Tao Te Ching
, also commonly known as
Lao Tzu
, is perhaps the most important of Chinese classical texts, with an unparalleled influence on Chinese thought. This bilingual edition consists of two parts. The English text in Part One is a reprint of the earlier translation of the so-called
Wang Pi
text, first published by Penguin Books in 1963. Part Two is the fresh translation of a text which is a conflation of two manuscripts of the
, dating at the latest from the early Western Han and discovered at Ma Wang Tui in December 1973. The result is a text with a fuller use of particles, free from the scribal errors and editorial tampering of subsequent ages.