This is  my  evolving  hacker -oriented version of the  Dao De Ching  (literally "way power classic").

Disclaimer: I don't actually know any Chinese. I'm working from Jonathan Star's  Verbatim Translation , an amazingly helpful spreadsheet in book form giving character-by-character glosses for each of the 5000-odd characters of the Dao De Ching. I'm also using the online Chinese text with clickable characters at zhongwen.com .

Not much is known for sure about the Dao De Ching, except that it's Chinese, it's very old, and people have loved it for twenty-five hundred years, as  Ursula K. LeGuin  says in  her version , which I dearly love.

But I will say this much. The Dao De Ching can be given philosophical interpretations, political interpretations, religious interpretations. In some translations the original sinks under the weight of them. But it has survived and is read today because it is, at bottom, immortal poetry, as beautiful and meaningful as any that humanity has ever known.

Here are the 81 chapters (or the ones I've written so far) in the usual order. Book One ("The Way") comprises chapters 1-37; Book Two ("Its Power") comprises chapters 38-81.

01  02 03  04  05 06  07   08   09  
10 11 12 13 14  15  16  17   18  
19 20  21  22  23  24 25 26 27 
28  29 30 31 32 33  34  35 36 
37 38  39   40   41   42   43  44 45 
46 47  48  49 50 51 52  53  54 
55 56  57  58 59  60  61 62  63  
64  65  66  67   68  69 70  71   72  
73 74 75 76 77 78  79  80  81