Talk:Tao Te Ching

Content too short
Re
 * 2.5 Themes	Edit

The text concerns itself with the Dao (or "Way"), and how it is expressed... This section should make up 60-80% of the article. Let us expand it. Zezen (talk) 05:50, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Sources for future article expansion
This is a pretty thorough treatment of the TTC ' s treatment in French, which has been influential on its reception in English and across Europe. In particular, it's obviously hilariously misguided but nonetheless important and worth mentioning that the Jesuits and other Christian sinologists got reaaaaaaaaaally hung up—as in for centuries—on a passage that talks about 1→2→3 and the myriad things coming from the three + another with the three characters 夷希微 (Yíxīwēi) taken to be a transcription of the tetragrammaton YHWH. We shouldn't gloss it as anything remotely accurate, but it's still worth mentioning in the article, given its influence on the Jesuit & al.'s handling of the classic, bumping it up several notches in importance vs the Chinese opinion at the time, which thought it was fine and all but it wasn't on the test so... maybe something to read in retirement. — Llywelyn II   04:48, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Content
The content of the book (manuscript) must be described in the article. Jestmoon(talk) 18:12, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Use of Wade-Giles in Title
I think the article should use the pinyin romanization of 'Dao De Jing,' and it should list the Wade-Giles romanization of 'Tao Te Ching' as secondary. There are some book titles that arguably have entered the English lexicon with the Wade-Giles (Sun Tzu), but I don't think this applies to the Dao De Jing. Mcmaho17 (talk) 16:02, 24 March 2023 (UTC)


 * My feeling is that the Wade-Giles transscription is still dominant for this book title, as well as for Sun Tzu. As a weak support, amazon.com has over 3000 hits on "tao te ching" (including the quotes), 121 on "dao de jing", and 41 on "daodejing". Nø (talk) 16:52, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I believe that the Wade-Giles "Tao Te Ching" is more widely used in English than pinyin "Dao De Jing". Since the Tao Te Ching entered the English-speaking consciousness before pinyin, I believe that puts it in a similar position to Sun Tzu’s Art of War where the Wade-Giles is more well known.
 * As examples, The New York Times has 82 hits for "Tao Te Ching" and 7 hits for "Dao De Jing"; The Atlantic has 7 for "Tao Te Ching" and 0 for "Dao De Jing". Both of these papers have examples of "Tao Te Ching" being used in the last three years, so it’s being used currently. Lathe Foundation (talk) 14:30, 25 March 2023 (UTC)