The book
The Tao Te Ching is eighty one short chapters, about five thousand characters in the original Chinese, and you can read the whole of it in an afternoon. It is attributed to Lao Tzu, a name that simply means the Old Master, and the tradition says he was a records keeper who grew weary of the state he served and rode west to leave it. At the mountain pass, the story goes, the gatekeeper recognized him and refused to let him through until he wrote down what he knew. The book is what he left at the gate.
That is legend, and scholars will tell you the text was more likely gathered over generations. It does not matter much. Whoever wrote it, it has been translated more times than almost any book on earth, and it opens with the most honest first line in the literature of the Absolute.
The name that fails
The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
Tao means way, or road. The line says that any way you can actually walk, any way that can be pointed out, mapped, or spoken, is not the enduring one. The book then makes the same admission about its own title: the name that can be named is not the enduring name. Everything sayable belongs to the world of things that arise and pass. What the things arise from has no name, not because a name is forbidden but because names are handles, and the ground has nothing to grip.
If you have read the Brahman page, you have met this move before as neti neti, and Eckhart made it when he pointed past the word God to the Godhead. Three hills, one refusal. The Tao Te Ching simply puts the refusal in the opening line, before it says anything else at all.
Water and the valley
Where other traditions reach upward for their images, this book reaches down. Its picture of the highest is the lowest: water, which benefits everything and fights nothing, settling in the places people look down on. Valleys, not peaks. The hollow of a bowl, which is the only part that holds anything. The empty hub at the center of a wheel, without which the spokes are firewood.
The highest excellence is like that of water.
The teaching inside the imagery is that what looks like nothing is what everything depends on. Usefulness lives in the empty part. It is the same claim the other witnesses make about the ground of being, told with a carpenter's examples instead of a theologian's.
Not doing
The method of the book is wu wei, which is usually translated as not doing, and is better heard as not forcing. The book says that in the pursuit of learning something is added every day, and in the pursuit of the Tao something is dropped every day. That is the front page of this site again. Subtraction. The Tao is not reached by effort, because effort is one more thing in the way, one more wave claiming to be the ocean.
Nothing in the book asks you to believe anything. It asks you to stop shoving. Water finds the low place by itself when nobody stirs it, and the book's wager is that the mind does too.
The same ground
The Tao Te Ching owes nothing to India and nothing to the church that would try Eckhart eighteen centuries later. It grew from its own soil, out of a civilization watching rivers and dynasties rise and fall. And digging straight down through that soil it struck what the others struck: an unnameable ground that everything depends on, reached not by adding but by letting go. The reports agree at the far end, and this one arrived in the fewest words.
Where to begin
Begin at chapter one and do not hurry. Most chapters are a few lines, and the right pace is one or two in a sitting, the way you would drink something hot. The old translation by James Legge is long out of copyright and free everywhere online; its English is Victorian and a little starched, but the water still moves under it. When a line stops you, let it. Being stopped is the book working.