William Martin - Walking the Tao: A new translation by William Martin

I have translated and interpreted the Tao Te Ching for thirty years and I never tire of exploring its fathomless depths. Recently I guided a group of students from several different countries through an intensive email exploration of this classic book. As part of that exploration titled Walking the Tao, I wrote a new translation especially for these fellow travelers. I wrote it from my current (2015) understanding and life situation and it emerged quickly and easily. I meant it simply as a touch point for this small group of students. However the feedback regarding this translation was so overwhelmingly positive that I have decided to incorporate it into a little ebook.

The fact that there are over one hundred English translations speaks to the impossibility of having a definitive, accurate, and once-and-for-all translation of this text. We dont know if the book is the work of one person or the collection of Taoist wisdom from many sources compiled by one editor at a later time. It really doesnt matter. The very ambiguity of authorship and origins works in harmony with the philosophy itself - the wisdom is intuitive and cannot be pinned down, controlled, and understood in the way our conditioned mind would like it to be.

The book was copied and recopied, edited and re-edited, modified and changed for hundreds of years before the copies we now use became available for translation. The manuscripts we have do not agree with each other completely. The complexity of Chinese characters adds to the difficulty. Each character represents many different ideas and meanings. The Chinese written language of the Tao does not have tenses, active or passive voice, singular or plural usage, case, person, or mood. Meaning has to be gained from context and the context of such an ancient book is often impossible to discern. This, in fact, is one of the blessings of the Tao Te Ching. As its traditional opening lines might say: The Tao that can be translated is not the Eternal Tao.

For this study we will use the name, Lao-Tzu - which can mean Old Youngster to carry our gratitude for all those throughout history who caused this work to be available to us today. Legend has it that Lao-tzu didnt want to write anything but was forced into it by a border guard. The constant warfare, social inequalities, and general lack of consciousness in China had left him feeling no alternative but to leave. When he reached the border, about to slip away into obscurity, he was asked by the border officer to write down his understandings of Taoism to leave as a legacy. He refused, saying, If I write it down, it wont be the Tao. Nevertheless, the guard would not let him pass until he wrote. Taking a brush and paper, Lao-tzu sat under the shade of a tree and, in one afternoon, wrote the short book of poetic wisdom that has become, 2500 years later, one of the most-translated, and well-beloved books in the history of the written word. Whatever the truth behind the legend, I am personally filled with gratitude both to Lao-tzu and to the nameless border guard whose stubbornness allowed the words to take a journey all the way from 600 BCE to the present day. It is in that sense of gratitude that I want us to undertake this walk together. We know the words we share will not be the Truth Itself, but we trust that they will point us in the right direction.

Bill Martin

Mount Shasta, CA, Summer 2016