The history
The Chinese version of the Tao Te Ching itself has seen dozens of editions containing anywhere from five to six thousand characters, the result of adding certain grammatical particles for clarity or omitting them for brevity. The greatest difference among editions centers not on the number of characters but on the rendering of certain phrases and the presence or absence of certain lines.
The first text
in Chinese
In late 1973, two copies of the text was discovered in a tomb that was sealed in 168 BC in a suburb of the provincial capital of Changsha known as Mawangtui. The Mawangtui texts contain numerous omissions and errors and need to be used with great care, however.
Other texts
Another text dates from the same period at another tomb sealed shortly after 200 BC. This tomb was located near the Grand Canal town of Hsuchou and was opened in 574 AD. Not long afterward, the court astrologer Fu Yi published an edition of the copy of the Dao De Jing that was found inside.
In addition to the Mawangtui and Fuyi texts, there are also more than sixty copies of the text that were found shortly after 1900 in the Silk Road oasis of Tunhuang. One of them was written by a man named Suo Tan in 270 AD, providing yet another early hand-written edition. Another copy is from the great fourth-century calligrapher Wang Hsi-chih.
Finally, the text appears in early commentaries of Yen Tsun, Ho-shang Kung, and Wang Pi (not to mention numerous passages quoted in the ancient works of Mo-tzu, Wen-tzu, Chuang-tzu, Lieh-tzu Han Fei, Huai-nan-tzu, and others).
Adapted from Red Pine's Tao Te Ching
