What the Excavated Copies Changed

That picture has been sharpened by archaeology. Silk manuscripts excavated at Mawangdui in 1973 (second century BCE) and bamboo-slip fragments from Guodian around 1993 (late fourth century BCE) give us copies far older than any previously known, and they show a text whose wording was still somewhat fluid and whose two main parts (the Dao and the De sections) once circulated in the reverse order. The Guodian slips contain only about a third of the received text, which many take as evidence that the book grew by accretion.

Beyond China, the Tao Te Ching is among the most translated books in the world, and its Western reception has often reshaped it, read as nature-mysticism, as management advice or as vague uplift, in ways that can float free of its roots in early Chinese thought and, later, in the ritual and communal life of religious Daoism. Careful modern translations informed by the excavated texts try to recover the work as it functioned in its own setting.