Ron Hogan

A decade in the making, Ron Hogans Getting Right with Tao conveys the essence of the Tao Te Ching but with a modern, self-aware sensibility. The original pragmatic treatise on personal development gets a contemporary, Tarantinoesque gloss in eighty-one spare, stripped-down chapters. What does it mean to be alive? What do you want from life? With a unique voice and incisive style, Hogan gets right to what matters.

A Contemporary Spin on the Tao Te Ching

Getting Right with Tao

rumbledethumps

I try to read a different translation of the Tao Te Ching each year. This version can't be called a translation so much as an interpretation, an interpretation the author believes will resonate more with 21st century Americans. An example:

Stephen Mitchell's translation of section 1:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of 
all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery. 
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
The source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Hogan interprets section 1 in this way:
If you can talk about it, 
it ain't Tao.
If it has a name, it's just another thing.
Tao doesn't have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.
Stop wanting stuff, it keeps you from seeing what's real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things.
Those two sentences mean the same thing.
Figure them out, and you've got it made.

While I admire the ambition of Hogan's project, I don't quite care for the execution. With the occasional curse word and folksy phony-feeling ain'ts, too much of the author shows through, which sort of misses the point of the Tao Te Ching.

Getting Right with Tao A Contemporary Spin on the Tao Te Ching

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