Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching

An English Version by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 978-1-59030-744-1

Read it at nrrb.github.io/tao-te-ching.

What is here

Ursula K. Le Guin's English version of the Tao Te Ching, all eighty-one chapters, set in Markdown and built into a small static website. Her notes are kept with the chapters they belong to.

She called it a rendition, not a translation. She did not read Chinese. She worked from Paul Carus's 1898 edition, which printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation.

The texts

Ursula K Le Guin.md is the whole of it: eighty-one chapters and her notes. Everything else in the book is made from this one file.

Jane English and Gia-fu Feng.md is a second English version, from 1972, transcribed as far as chapter 3. It is kept for comparison and is not built into the site.

The chapters

Each chapter has a folder named for its number and its title, holding one file:

1_taoing/README.md
2_soul_food/README.md
...
81_telling_it_true/README.md

The folders are made, not written. split_tao_te_ching_md.py reads Ursula K Le Guin.md, splits it on the chapter headings, writes a folder for each chapter, and writes SUMMARY.md, the table of contents the site is built from.

So a fix to the words belongs in Ursula K Le Guin.md, followed by:

python3 split_tao_te_ching_md.py

Anything typed straight into a chapter folder is lost the next time that runs.

Building the site

The site is built with HonKit, which reads book.json, SUMMARY.md, and styles/website.css.

npm install
npm run build

The build writes to docs/. GitHub Pages serves docs/ from master, so the built site is committed alongside the source, and a change to the text is not published until the site is built again and the result committed.

To read it locally instead, with live reloading:

npm run serve

That one builds to _book/, which git ignores.

On the text

Le Guin's version is under copyright, Shambhala Publications, 1997. What is here is a personal copy, kept for reading and for working on the Markdown. It is not a license to republish.