The Tao Te Ching is a brief classical Chinese work transmitted in chaptered form and associated by tradition with Laozi. The identity and date of a single author cannot be established from the traditional name alone. Early manuscript discoveries and later received versions show that the text’s transmission predates modern translation and involved textual variation.
Legge translates the received text as The Tao Teh King and organizes it into 81 chapters. The work’s short, often deliberately suggestive lines resist easy paraphrase: a term such as Dao can carry philosophical, cosmological and practical dimensions. An English translation must make choices about those resonances, and other translators may render the same line differently.