In Harmony with the Tao: A Guided Journey into the Tao Te Ching

By Francis Pring-Mill

The Tao Te Ching is one of the most widely read and deeply loved works of ancient spiritual wisdom in the world. But its dense and cryptic lines can sometimes yield more confusion than illumination. If you’ve ever found yourself understanding the printed words but thinking, “Yes, but what does this mean and how is it relevant to me?” then Francis Pring-Mill’s In Harmony with the Tao: A Guided Journey into the Tao Te Ching is your guide into deeper understanding of this classic work of Chinese philosophy.

Today’s fast-paced world leaves us little time to spend with the timeless questions, such as how to live a meaningful life in harmony with the world around us. Nonetheless we yearn for answers ― and answers are to be found in the Tao Te Ching, a book written twenty-five hundred years ago that resonates with people everywhere as though it had been written yesterday. Of the many English translations and versions, some are scholarly, others are philosophical. What’s new in In Harmony with the Tao is the concept of a guided journey accompanying the text of perhaps the best-known English edition: Stephen Mitchell’s elegant, authoritative interpretation Tao Te Ching: A New English Version. This book, In Harmony with the Tao, includes the complete text of Stephen Mitchell’s work accompanied by Francis Pring-Mill’s illuminating commentaries on each chapter. In a skillful rendition of ancient wisdom reimagined for modern times, In Harmony with the Tao reveals the common threads weaving through the eighty-one brief chapters. In Harmony with the Tao will appeal to anyone keen to understand the ideas contained in, and especially between, the lines of the Tao Te Ching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caveat Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781940468709

Francis Pring-Mill

Francis Pring-Mill has a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was also awarded The Queen's College Benefactor's Prize, and won a postgraduate scholarship from the University which funded three years of doctoral research. He then held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. In the business world his roles have included government statistician, software engineer, and director in an IT professional services firm.Dr. Pring-Mill's publications to date have been in the fields of zoology, software engineering, and methodology. Characteristic of all of them has been success at analyzing, simplifying, and presenting ideas to make them easier to understand and apply. With his book, In Harmony with the Tao, he brings the same skills to a new subject.Stephen Mitchell was born in Brooklyn in 1943, educated at Amherst, the Sorbonne, and Yale, and de-educated through intensive Zen practice. He is the acclaimed translator of A Book of Psalms, Beowulf, The Bhagavad-Gita, The Book of Job, among many others.