Gia-fu Feng and Jane English: The Edition I Give to First-Time Readers

The Feng & English edition sits on my desk, not on my nightstand — that is Le Guin’s spot. The desk is where I go when I need clarity. The Feng & English edition has a clarity that few other translations match.

The Unusual Partnership

Gia-fu Feng was a Chinese-born scholar who spent much of his adult life in the United States, teaching at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur — the epicenter of the 1960s human potential movement. He was trained in classical Chinese scholarship but lived among hippies and seekers. When I first learned this, it made sense: his translation feels like someone who knows the text’s roots intimately but is completely unpretentious about it.

Jane English was a physicist-turned-photographer. Her black-and-white photographs — water, leaves, stone, mist — sit alongside the text. When I first opened the book, I thought they were decorations. I was wrong. They are visual meditations. A photograph of still water next to Chapter 8. A leaf floating on a pond next to a chapter about letting go. The images do what the text does: they invite you to stop analyzing and start noticing.

Their translation emerged from their friendship and their shared conviction that the Tao Te Ching was not an artifact to be studied but a living text. Feng provided the language. English provided the ear and the eye. The result, first published in 1972, has never gone out of print.

The Translation Style

Feng and English aim for the middle path — accurate but poetic, dignified but not stuffy. Their Chapter 1: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

The language is clean. It does not call attention to itself. You read through it to the ideas, not stopping to admire the translator’s craft. This is harder than it looks. When I compare their version to Mitchell’s or Le Guin’s, the Feng & English rendering is the one that disappears — and that is its greatest strength.

Who Should Read It

Start with Feng & English if you want one book that does everything reasonably well. It is accurate enough for study, beautiful enough for reflection, and its bilingual presentation — Chinese on one page, English facing — gives you a sense of the original even if you cannot read the characters.

If you want deeper scholarly annotation, supplement with Red Pine. If you want more emotional intimacy, try Le Guin. If you want maximum readability, Mitchell is the easiest entry — with the caveats I have described.

The translation comparison page puts Feng & English alongside the other major versions for the two most well-known chapters. See for yourself which voice fits the way you want to read.

Ready to try a chapter? Chapter 8 — Be Like Water is where I tell everyone to start. Or if you prefer a guided approach, the 5-step starter path takes you through it in about 20 minutes.