal but I was not quite ready for how wholly it would entrance me. I think I must have read something else which made reference to it and out of the thinnest thread of curiosity I decided to borrow it from the library. Outside of my ordinary reading I have been dipping into poetry and other such things and somehow I came across the Tao, I can’t really remember how it happened. This is not a regular review, more of a reflection.
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