Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Second Book of the Tao
    Unavailable
    The Second Book of the Tao
    Unavailable
    The Second Book of the Tao
    Ebook205 pages2 hours

    The Second Book of the Tao

    By Stephen Mitchell

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Enhanced by Stephen Mitchell’s illuminating commentary, the next volume of the classic manual on the art of living

    The most widely translated book in world literature after the Bible, Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living. Following the phenomenal success of his own version of the Tao Te Ching, renowned scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell has composed the innovative The Second Book of the Tao. Drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzussu, The Second Book of the Tao offers Western readers a path into reality that has nothing to do with Taoism or Buddhism or old or new alone, but everything to do with truth. Mitchell has selected the freshest, clearest teachings from these two great students of the Tao and adapted them into versions that reveal the poetry, depth, and humor of the original texts with a thrilling new power. Alongside each adaptation, Mitchell includes his own commentary, at once explicating and complementing the text.

    This book is a twenty-first-century form of ancient wisdom, bringing a new, homemade sequel to the Tao Te Ching into the modern world. Mitchell’s renditions are radiantly lucid; they dig out the vision that’s hiding beneath the words; they grab the text by the scruff of the neck—by its heart, really—and let its essential meanings fall out. The book introduces us to a cast of vivid characters, most of them humble artisans or servants, who show us what it means to be in harmony with the way things are. Its wisdom provides a psychological and moral acuity as deep as the Tao Te Ching itself.

    The Second Book of the Tao is a gift to contemporary readers, granting us access to our own fundamental wisdom. Mitchell’s meditations and risky reimagining of the original texts are brilliant and liberating, not least because they keep catching us off-guard, opening up the heavens where before we saw a roof. He makes the ancient teachings at once modern, relevant, and timeless.

    Listen to a special podcast with Stephen Mitchell:

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateFeb 19, 2009
    ISBN9781101015995
    Unavailable
    The Second Book of the Tao
    Author

    Stephen Mitchell

    Stephen Mitchell's many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and The Second Book of the Tao, as well as The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Gospel According to Jesus, Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Meetings with the Archangel.

    Read more from Stephen Mitchell

    Related authors

    Related to The Second Book of the Tao

    Related ebooks

    Eastern Religions For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Refuge In The Storm

      May 23, 2023

      Refuge In The Storm
      4 min read

    • Article

      The How Of Happiness

      Nov 22, 2022

      The How Of Happiness
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Language Beyond Reason

      Feb 27, 2020

      I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Aug 4, 2020

      Sometimes hope can come in the form of a good story. Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking offer just that in The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford), though they are careful to show that this is nei

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Sensei Roboto

      Sep 27, 2022

      Sensei Roboto
      4 min read

    • Article

      Tears Become Rain

      Sep 19, 2023

      WITH HER CHILD experiencing mental health challenges, Celia Landman long blamed herself. “At times in my life, I’ve encountered so much pain I questioned why I became a parent,” she writes in When the Whole World Tips: Parenting Through Crisis with M

      4 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Oct 7, 2021

      Karl PN Shuker Coachwhip Publications, 2019 Pb, 400+pp each, £16. ISBN 9781616464677 & 9781616464837 By all accounts (even his own) Dr Shuker is a prolific writer, so anyone interested in his cryptozoological articles (more than 600 at last count) mi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Joyful Wandering

      Jan 18, 2022

      Joyful Wandering
      4 min read

    • Article

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Dec 7, 2021

      FIRST PUBLISHED in 2001 when the author was seventy-eight, Setouchi Jakucho’s memoir Places (Hawai’i) has finally been translated into English, by Liza Dalby. Setouchi, now ninety-nine, is perhaps Japan’s most famous Buddhist nun; before she was orda

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Jun 1, 2021

      OF THE HANDFUL OF WELL-KNOWN women in the life story of the Buddha, Yasodhara—his wife before renunciation—and Mahaprajapati—his aunt and foster mother—certainly rank amongst the most important. Yet accounts of these two women’s lives are either frus

      4 min read

    • Article

      Up-to-date Dharma

      Jul 19, 2022

      Up-to-date Dharma
      4 min read

    • Article

      Heart To Heart

      Jan 24, 2023

      Heart To Heart
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books In Brief

      Mar 19, 2024

      DR. KAMILAH MAJIED’S Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living (Sounds True) invites us to exercise playful curiosity. The book’s expansive embrace of contemplative practices supports wellness and justice for people from

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Sep 14, 2021

      WHEN DEATH CEASES to be an abstraction and becomes an inevitability, rumination upon its imminence requires a rare act of courage. Such is the exquisite fortitude exhibited by the late scholar C. W. Huntington Jr. in his posthumously published What I

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Forgotten One: Furnace Transmutation

      Jun 30, 2021

      Why does a teacup with furnace mutations and deformations become a fetish in the eyes of tea experts and ceramists? Why do we perceive beauty in a defect? Is it because of the defect’s uniqueness or unduplicated quality? Does the defect perhaps repre

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Smutty Mystic

      Feb 10, 2022

      The Smutty Mystic
      10 min read

    • Article

      Trying Not to Try: Modern science and Chinese philosophy tell us similar stories about how we think.

