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11:26pm April 13, 2015

“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.” -Ursula K. LeGuin, on the Tao Te Ching

I discovered the Tao Te Ching when I was roughly eleven years old. The old version of the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation, before they modified it to death. It is still my favorite version, though I have collected many since.

I have never found another spiritual text that is as perfect as this one is. By which I mean there are no extra words, no words left out, and a profound distrust of language is built into it at the core. But it manages to use language to point at the truth in a way that few books ever can. I don’t know how someone managed to write wisdom this… distilled. But I am glad someone did. I am glad I ran into it at the age I did and recognized it for what it was.