Best translated as <I>The Classic Book of the Way and Its Power (or Virtue),</I> its teachings are of simplicity, humility, and non-action, and its cadenced poetry is at once spare and profound. This edition
Last year I got a call from Abbess Yin, an old friend who runs a Daoist nunnery near Nanjing. I’ve always known her as supernaturally placid and oblique, but this time she was nervous and direct: a group of Germans were coming to spend a week learning about Daoist life; could I travel down from Beijing to help? To translate, I asked? No, she said impatiently, to mediate to