So I’ve read around five different translations of the Tao Teh Ching. One particular one, I’ve read around twenty times. I think that it is quite a nice book. It states too many things that are quite relevant, but it’s so damn cryptic that half the time I feel that I’m the one making up the meanings in the book. Actually , now that I think about it , that might be the case.
The Tao Teh Ching is a book that does not convey it’s meanings well. Maybe it’s just hard to convey them, but the Tao Teh Ching makes it vague. Even the “live” examples it gives are quite confusing and can mean a million things. Perhaps the author(s) were just bad at examples, or maybe bad at expressing what they wanted. (Or maybe they came up with random gibberish that seemed to resonate with me after translation.) I think that books like that need to be more specific in what they mean.
Also, be very careful while reading it. If you take it too seriously, you might end up being a lazy guy who never gets up from bed (Although it never says anything like that in the book, that is often what a lot of people interpret it to be.) I think that one day I’d like to write a book similar to the Tao Teh Ching, but which expresses what I want to say more explicitly, so that people who disagree can actually disagree instead of getting confused.