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Bible Geek Bill's avatar

I picked up a copy of Li-Young Lee's translation, but haven't read much of it yet. Near the end of "chapter 4", it says, "The first cause, it seems the progenitor of God." (page 9). Is "God" accurate? I only took a semester of Mandarin back in Fall-2013. This edition has the Chinese on the left page with the English on the right. In the introduction it has the Perennialist bullshit about how all religions, East and West, are the same (p.xiii). That's something that turned me off of most English translations of the Bhagavad Gita. In the translators notes it says,

"We may never truly know who authored Dae De Jing, although it seems strange to us that Dao De Jing would have been attributed to Laozi is the book were not written by him, dictated by him, or based on his teachings."

The last option is definitely not the same as the first two: Hebrews is def. Pauline but no credible scholar thinks Paul wrote it, or dictated it. The translators further say "we have been able to comprehend it as a unified whole." However, the only way to truly rule out any redactors of any ancient text is to compare MSS, and I'm assuming that is a lot harder to do with the Dao De Jing than with the Bible.....

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Bible Geek Bill's avatar

I seriously recommend S.Mitchell's translation as well as an English commentary, and maybe some academic articles on it. Maybe visit a Daoist temple in China? Don't give up on it after just one read. I would also love to see you review Manu Smriti (but don't use Wendy Doniger's translation, she's a bit antique).

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