Laozi: A Fresh Look Based on Bronze Inscription Glyphs with Breathtaking Commentary by Yinxi

by Betsy Pearson

Welcome to the world! May 3, 2024

This is the culmination of Betsy’s 6 year exploration of her favorite book, the Dào Dé Jīng. Be forewarned that it contains a fanciful (and, yes, extremely heretical!) interpretation. But it also contains one of the most objective and useful research tools you’ll find for exploring this beautiful text.

For millennia, Laozi’s Way (Dào) and its Ethics (Dé) have guided endeavors as global as politics or physics and as personal as how to live a good life. But most versions of this famous text are written in or translated from a modern, standardized form of Mandarin Chinese.

Words matter. Like all poets, Laozi knew this.

And a picture is worth a thousand words—Laozi knew that too.

Since Old Chinese built words directly with pictures, each character carried that extra visual power to evoke experiences in the reader. That makes Laozi’s word choices extra important.

Over the centuries, Chinese characters have gone through many changes in structure and meaning. This new translation investigates the original images embedded in the pictorial scripts of Laozi’s time. Revisiting the word-pictures that Laozi most likely chose to hand-draw over 2,500 years ago gives us a more complete and nuanced immersion into his writing plus precious glimpses into the mostly-anonymous master’s world.

 This book has three parts:

•  The text’s main body is a new translation of the Dào Dé Jīng based on a strictly consistent transcription of the old glyphs associated with each character. Each character has one, and only one, translation everywhere it appears. Chapter-line-and-character numbering along with the Modern Chinese characters and Pinyin transcriptions, appear next to each of the 5,297 characters that comprise this most common version of the received text.

• Running alongside Laozi’s work, literally in the margins, is a fictional reimagining of Laozi’s story told from the perspective of the border guard Yinxi who is said to have requested and received the Dào Dé Jīng from Laozi as the sage left their country forever. What if Yinxi discovered Laozi’s autobiography “hidden in plain sight” inside the very images Laozi used to share his wisdom? Yinxi details for us the decoded characters’ shocking secret along with the subsequent hijinks, dangers, and enduring wisdom.

• Perhaps most importantly, the appendix holds a glossary listing all 811 characters alphabetically by their Pinyin name. There you will find each character’s Modern Chinese character, a reconstructed glyph image, a list of every spot where that character occurs in this book, and a count of how many times it occurs. We are especially delighted to offer this unique resource to our fellow Laozi devotees.

Insights into our translation process can be found at thedaooflaozi.com. We’re working on making that site an interactive one where you can view different translations for each character, add your own, and assemble your own customized interpretation of the Dào Dé Jīng. We want Laozi to be evermore available for exploration and experience by all of us at a deep level because his great wisdom, generosity, genius, and humor have meant the world to so many generations and quite definitely to us.

One warning: the font is pretty tiny in this book. If you want just the translation, without the fictional component, this is a better bet. See the decision matrix below to decide which book(s!) are best for you!