The Tao Te Ching (道德经, Dao De Jing), also known as the Laozi after its author, is the foundational text of Taoism. It is one of the most translated books in world literature — with more than 250 translations into Western languages, second only to the Bible — and one of the oldest works of philosophy still read today.
The title is usually rendered "The Classic of the Way and Virtue": Tao (道) is the Way — the underlying order and source of everything; Te (德) is virtue or integrity — how the Way expresses itself in a person; Ching (经) means "classic" or "scripture."
The book contains 81 short chapters — roughly 5,000 Chinese characters — written in compressed, poetic, deliberately paradoxical verse. It is traditionally divided into two parts: the Tao Ching (chapters 1–37), on the Way itself, and the Te Ching (chapters 38–81), on virtue in action. Some chapters are three sentences long; the whole book can be read in a few hours, but readers return to it for a lifetime.
Its central ideas include:
The Tao — the nameless source of all things, older than heaven and earth.
Wu wei (无为) — "effortless action": achieving by aligning with the natural flow instead of forcing. See our guide to wu wei.
Water and humility — the soft and low overcome the hard and high.
Contentment — knowing when enough is enough.
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
— Chapter 1
Tradition attributes the text to Laozi (老子), an older contemporary of Confucius said to have been the archivist of the Zhou court. The oldest surviving fragments — the Guodian Chu Slips — date to the late 4th century BCE, and the earliest complete manuscripts, the Mawangdui silk texts, to the early 2nd century BCE. Scholars debate whether "Laozi" was one man or a school of thought; the text itself has outlived the question. Read the fuller story of Laotzu.
Do not start at page one and march through. Three chapters give you the whole book in miniature: Chapter 1 (the Tao that cannot be named), Chapter 8 (water as the highest good), and Chapter 33 (knowing yourself). Then open a chapter at random and let it find you — that is how the book has been read for two and a half millennia.
Because its subject has not changed: how a human being lives well in a world they do not control. Its advice — act without forcing, lead without dominating, know when to stop — maps directly onto modern life, from leadership to burnout to politics. For the book's most-quoted lines with plain-English explanations, see the best Lao Tzu quotes, explained.