Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi, Jerome P. Seaton

everyone
fears ought to be feared." The standard text is strange, obscure:
"What the people fear must be feared." Yet the next lines follow from
it as they don't from the Ma wang tui ; and after much
pondering I followed the standard text.
Chapter 23
    In the second verse the word shih , "loss," gives trouble to all the translators. Waley calls it "the reverse of the power" and
"inefficacy," and Waley's interpretations are
never to be ignored. All the same, I decided to take it not as the opposite of
the Way and the power, but as a kind of shadow-Way. Identify yourself with
loss, failure, the obscure, the unpossessible , and
you'll be at home even there.
Chapter 24
    My version of the first four lines of the second verse
doesn't follow any of the scholarly translations, and is quite unjustified, but
at least, unlike them, it makes sense without horrible verbal contortions.
Chapter 25
    In all the texts, the fourth verse reads:
    So they say: "The Way is great ,
heaven is great,
earth is great,
and the king is great.
Four greatnesses in the world ,
and the king is one of them. "
    Yet in the next verse, which is the same series in reverse
order, instead of "the king" it's "the people" or
"humanity." I think a Confucian copyist slipped the king in. The king
garbles the sense of the poem and goes against the spirit of the book. I
dethroned him.
    The last words of the chapter, tzu jan , which I
render "what is," bear many interpretations. Waley translates them as "the Self-So," glossing them as "the
unconditioned" or "what is so of itself"; Henricks ,
"what is so on its own"; Lau, "that which is naturally so";
Gibbs-Cheng, "Nature"; Feng -English,
"what is natural"; Lafargue , "things
as they are." I came out closest to Lafargue in
this case.
Chapter 26
    I follow the Ma wang tui text for the third
verse, which fits the theme much better than the non-sequitur standard text,
"Amid fine sights they sit calm and aloof." The syntax of the Ma wang tui also clarifies the last verse, relating it to the last
verse of chapter 13.
Chapter 27
    The first two lines of the third verse say that the not-good
are the t'zu :
"the capital" ( Carus ), or "the charge"
( Feng -English), or "the stock in trade" ( Waley ), or "the raw material" ( Henricks ) of the good. Lafargue has "the less excellent are material for the excellent," and
Gibbs-Cheng, "mediocre people have the potential to be good people."
The latter two interpretations seemed the most useful to me. And so I call
these makings, this raw material, "a student"—somebody learning to be
or know better.
    The last lines of the second and third verses are translated
in wildly various ways; my "hidden light" and "deep
mystery" are justified if, as I believe, Lao Tzu is signaling that his
apparently simple statements have complex implications and need thinking about.
Of course, this is true of everything in the book.
Chapter 28
    "The natural" and "natural wood" are the same word, p'u , which I talked about in the note to chapter 19. Given
the amount of cutting up and carving that goes on in the last verse (which
seems a kind of footnote to the first three) , we
really seem to be talking about wood.
    Chinese lends itself to puns, and this last verse is rife with
them. Waley says that ch'i ("useful things")
can mean "vessels" or "vassals," and chih can mean "carving"
or "governing." A great government wouldn't chop and hack at human
nature, trying to make leaders out of sow's ears. But the paradox of the last two
lines surely exceeds any single interpretation.
Chapter 29
    The phrase t'ien hsia occurs only in the first
verse, where I translate it "the world." I begin the second verse
with the literal translation of it, "under heaven." I wanted the phrase
in the poem as a reminder that the world of these extremes—of hot and cold,
weakness and strength, gain and loss—is the sacred object, the place under heaven.
Chapter 31
    I have omitted certain lines included by the translators who
are my sources