from gbarto.com’s Language Pages:
Beginning Chinese for the Aspiring Sage
by Geoffrey Barto of gbarto.com
Welcome to the Dao-9
Project, an exploration in progress of the first nine books of the Dao or
Tao. It is the aim of this project to
teach the curious a little about Chinese, a little about the Dao and a little
about how they go together. As the
subtitle indicates, this is a
language course for the aspiring sage, for the person who has always loved
those pretty editions of the Tao in which the Chinese is printed on the facing
page but had no idea what those characters meant. This guide is far from perfect, for I, too,
am an amateur in Chinese, working from dictionaries and commentaries and not
from an impeccable Chinese that I have never had the good fortune to learn
under the tutelage of a wise and wizened master. But it will show, I believe, that a dedicated
amateur can learn about this
wonderful book and those wonderful characters, even without a sage for a
guide. Will show that you, as I, can
glean something for yourself that will make this amazingly baffling text come
alive with a new and altogether more elegant unintelligibility that will have
you, too, embracing the nature of the Tao that cannot be told.
The Chinese text that I
offer will not be found anyplace else; nor should it be. I have assembled it on my own from various
manuscripts in order to create something you can use to get your feet wet. When you’re done, you will be ready to go
into a bookstore, pick out a book of your own, and have a go at it. There will be, of course, tricky spots, but
there will also be enough familiar characters that you will recognize different
passages, have your own understandings come to mind as you look through them
and try, anew, to decipher them.
Immediately below are links
to introductory information and to those books of the Dao which have so far
been launched. Afterwards, I have
included a list of some of the resources used in putting this together.
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Introductory material and
sources |
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Book 1: |
The sources for the text and
interpretations are:
Main source
Henricks, Robert G. Te Tao Ching.
NY: Random House, 1989.
Supplemental sources
Kwok, Man Ho, Martin Palmer
and Jay Ramsay. Tao Te Ching.
Pine, Red. Tao Te Ching.
SF, CA: Mercury House, 1996.
Wu, John C. Tao Te Ching.
NY:
Recommended dictionaries
are:
Go, Ping Gam. What Character Is That? Larkspur, CA:
Simplex, 1995.
Manser, Martin. Concise English-Chinese, Chinese English
Dictionary.
Purchase selected material
at gbarto.com’s Dao Books.
Return to gbarto.com’s Language Pages.