Alexander Ular
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Alexander Ular
Download German/French/English PDF file – release 1.0 – 134 pages
(Page format differs from that of other Dunyazad Library books)
English translation only:
Download PDF file – release 1.01 – 105 pages
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The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese philosophical text from the middle of the first millennium BCE, ascribed to Lao Tse, about whom only some legends are known. Apart from the Bible the Tao Te Ching is the most often translated book in history — in major Western languages, including English, the numbers of its translations far exceed those of the Bible.
Anyone who has ever concerned themselves with the Tao Te Ching agrees that it contains a wealth of most profound wisdoms and truths. No two people, though, seem to agree on what these truths and wisdoms are.
Alexander Ular’s idiosyncratic German translation from 1903 is still considered a major work (and it is a work that has deeply impressed me), but for all I know has never been translated into English, nor has his French translation from 1900. To make them more widely available I have done my best to translate them into English.
(You can find my translation of Bert Brecht’s poem The Legend of the Genesis of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao-Tse’s Journey Into Exile in the Library’s Audio Wing.)
Politics
Download PDF file – release 1.0 – 87 pages
Download plain text file – release 1.0
Download ePub file – release 1.0
Deutsch – Go to the German page for the German original
“The religious binds; the economic releases. The state compels; culture liberates. The power of the few can make states great; but cultures become great only when states perish. Governments are always reactionary because they seek authority; people are always revolutionary — when they seek culture. That is the whole secret of politics.”
“Nation is religion.”
“The truth is that the mixing of peoples, not to say races, their clash, their mutual interpenetration, is the indispensable prerequisite for the development of culture. Upheaval — not merely of the state order, this is only a means to an end here — is as necessary to peoples as it is to agricultural soil, turned by the plow.”
Alexander Ular’s audacious take on the connection between religion, politics and oppression and the liberating power of culture, published in 1906, still reads as radical today as it did 120 years ago and unfortunately has not lost any of its relevance.
About the Author
Alexander Ular was a German journalist, sinologist, and writer, who today is best known for his German translation of the Tao Te Ching, but who was also the author of several monographs on Russia and China, of two novels, and of the text Politics.
Surprisingly little can be found about his life — not more than that his real name was Alexander Ferdinand Uhlemann, that he was born in Bremen in 1876, that he lived in France for a time, that his political views could be described as anarcho-syndicalist, and that he died in Morocco in 1919.