A Sufi Commentary on the Tao Te Ching

Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Mohammad H. Faghfoory, Toshihiko Izutsu (Translation and annotations)
Paperback, 208 pages
9798896400028

The Way and Its Virtue

This extraordinary book contains a full translation of the Tao Te Ching from Chinese, along with an extensive Sufi mystical commentary on each verse by the renowned scholar, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who includes along with his own commentary, passages from the Diwan of Hafiz, Rumi’s Mathnawi, Sa’adi, Nizami, Farid Al-Din Attar, Shabastari, and Bayazid Bastami.

In 1974, the oldest extant copy of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (6-4th century BCE) was unearthed at Xi’an along with the ceramic warriors guarding the tomb of the first Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang. In the 1970s, Professor Toshihiko Izutsu—the Japanese Islamicist, philosopher and linguist—collaborated in Tehran with Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr to translate this treasure into English. Dr. Nasr went on to put it into Persian adding a Sufi commentary which was recently published in Iran. This has now been translated into English with annotations by Mohammad H. Faghfoory.