How these pages are made
The translations, the rule the writing follows, and what this site will not tell you
Taoist Diary publishes 10 classics of the Tao, the Stoics, the Buddha and the Confucian canon in translations that are free of copyright worldwide, and 7 short pieces about what those translations actually say. Every quoted sentence is pulled from the text itself, with the chapter and the translator named.
Which translations, and why these
The 367 chapters here are the work of James Legge, George Long, F. Max Müller and V. Fausbøll. They were chosen for one reason before any other: they are free of copyright everywhere in the world, so the whole text can sit on an open page with no account and no paywall. Each book page carries the translator, the year of that translation, and a link to the scan it was taken from.
There is a second reason, and it is the more interesting one. These are Victorian translations, and the Victorians had a habit modern translators dropped: when the original left something implied, they put their own words in brackets rather than smoothing them into the sentence. James Legge writes “doing nothing (with a purpose)”, and the bracket is him telling you where his reading begins and the Chinese ends. Modern versions read more easily and hide that seam. Most of the writing on this site lives in those brackets.
The rule the writing follows
Nothing is claimed here that cannot be pointed at inside these texts. That is a real constraint, and it costs pages: it means this site does not tell you about Laozi’s life, because the reliable answer is that almost nothing is known and the rest is legend. It does not explain Chinese characters, because the text on hand is an English translation and reading etymology off a translation is guesswork wearing a lab coat. It does not promise that any of this will lower your blood pressure or fix your sleep.
Where another source is genuinely better — a dictionary for the character, an encyclopedia for the history — the honest thing is to leave the subject to it. What is left is the part this site can actually stand behind: what the sentence says, who translated it that way, and what changes when you read the chapter around it.
How the quotations get onto the page
They are not typed. Every quotation in the 7 pieces is stored as a reference — a book, a chapter, a paragraph — and a build script pulls the text out of the archive and drops it in. If a reference points at a chapter that does not exist, the build stops and the page never ships.
That machinery exists because of a mistake. An earlier version of the home page carried a line attributed to Zhuangzi — “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders” — which is not in Zhuangzi, and is not in any translation of it. Someone had typed it from memory. On a site whose entire promise is that the words are the words, that is the most expensive error available, so the possibility was removed rather than the sentence.
Who publishes this
Taoist Diary is published by Solomon Interactive LLC. It is also an app, where the same library is free to read and the narrated audio is the paid part. Writing, editing and the choice of passages are the work of the publisher rather than a named individual, and this page exists so that is stated plainly instead of left to be assumed.
Corrections are welcome and wanted, particularly about the texts. If a quotation here diverges from the translation it cites, that is a defect and it will be fixed: write to contact@solomoninteractive.com.
Elsewhere
A passage goes out most mornings on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. They are the same voice as these pages, in shorter form.