The Dao De Jing (also called the Tao Te Ching) was written more than 2,500-years ago and is considered one of the most important books in world literature. Coming in at only 5,000 Chinese characters, its timeless wisdom has inspired millions of people around the world and serves as one of the cornerstones of the Taoist religion. It has been translated into English many, many times, but this new work by the best-selling writing team of Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang is much than a translation. The authors have taken the unusual step of not just giving you the English translation, but also showing, word by word, how one gets from the original Chinese characters to the English version. Each of the 81 short chapters contains a beautiful English translation, followed by a word-by-word and line-by-line breakdown of the chapter, showing the original Chinese, the pinyin (phonetic spelling in English characters), a word-for-word literal translation into English, and occasional helpful notes to help the reader better understand the translation. The result is a book that can be read casually, or studied carefully, or anything in between.
