Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian

Robert Henricks was a specialist translator of excavated Chinese manuscripts, and this is his scholarly translation of the Guodian bamboo slip Laozi, the version of the text recovered from a tomb sealed around 300 BCE and excavated in 1993, the earliest physical witness to the Tao Te Ching known to survive. Its real evidentiary basis is direct: Henricks works chapter by chapter from the excavated bamboo strips themselves, and the book explicitly compares the Guodian readings against both the earlier-recovered Mawangdui silk manuscripts and the later received Wang Bi edition, noting where the three diverge rather than presenting one as simply superior. Use it for the content of the Guodian Laozi and for its documented differences from the Mawangdui and Wang Bi versions; a claim resting on the Mawangdui manuscripts alone in their own right should also be checked against Henricks's earlier dedicated Mawangdui translation.