His many books include The Gospel According to Jesus, The Second Book of the Tao, two books of fiction, and a book of poetry. He is widely known for his ability to make old classics thrillingly new, to step in where many have tried before and to create versions that are definitive for our time. Stephen Mitchell was educated at Amherst College, the Sorbonne, and Yale University, and de-educated through intensive Zen practice. Listen to a special podcast with Stephen Mitchell: He makes the ancient teachings at once modern, relevant, and timeless.

Mitchell’s meditations and risky reimagining of the original texts are brilliant and liberating, not least because they keep catching us off-guard, opening up the heavens where before we saw a roof. The Second Book of the Tao is a gift to contemporary readers, granting us access to our own fundamental wisdom. Its wisdom provides a psychological and moral acuity as deep as the Tao Te Ching itself. The book introduces us to a cast of vivid characters, most of them humble artisans or servants, who show us what it means to be in harmony with the way things are. Mitchell’s renditions are radiantly lucid they dig out the vision that’s hiding beneath the words they grab the text by the scruff of the neck-by its heart, really-and let its essential meanings fall out. This book is a twenty-first-century form of ancient wisdom, bringing a new, homemade sequel to the Tao Te Ching into the modern world. Alongside each adaptation, Mitchell includes his own commentary, at once explicating and complementing the text. Mitchell has selected the freshest, clearest teachings from these two great students of the Tao and adapted them into versions that reveal the poetry, depth, and humor of the original texts with a thrilling new power.

Drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzussu, The Second Book of the Tao offers Western readers a path into reality that has nothing to do with Taoism or Buddhism or old or new alone, but everything to do with truth. Following the phenomenal success of his own version of the Tao Te Ching, renowned scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell has composed the innovative The Second Book of the Tao. The most widely translated book in world literature after the Bible, Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living. Enhanced by Stephen Mitchell’s illuminating commentary, the next volume of the classic manual on the art of living

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell