Eighty-one verses on the art of not forcing

The Tao Te Ching is attributed to Lao Tzu and is thought to have taken its current form around the fourth or fifth century BC, though scholars continue to debate both authorship and dating. It consists of eighty-one short chapters — some only a few lines — that circle the same ideas from different angles: the nature of the Tao (the Way), the virtue of yielding, the power of emptiness, the limits of force.

The central concept is wu wei, often translated as 'non-action' or 'effortless action'. Lao Tzu is not counselling passivity. He is pointing to the difference between effort that flows with the nature of things and effort that fights against it. Water, he observes, is among the softest substances in the world, yet it carves canyons. The Tao Te Ching returns to this image repeatedly: yielding overcomes resisting.

A second persistent theme is the danger of naming and categorising too firmly. Once you call something beautiful, the concept of ugliness has been created; once you call an action good, its opposite follows. Lao Tzu is suspicious of rigid distinctions and the certainty that accompanies them — an unusual position for a philosophical text, which tends to depend on precisely that kind of certainty.

The book has been translated more times than almost any other text in history, which is both a tribute to its reach and a warning about reading it: every translation is an interpretation, and the gap between versions can be substantial. The ideas are best approached as provocations rather than instructions.