      Feb 6, 2014

      In a famous story from ancient Chinese philosophy, Butcher Ding has been called upon to play his part in a traditional religious ceremony. The ritual, to consecrate a newly cast bronze bell, requires the butcher to sacrifice an ox in a public space,

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Dark Side of Awe

      Jan 29, 2024

      The Dark Side of Awe
      10 min read

    • Article

      How To Build A Better World

      Jan 23, 2024

      IN BECOMING GANDHI: My Experiment Living the Mahatma’s 6 Moral Truths in Immoral Times (Sounds True), author Perry Garfinkel sets out to live like Gandhi for three years. Garfinkel, a freelance journalist, worldwide traveler, and self-proclaimed “bon

      4 min read

    • Article

      Counter Culture

      Nov 18, 2021

      Counter Culture
      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Feb 6, 2018

      Should Vajrayana practitioners eat meat? Tibetans have long wrestled with this question, as Geoffrey Barstow elucidates in FOOD OF SINFUL DEMONS: MEAT, VEGETARIANISM, AND THE LIMITS OF BUDDHISM IN TIBET (Columbia 2017). In their discussions of ethica

      4 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Jul 14, 2022

      Plants, Charms, and Amulets of the Healers of the Crusades Jon G Hughes Destiny Books, 2022 Pb, £17.99, 416pp, ISBN 9781544113301 The Knights Templar do not readily come to mind when we think if healing organisations of the Middle Ages, but the bad p

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      May 21, 2019

      Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times By Stephanie Kaza Shambhala Publications 2019; 264 pp., $18.95 (paper) Stephanie Kaza, professor emerita of environmental studies, likes to say that she first took the path of Green Buddhism when,

      5 min read

    • Article

      Life, Loss, And Connection

      Jul 20, 2021

      Life, Loss, And Connection
      4 min read

    • Article

      Help Yourself

      Apr 3, 2022

      In a nutshell, Creative Visualisation contends that it’s possible to use your imagination to manifest the life of your wildest dreams through visualisation, meditation, and affirmations. It’s easy to write this framework off as codswallop, given how

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Mar 24, 2020

      The Liberating Power of the Female Buddha By Rachael Wooten Sounds True 2020; 312 pp., $17.99 (paper) The figure of the female buddha Tara emerged in the sixth century as part of both Hindu and Buddhist tantra. According to one legend, she lived eons

      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 20, 2018

      What Fake Buddha Quotes Can Teach Us About Buddhism By Bodhipaksa Parallax Press 2018; 144 pp., $11.95 (paper) Did you ever hear or read that famous Buddha quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?” Well, the Buddha didn’t say it. T

      5 min read

    Reviews for The Second Book of the Tao

    2.5/5

    3 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      This is a very personal book for the author, perhaps too personal. He selected and translated sections of two writers, Chuang-tzu and Tzu-ssu, and then added his own commentary for each section.

      While I have enjoyed Mitchell's other translations, and found the selections he chose for this book to be interesting, the commentary for each section was rambling, filled with cliches, uninteresting and uninspired.
    • 3/5
      I found Stephen Mitchell's version of the Tao Te Ching powerful and moving. Sadly, the 'Second Book of the Tao' is pop-psych mush. It combines excerpts from two different ancient Chinese writers: Chuang-Tzu, famous for asking whether he is himself dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of Chuang-tzu; and Tzu-ssu, a grandson of Confucius. That is, one is a Taoist mystic; the other, both intellectually and genetically, a full-blooded Confucian. Mitchell does make clear in the notes which selections are drawn from which author.Mitchell apparently took similar approaches to creating both books. Not speaking Chinese, he gathered together numerous translations, and then wrote his own version, updating metaphors and images for a modern audience. For the Second Book, he also added his own commentaries, which rarely add much to the texts, and are dreadful -- flippant and condescending. For example: "Suddenly, one fine day, mind realizes that it knows nothing, that it *is* nothing, and sets itself free. Being? Non-bring? Give me a break." Or: "The Master lived in the center of the universe, which turned out to be the center of himself. He discovered that there's nothing to it. No self, no other. Amazing! Wherever you go, there you aren't." Some readers will experience this as witty and striking, piercing pretension while maintaining a casual style. I had exactly the opposite reaction; reading this book was like listening to a guest dominate a cocktail party, trying to be deep and hip and subversive all at the same time, with ego boiling beneath a surface so nonchalant it's almost mannered. The collected passages themselves include some gems, and I'll hope to read them in one of the faithful translations Mitchel consulted while assembling this work.