Tao Te Ching — The Tâo Teh King (Legge)
Contents — 81 chapters
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About this book
The Daodejing ("Classic of the Way and its Power") is the foundational text of Daoism, traditionally ascribed to the sage Laozi (6th century BCE) though likely compiled from older sources in the Warring States period. In 81 short, aphoristic chapters it sets out the Tao — the ineffable Way that underlies all things — and Te, its active power, advocating wu-wei (effortless non-action), naturalness, simplicity, and the valuing of the soft and lowly over the hard and exalted. Legge's 1891 translation for the Sacred Books of the East (Vol. 39) is the complete public-domain English edition hosted here, in two parts (chapters 1–37, 38–81).
Relevance to this project
A cross-cultural axis text: like the Sefer Yetzirah, the Tao Te Ching describes the genesis of the cosmos from a small set of primordial principles (the Tao, yin/yang, the "ten thousand things") and treats language as inadequate to the ultimate — "the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." The shared ancient structure — an emanation cosmology in which named forms descend from an unnameable source — is the comparative frame the project sets the Hebrew letter-tradition against.