Dao De Jing ― The Book of the Way

"Moss Roberts provides a scholarly reading of the Dao De Jing so generous, so vivid, you can feel valley mist on your face and smell the straw dogs. Here are the furious warlords, craggy landscapes teeming with the ten thousand creatures of Taoist philosophy; China's careful arts of government and war; science, yoga, alchemy, erotics; old bamboo texts hidden in caves for millennia. This book is for anyone who has met Laozi's 'dark' mind and wants a closer look."--Andrew Schelling, author of The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems from Old Indiaand Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry

"This is a work of great creativity and impressive scholarship. He has achieved a translation that replicates, as closely as possible, the literary merit of the original, its rhythms and its rhymes. He repeatedly brings to our attention fresh insights and interpretations that deserve careful consideration. Roberts not only makes use of the Mawangdui manuscripts but, even more importantly, the recent Guodian finds, the latter opening a whole new page in Laozi Studies."--Stephen Durrant, Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Oregon and author of The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writing of Sima Qian

"Moss Roberts' commentary is provocative and compelling. The scholarship informing the work is solid, but like the Dao De Jing itself, the scholarship is not flaunted, but rather subservient to the messages of the text itself." --Hoyt Tillman, Professor of History, Arizona State University.

"This new translation of the Dao De Jing is an exceptional literary effort, capable of reinvigorating the English version of the text both as literature and as philosophy, while also bringing new scholarly insight to the meaning of the work. Professor Roberts' combination of linguistic expertise and poetic sensitivity and skill is rare and special, and should win this translation a large and appreciative audience."--John Major, author of Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought, China Chic: East Meets West , and co-editor of World Poetry

"Reading Professor Moss Roberts's new translation of Dao De Jing gives one a sense of pleasure and surprise. He is a diligent and rigorous scholar, while at the same time possessing a poetic acuity to deeply penetrate the words and read between the lines. . .. His superior translation has deepened my own comprehension of this famous Chinese classic."--Fang Ping, former editor-in-chief, Shanghai Literary Translations Press

Moss Roberts is Professor of Chinese at New York University. He has translated the classic novelThree Kingdoms, published by University of California Press in both unabridged (California, 1991, 2000, copublished with Foreign Languages Press) and abridged (California, 1999) editions. He is also the editor and translator ofChinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (1979).