Reading the Dao De Jing with
The complete Dao De Jing of Laozi (老子) — in Wang Bi Chinese, Hemingway-clear English, and Thai. Eighty-one short chapters. Read one a day. Or all at once. The book is not impatient.
Each chapter unfolds in five panels:
01 Origin · 原文 · 02 Direct · 直譯 · 03 Reading · 解讀 · 04 Code · 程式 · 05 Note · 注
↓ begin ← → turn pages ≡ chapter index L EN ⇄ TH
A Note Before We Begin
For more than a hundred days I wrote about my life, and the longer I wrote, the more clearly I noticed the same book was answering me. The book is the Dao De Jing. It was completed somewhere around the fourth century BCE, in eighty-one short chapters and roughly five thousand Chinese characters. It is the second-most-translated book in the world after the Bible. It is also the most-mistranslated.
Most translations turn it into a poem about mist. The original is not about mist. It is about a person trying to live well. The translator's job is to read it for that person — not for the mist.
This translation aims at understanding, not poetry. The sentences are short. The metaphors are kept where they earn their keep. Where I have a story from my own life that fits the chapter, I tell it. Where I don't, I shut up.
Each chapter unfolds in five panels. Origin 原文 — the Chinese, in Wang Bi's text. Direct 直譯 — a literal translation, faithfully strange. Reading 解讀 — what I think the chapter is actually doing, with the science that supports it. Code 程式 — a TypeScript distillation, because some claims compress better as a function signature than as a sentence. Note 注 — a story or remark from the rest of my life. Toggle English and Thai at the top of the page, or press L. Move between chapters by scrolling or by pressing ← and →.
This is the most important book I have read more than ten times. Some chapters I have read more than a hundred. They get clearer every time, and clearer is not the same as easier.
— Non · Bangkok · Shanghai · Boston · 2026