Tao Te Ching

Attributed to Laozi, this work of Chinese wisdom gathers eighty-one short chapters, somewhere between maxim and poem. It turns on the Tao, the way that can be neither named nor grasped, and on the virtue that follows for those who keep to it. It praises water, emptiness and yielding, and a way of governing by non-action. The text explores restraint, withdrawal and the reversal of ordinary values. Laozi offers less a doctrine than an art of holding back, given here in James Legge's English translation of 1891.