— Anonymous
Poems of Tao Te Ching are very important and a world heritage. The work is complete and it survived the challenge of time for around 2500 years. It contains great quotes most of which are valid still on our times. However, I was challenged reading it. A great work of literature in my opinion doesn’t need to be so philosophically intense, and so hard to be interpreted. Needs to be enjoyable also. Needs to be taken away by reading it, and not frustrating because you have to read it multiple times to understand it and the more i read it i kept losing interest. In a few moments in the first poem i was bored. Another reason why i don’t think is a great work is because i think its too connected to Chines culture and hard to understand for people like me who are ignorant and lack knowledge about the great ancient Chinese culture. We miss the context of it. I feel like this poems could be very much enjoyable to Chinese people because they understand the context of it and they share the same doctrines that Taoism promoted. Therefore this poem is hard to be enjoyed by the rest of the world do to lack of knowledge. To me it felt more like i was in philosophy or theology class and analyzing some philosophical doctrine and didn’t really feel like i was reading a relaxing piece of great literature. I felt like I was more stressed after i read it than i was before it. I normally do enjoy poems. So if i could classify these readings, I would categorize Gilgamesh as boring and incomplete, Ovid as “great work” and interesting, and Taos poems as “intense”, hard to read, a great work representing a rich culture but not enjoyable.
