"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."
Eighty-one brief chapters attributed to Laozi, a possibly legendary archivist said to have written them down before vanishing westward through a mountain pass. It is the shortest of the great scriptures and the hardest to exhaust, a manual for moving with the grain of reality instead of against it, with water as its favorite teacher: soft, yielding, and capable of carving canyons.
Wu wei: effortless action, doing by not forcing, is the design philosophy of requests stated 2,500 years early. The best interface is the one that gets out of the way; the best code disappears into the task. For Humans is the Tao Te Ching applied to APIs. The book's opening line, that the nameable Tao is not the real one, is also the vault's standing caution about The Un-Englishable, the most important things resist their own documentation.
Related
- Books: The shelf
- Taoism: The tradition it anchors
- For Humans: Wu wei as design philosophy
- The Un-Englishable: On what the text says cannot be said