The Canon of Reason and Virtue by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki and Paul Carus

Description

The Canon of Reason and Virtue is a book by Lao-tze, translated here by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki and Paul Carus and first published in 1913. It presents an extract from the Tao Te Ching — a foundational Taoist text that teaches humility, harmony with the Way (Tao), and the practice of non-assertive action (wu-wei) — arranged with scholarly notes and alternative readings intended to make the text accessible to Western readers. Carus was an influential popularizer whose editorial aims sometimes framed Eastern religions to fit a modern, “rational” worldview. Critics have noted Carus’s selective, sometimes programmatic approach to Asian texts. D. T. Suzuki later became one of the most important mediators of East Asian religious ideas to the West, but modern scholars argue his portrayals were not neutral: Suzuki’s writing often emphasized particular (Rinzai) strands of Zen and presented timeless, ahistorical notions of enlightenment — a stance now critiqued for simplifying and reshaping complex Asian traditions to meet Western expectations. Readers should treat the book as historically important and enlightening but also as an interpretive product of its time.

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