The Tao Teh King by Aleister Crowley

This is the preface to Aleister Crowley's translation of and commentary on the *Tao Teh King* (Tao Te Ching), written from his position as a Western occultist with extensive self-directed study of Eastern and esoteric traditions. Crowley argues that his unusual qualifications — spanning Ceremonial Magick, Hindu and Buddhist practice, Sufi mysticism, and the Hebrew Qabalah — uniquely equipped him to interpret Lao Tze without the Christian-centric distortions he accuses prior Western translators of projecting onto Eastern texts. He describes how the philosophy of Tao came to him experientially during months of solitary wandering in Yunnan province (1905–06), and deepened further during what he calls his "exile" in America — a place he characterizes as more spiritually alienating than any desert. The central intellectual challenge he addresses is the untranslatability of "Tao" itself: he systematically rejects prior renderings ("Reason," "the Way," "TO ON") and argues that grasping Tao requires not Western philosophical categories but a specific meditative attainment — the Buddhist trance *Nerodha-Sammapati* — after which an entirely new category of understanding becomes available. His distinctive claim is that the Qabalah, treated as a structurally neutral symbolic system rather than a theological one, served as the indispensable bridge between Lao Tze's thought and communicable Western language. Readers considering the full text should expect a syncretic, heavily annotated translation aimed at serious occult practitioners rather than a scholarly or literary audience.

The Tao Teh King by Aleister Crowley

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