I made a Dao De Jing translation page
Reading the Dao at random
Last month, I coded a webpage which presents three different translations of the Tao Te Ching side-by-side. You can access it here.
This is just a framed interface to the odd and excellent Hungarian website Terebess which lists dozens of English translations of the Tao. The page I made opens a random chapter of the Dao De Jing, in three different translations.
It looks like this:
You can also jump to a new random verse, type in a verse number you want to read, select from different translations using the three dropdown menus, or reset back to the three default translations (Derek Lin, Stephen Mitchell, and Feng & English).
You can also add a verse number to the URL, for example ?v=3, to access the third chapter.
Here are some similar tools other people have made that you might also like to try:
Tao Te Ching in Side By Side Viewer
If you missed my post in August on Daoism, you can read it here:
Decades of Dao
Daoism is the philosophy with which I find myself most closely aligned, and which I find closest to my heart. What a shame, then, that its most famous line, from the opening of the Dao De Jing, definitively asserts that the Dao cannot be spoken!
Each day, I read a random verse of the Dao De Jing in six different paper translations, but when I’m travelling I use this tool so I can easily compare a few. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
Best,
Bryan