Tao Te Ching

I felt like David Loy's Nonduality had prepared me to better appreciate Eastern philosophy, so I dove right in with Lao Tzu's classic.  I read the D.C. Lau translation because I had the Penguin Classics version sitting around on the shelf.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a whole more out of reading the whole text than I did reading the first chapter that Loy analyzed.  The only real theme you can definitively point to in this cryptic work is the paradoxical confusion of opposites.  Which of course is simply a restatement of the definition of nonduality.  I also gleaned little from Lau's philosophically narrow-minded introduction.  The idea that the book is mainly just about how to survive in the Warring States period in China is almost laughable.  However, it was useful to learn that, while there was a Taoist sage named Lao Tzu, this also simply means "old man".  Accordingly Lau sees the text as one of several compilations of Taoist oral traditions that have been collected under the rubric of the "advice of a wise old man".  As with the Buddhist suttas, I think this goes a long way towards accounting for the modern reader's sense of the work's obscurity; it was never meant to be a stand alone piece of literature the way that, say, a Platonic dialog is.