I love this type of honest commentary from Ursula, and it’s prevalent throughout the Chapter Notes as well as the Footnotes at the bottom of most pages which are just phenomenal, short and sharp insights into the text, nearly as sagacious as the passages of the Tao themselves. Oddly enough, the author's commentary may have been even better as he digs in and takes the ancient wisdom and paints in a language for the modern era. Given the least semblance of control, Chuang-tzu offers a whole world of irreverence and subversion. Mitchell pointed me to the doorway through which I've found whatever peace and spirituality I now have. I realize (again and again) when I read books of this nature, there is always further to go when it comes to being at peace; like all things, it comes with mental, spiritual and physical health.

Tao Te Ching – Stephen Mitchell

The most widely translated book in world literature after the Bible, Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living. Today I will break my habit of abstaining from rendering a measurable verdict on books considered sacred to say that this one is simply not at all worth reading. I learned of Taoism in a world history class in high school, and when my friends took their Philosophy 101 course at the local university this was the text they worked with.

A gentleman or lady needed to be at least minimally skilled in many arts, because that was considered the fittest way of appreciating the good things in life and honoring the goodness itself.

Stephen Mitchell’s Version of the Tao Te Ching: A Spiritual

Historians variously contend that Laozi is a synthesis of multiple historical figures, that he is a mythical figure, or that he actually lived in the 5th-4th century BCE, concurrent with the Hundred Schools of Thought and Warring States Period.I can't comment as someone who has read numerous iterations of the Dao de Jing (or Tao Te Ching as most older books in English refer to it) or of the classics attributed to Zhuangzi. That any scholar would think that ancient Chinese philosophy could easily fit these convenient contemporary cultural touchstones in only a few sentences is baffling, and offensive. She finds deep in her own experience the central truths of the art of living, which are paradoxical only on the surface: that the more truly solitary we are, the more compassionate we can be; the more we let go of what we love, the more present our love becomes; the clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good. That is the sum of this book and learning to embrace that will free ones mind from the narrow limits of a 2 dimensional world where truth and reality has to be forced into "either, or". This translation is not word-for-word, but feels like an inspired effort to bring Lao Tsu's intentions to the western awareness.