Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A New Translation, translated by William Scott Wilson (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2012) (Chapter 48: "If you take up studying, you increase day by day. / If you take up the Way, you decrease day by day. / You decrease and then decrease again. / In this way, you reach the point of nonfabrication: Nothing is fabricated, but there is nothing left undone. // Taking up the affairs of the world / Is always done without meddling. / If there is meddling, / It will not be sufficient to accomplish the job." Id. at 85. Chapter 24: "If you are up on tiptoes, you will not stand with confidence. / If you move along straddling the road, you will be unable to put one foot in front of the other. / If you make yourself seen, you will not be illustrious. / If you consider yourself right, you will not be taken as a model. / If you denigrate others, you will get no credit. / If you consider yourself the grip of a spear, you will never become a staff of support. // Those who abide in the Way / Call such things 'leftover food' or 'warts on your behavior.' / Thus, those who possess the Way will be found elsewhere." Id. at 41.).
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (Updated Translation), translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English with Toinette Lippe, with a Revised Introduction and Notes by Jacob Needleman (New York: Vintage Books, 2012) (Chapter Forty-Eight: "In the pursuit of learning, something is acquired everyday. / In the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is relinquished. // Less and less is done / Until non-action is achieved. / When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. // The world is governed by letting things take their course. / It cannot be governed through interference." Id. at 51. From Needleman's Introduction: "To be a warrior in the outer life, one must be a warrior in the inner life. To govern in the outer life, one must govern in the inner life. To be wise in the outer life, one must be wise in the inner life." "Thus, when the Tao Te Ching cautions the ruler against imposing concepts of good and evil onto the people, it is also cautioning us not to cut ourselves off from the vital forces within through attachment to mental or emotional judging of ourselves. To read anything in the Tao Te Ching as merely advice for the outer life is to distort it, that is, to pack it into our own store of illusions. But to apply it simultaneously to the outer life and to our own inner life is to embark in a search that will be supported, we are told, by the strongest and greatest energies in the universe." Id. at xl-xli.).
Lao Tzu, The Teachings of Lao-Tzu: The Tao Te Ching, translated by Paul Carus (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 1913, 2000) (Chapter 48. "FORGETTING KNOWLEDGE. They who seek learnedness will daily increase. / They who seek Reason will daily diminish. / They will diminish and continue to diminish until they arrive at non-assertion. // With non-assertion there is nothing that they cannot achieve. / When they take the empire, it is always because they use no diplomacy. / They who use diplomacy are not fit to take the empire." Id. at 99. Chapter 24. "TROUBLE FROM INDULGENCE. 'One on tiptoes is not steady; / One astride makes no advance. / Self-displayers are not enlightened, / Self-asserters lack distinction, / Self-approvers have no merit, / And self-seeker stunt their lives.' // Before Reason this is life surfeit of food: or a wart on the body with which people are apt to be disgusted. // Therefore the sage will not indulge in it." Id. at 66.).
Lao Tzu, The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te ching), translated, with introductory essays, comments, and notes by Wing-Tsit Chan (New York: Macmillian/Library of Liberal Arts. 1963, 1985) (Chapter 48: "The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. / The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. / It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. / No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone. / An empire is often brought to order by having no activity. / If one (likes to) undertake activity, he is not qualified to govern the empire." Id. at 184. Chapter 24: "He who stands on tiptoe is not steady. / He who strides forward does not go. / He who shows himself is not luminous. / He who justifies himself is not prominent. / He who boasts of himself is not given credit. / He who brags does not endure for long. // From the point of view of Tao, these are like remnants of food and tumors of action, / Which all creatures detest. / Therefore those who posses Tao turn away from them." Id. at 143. "No one can understand China or be an intelligent citizen of the world without some knowledge of the Lao Tzu, also called the Tao-te ching (The Classic of the Way and Its Virtue), for it has modified Chinese life and thought throughout history and has become an integral part of world literature." Id. at v.).
Lao Tzu, The Way of Life: According to Lao Tzu, translated by Witter Bynner (A Perigee Book, 1994) (Chapter 48. "A Man anxious for knowledge adds more to himself every minute; / A man acquiring life loses himself in it, / Has less and less to bear in mind, / Less and less to do, / Because life, he finds, is well inclined, / Including himself too. / Often a man sways the world like a wind / But not by deed; / And if there appears to you to be need / Of motion to sway it, it has left you behind." Id. at 75. Chapter 24. "Standing tiptoe a man loses balance, / Walking astride he has no pace, / Kindling himself he fails to light, / Acquitting himself he does so alone. / Pride has never brought a man greatness / But, according to the way of life, / Brings the ills that make him unfit, / Make him unclean in the eyes of his neighbors, / And a sane man will have none of them." Id. at 52.).
Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place In Chinese Thought (New York: Grove Press, 1958) ("I have noticed that general works about the history of Man either ignore China altogether or relegate this huge section of mankind to a couple of paragraphs. One of my aims in this book is to supply the general anthropologist with at any rate an impetus towards including China in his survey. This does not however mean that the book is addressed to a small class of specialists; for all intelligent people, that is to say, all people who want to understand what is going on in the world around them, are 'general anthropologists', in the sense that they are bent of finding out how mankind came to be what it is to-day. For hundreds of millennia Man was what we call 'primitive'; he has attempted to be civilized only (as regards Europe) in the last few centuries. During an overwhelmingly great proportion of his history he has sacrificed, been engrossed in omens, attempted to control the wind and the rain by magic. We who do none of these things can hardly be said to represent normal man, but rather a very specialized and perhaps very unstable branch-development. In each of us, under the thinnest possible veneer of homo industrialis, lie endless strata of barbarity. Any attempt to deal with ourselves or others on the supposition that what shows on the surface represents more than the mere topmast of modern man, is doomed to failure." Id. at 11. "The first great principle of Taoism is the relativity of all attributes. Nothing is in itself either long or short. If we call a thing long, we merely mean longer than something else that we take as a standard. What we take as our standard depends upon what we are used to, upon the general scale of size to which we belong. The fact that we endow our standard with absoluteness and objectivity, that we say 'No one could regard this as anything but long' is merely due to lack of imagination." Id. at 51-52. "Why did confidence in the absoluteness of any of the qualities that we attribute to things outside ourselves break down in China towards the end of the 4th century? Owing, I think, to rapidly increasing knowledge of what went on in the world outside of China. Quite apart from the changes in material culture (use of iron, knowledge of asbestos, use of cavalry in war and adoption of nonChinese dress in connection with it, familiarity with new forms of disposal of the dead) which these contacts brought, the Chinese were beginning to regard the world they knew merely as a gain int eh Great Barn." "There was n end to the wonders that this great storehouse might produce...." Id. at 52-53. Chapter LXXI: "'To know when one does not know is best. / To think one knows when one does not know is a dire disease. / Only he who recognized this disease as a disease / Can cure himself of he disease.' / The Sage's way of curing disease / Also consists in making people recognize their diseases as diseases and thus ceasing to be diseased." Id. at 231.).
Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way, Rev'd Ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, 1965).
