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THE TAO OF POOH / THE TE OF PIGLET Benjamin Hoff

Egmont Books

Two books , now usually available as one, that use the characters and storylines of the Winnie-the-Pooh childrens books to explain the basics of Taoism. Hoff expands upon elements of the Pooh's adventures to shed light on this ancient and timeless philosophy, which translates as "the Way" froim it's Chinese beginings.

Hoff is to be commended for making the principals of Taoism understandable and relevent.Most previous encounters I've had with english versions of famous Taoist texts like the Tao De Jing have lost so much in translation and interpretation as to make them almost meaningless at times. It's all "the Heavens are one Finger. There is nothing. How So? So." sort of stuff.

By avoiding any attempt to deal literally with 6,000 year old chinese prose and instead focus on the core eternal attitudes of Taoism , Hoff suceeds where many more scholarly attempts before him have failed.

"...down through the centuries, man has develoiped a mindset that seperates him from the world of reality, the world of natural laws. This mind tries too hard, wears itself out, and ends up weak and sloppy. Such a mind, even if of high intellegence, is inefficent. It goes here and there, backwards and forewards, and fails to concentrate on what it's doing at the moment. It drives down the street in a fast moving car and think it's at the store, going over a grocery list. Then it wonders why accidents happen"

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