The complete Dao De Jing of Laozi: all 81 chapters, in the original Chinese and in two English translations, built for actually reading it.
Every term is tappable, showing what the character means here, in this line — not a dictionary's one-size answer — along with its reading and the characters it is made of, and the English that renders it is boxed in both translations. Pinyin sits under the characters when you want it and disappears when you don't.
LINE BY LINE
Each line of the Chinese is followed by the English that translates it: James Legge's (1891) and Paul Carus's (1913), aligned to the text line by line. Color match paints each phrase of the English and the characters it renders in one hue, so you can see what answers what.
READ IT YOUR WAY
• Study — the full apparatus: text, both translations, pinyin, tappable words, color.
• Translation — the English as a book. The original waits one tap away under each chapter.
• Chinese — the received text alone, unglossed, with the English one tap away.
• Classical — the text as old books set it, in columns right to left: typeset, or photographed from two real copies of the bare text — an Edo printing of 1777 (Wang Bi's recension, with Japanese reading marks) held in Tokyo, and Shitao's own brush copy held in Taipei — with every character mapped, so the glosses work even on a photograph.
The chapters are listed in the book's two parts, 道經 and 德經, each under its old Heshang Gong title with Carus's English beside it. Scroll the book as one column, or turn it one chapter per page. Reader mode puts away everything but the page; there is a dark page for night and a flat, high-contrast scheme for e-ink screens.
TALK IT THROUGH, LINE BY LINE
Any line of any chapter can have its own discussion thread, on Reddit in r/DaoDeJingReader. Each chapter lists its lines with what is being said about each, and a character's card starts a thread on its line with the title and the text already written.
A WORK IN PROGRESS
Much of this app — the definitions written for each chapter, the links between the English and the Chinese, the characters mapped on the photographed pages — was organized with a great deal of machine assistance and checked as far as one person can. The glosses and translation links will have some mistakes. Every card has a "Report a problem with this" link, and corrections reach the app without an update.
YOURS, IN THE FULLEST SENSE
Notes you take live in your own iCloud Drive as Markdown — readable anywhere, and they outlive the app. The text is built in and always works offline. There are no accounts, no ads, no analytics, and no tracking.
Everything is free. Nothing is locked. There is a tip jar, for anyone who wants to keep it going.
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