道德經

道德經

道德經 · 第四章

第四章「道沖」— read line by line, with the classical Chinese commentary beside every English version.

The Chinese is 江希張's own 1919 edition, transcribed character-by-character from the 1935 奉天再版 print; the 字解 glosses are his, verbatim. Two English renderings are offered, and every line names the one you are reading: Derek Lin's published translation, shown by default, and TD, our own (Tong De) preliminary translation of 江希張's Chinese, refined with input from knowledgeable, spiritually wise senior readers of our community toward a version we can stand behind. This chapter also offers TD · Español, our own preliminary Spanish translation of 江希張's Chinese. Corrections welcome.

What you're looking at

Each passage is broken into its natural lines of original Chinese. For every line you can switch which translation shows — Derek Lin's published translation, TD, our own preliminary rendering from the Chinese of this edition, or TD · Español, our own preliminary Spanish rendering (the Legge and Giles translations are not carried on this text). Choose one with Version at the top of the page (in a narrower window or on a phone it is under ⚙ Customize); tap a second version to read both together.

Tap a line’s number to copy that line — with its translation, when one is showing — and a link straight to it.

Two kinds of dotted underline appear under the Chinese, and they mean different things:

異文 · rival wording rare
The witnesses genuinely disagree on which character the text originally had — a real textual dispute. E.g., from 莊子: is the great fish 鯤 a “roe-fish,” or, as one editor argued, 鯨 a “whale”? Tap to see the competing texts.
釋文 · apparatus note
Everyone agrees on the character; the note just tells you one thing about it — 音 how it’s read · 訓 what it means · 異體 another way to write it · 句讀 where the clause breaks · 釋義 how the commentators interpret it. Every tap says which of these it is.

And when a character’s pronunciation itself is disputed (異讀), the mark rides on the pinyin instead of the character — the underlined syllable opens the rival readings (e.g. 鵬 as péng or fèng), grounded in the 經典釋文.

釋義 interpretation is the one that’s easy to mistake for a wording dispute: the character isn’t in doubt, only its sense — so it is not rival wording, and never gets the red mark. (Separately, “字解 word notes” opens the word notes of 江希張 註解, the edition this page follows.)

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