Tao Te King, or the Tao and its Characteristics

By Lao Zi

Translated by James Legge

Narrated by Dean Delp

Lao Zi is believed to have been born in 604, during the Chou Dynasty. Little is known of his life and there is some speculation that he was mythical.

Lao Zi seems to have been the inheritor rather than the creator of the Taoist philosophy. It is a peculiarity of the Tao Te King that all the historical references are very vague, and in all its chapters not a single proper name can be found. Yet there are some references to the words of earlier sages and to "sentence-makers" whose maxims Lao Zi introduces to illustrate his own sentiments.

Lao Zi's view of antiquity appears to have that of a happy society in which the highest ideas of the Tao were realized. He proposes that men existed at first in a condition of happy innocence which was ruined when their view of the Tao was corrupted by the human proclivity for manipulation and complex systems.