Page Text: Chuang Tzu
Check out Legge's translations of the Tao Teh Chingand the Chuang Tzu if you've never read them!! These are two of the best philosophy books ever written, if not the very best.
"My words are very easy to know, and very easy to practise; but there is no one in the world who is able to know and able to practise them".
NOTE 1: we have hyperlinked all of the footnotes of the text, including the General Introduction, the Tao Teh Ching, and the Chuang Tzu.
NOTE 2: In order to view the Chinese characters you have to have a Chinese language pack installed on your computer, and your operating sytem must support unicode.
One of the first major translations of the Tao Teh Ching and the Chuang Tzu in the West, part of the 'Great Books of East Series' (1879), and still in many ways the best, preceding as it did both the 20th century quasi-spirituality that has tainted most of the ensuing translations, and the entire 'Being' thing that we have been unable to avoid in this post Heidegger world (note for instance the use of the word 'existence' in this version, rather than the now ubiquitous 'being').
These originally came out in a two volume set, part of the 'Sacred Books of the East' series, this is still the best translation we know of either work. If you haven't ever read these books, you haven't ever read philosophy in any meaningful sense.
This Tao Teh Ching features the full notes found in the original; we hope to get the full unicode Chinese characters up soon, currently they are only up on chapters 1 and 6 of the Tao Teh Ching. If you only see empty boxes or large question marks, your browser or operating system may not support unicode. To get more information on display problems, please go to unicode.org , this link will take you to their display problem and resolution page.
We tried to make the text formatting as close as we could to the original style of printing and page layout used in the Dover editions of these books, which were themselves printed from the plates used to print the originals; the only difference is the hyperlinked footnotes, with return 'back' links that will take you back where you were in the text body.
This book has held up under the test of time in a way few other works can ever hope to do. Deeper than Heraclites, far more coherent than the Bible, far less dogmatic than the Buddhist Sutras, this is the cats meow of philosophy books, today or then.