Daode jing: A Contextual, Contemplative, and Annotated Bilingual Translation

by Louis Komjathy

A contextual, contemplative, and annotated bilingual Chinese-English translation of the Dàodé jīng 道德經 rooted in historical retrieval and contemplative hermeneutics.

The Lǎozǐ 老子 ( Lǎo-tzǔ ; Book of Venerable Masters), more often referred to with its honorific title of Dàodé jīng 道德經 ( Tào-té chīng ; Scripture on the Dao and Inner Power), is one of the most translated and most misunderstood Daoist classics. Although traditionally attributed to the legendary Lǎozǐ 老子 (Lǎo-tzǔ; “Master Lao”; trad. dat. 6th c. BCE) and thus presented as the Book of Master Lao , the work is actually a multivocal anthology consisting of historical and textual layers dating from the fourth to the second centuries BCE and containing teachings and practices associated with various anonymous elders of the inner cultivation lineages of classical Daoism. With this long-awaited annotated translation and ground-breaking interpretive study, one of our leading scholars of Daoism and translators of Daoist literature recovers the Dàodé jīng as a contemplative and mystical work, one in which inner cultivation and apophatic meditation form its core. In the process, this book returns the ancient classic to its rightful place as a key work of classical Daoism and as a foundational and central scripture of the Daoist tradition. Challenging and remedying received interpretive legacies and current trends of philosophical, popular, and spiritualist appropriation, Dàodé jī A Contextual, Contemplative, and Annotated Bilingual Translation focuses on the technical specifics of the work, including its unique language of Daoist cultivation and realization. Here is a translation that provides access to the classical Chinese Daoist source-text, with specific emphasis on its contextual and contemplative meaning. As an exercise in historical retrieval and contemplative hermeneutics, rooted in a Daoist scholar-practitioner approach, it helps readers reimagine both the Dàodé jīng and classical Daoism, and opens new vistas into some of the foundations of the Daoist tradition as a whole. A landmark in “ Lǎozǐ Studies” and one of the most authoritative and comprehensive studies to date, the present work has the potential to transfigure received opinion and inspire new engagements with a text both too well and too little known.

550 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2023

About the author

Louis Komjathy 康思奇 (Ph.D., Religious Studies; Boston University) is an independent scholar-educator and translator (www.louiskomjathy.org). He researches and has published extensively in Contemplative Studies, Daoist Studies, and Religious Studies, with specific interests in contemplative practice, embodiment, and mystical experience. He is founding Co-chair of the Daoist Studies Unit (2004-2010) and Contemplative Studies Unit (2010-2016) in the American Academy of Religion, and founding Co-director of the Daoist Foundation (www.daoistfoundation.org). In addition to nine books to date, he has contributed chapters to _Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies_ (2011), _Perceiving the Divine through the Human Body: Mystical Sensuality_ (2011), _The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions_ (2012), _The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion_ (2014), _Religion: A Next-Generation Handbook for Its Robust Study_ (2016), _Teaching Interreligious Encounters_ (2017), _Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion_ (2017), and _Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies_ (2020), among others. His current work explores cross-cultural and perennial questions related to aliveness, extraordinariness, flourishing, transmutation, and trans-temporality. He lives in semi-seclusion on the Northshore of Chicago, Illinois.