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    Tao for Now
    Tao for Now
    Tao for Now
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    Tao for Now

    By Susan Corso

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    About this ebook

    Susan Corso's love of words (God's Dictionary, Tarcher/Putnam) undergirds this intuitive "translation" of the Tao Te Ching. Over decades as she studied many translations for her own edification, intuitive phrases began to arise organically from inside her. Fortunately, she transcribed those gleanings. You hold the respectful, i

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDona Nobis Pacem Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2015
    ISBN9781937233266
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      Book preview

      Tao for Now - Susan Corso

      Introduction

      In ancient Chinese, the character for Tao is a person whose head and body are going in the same direction. I love the idea of a human who is integrated enough to have all of herself going in the same direction.

      This is the fourth of four documents in my work on Tao. At first, there were three. The first is twenty-two versions of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching presented contiguously—this allows immersion in a version; the second is parallel by pseudo-chapter—this allows immersion by chapter; the third is parallel verse comparisons—this allows depth contemplation and the subtlety of word choice to shine. To learn how the fourth came to be, read on, MacDuff.

      Process

      I did not set out to do a translation of Tao Te Ching. Oh, well, perhaps that’s not entirely true, but it was definitely in a back-of-the-brain file under the heading Someday. I had just finished proofreading my Parallel Tao Verse Comparisons and decided to re-read it as part of my own spiritual practice. At Pseudo-Chapter 12, I got the inkling of an idea for one phrase in the text. I added my initials at the bottom of the list, typed in and highlighted my version of the phrase, and kept reading.

      The next day, an idea for a title for Pseudo-Chapter Thirteen arose in my mind as well as a phrase. I did the same process and before long, in this very chapter, I noticed that an intuitive translation began to arise for every line. I began to type them in, and that, as they say, was all she wrote. Or, rather, not all she wrote for I made a file for my own Intuitive Tao, figured I’d do two a day till I was caught up and stayed with it. Then, like Alice, I kept going until I came to the end, and then, I stopped. It took two months and fifty-four years.

      Realization

      At the end of this document, you will find a list of what I call Tao Words. Among them are Tao and Teh. Translators since James Legge have struggled with English for the untranslatable word Tao. There really isn’t an English equivalent that encompasses the entirety of the pictogram.

      This time [note those last two words; they are key] I settled on Wisdom for Tao. As I worked through the rest of the translation, various other words floated through until I realized that any word for Tao—as long as the reader holds it in high esteem—will do. The best words are the

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