About Owen Marsh and The Tao Path

I'm Owen Marsh. I write The Tao Path at followthetao.com — a guide to Taoist philosophy and how it applies to the life most of us are actually living: jobs, families, decisions that don't have right answers, the ordinary frustrations that nobody mentions in the introduction to Eastern philosophy.

I came to Taoism in my mid-twenties, the way many people do. A friend handed me Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching off her shelf and told me to keep it. I read it that weekend and thought it was beautiful and basically incomprehensible. Then I read it again a year later and found something different in it. Then again, and again. Over the following decade I kept circling back — through Le Guin, through Watson's Zhuangzi, through Alan Watts (who's brilliant and often wrong), through more rigorous translations like Red Pine, through the working scholars who actually argue with each other about what these texts mean.

I'm not a sinologist. I don't read classical Chinese. I'm not a religious teacher and I haven't trained with a lineage. What I am is a careful reader who thinks these texts are routinely mistranslated, oversimplified, or flattened into something that sounds like advice from a wellness app. The Tao Te Ching is not "go with the flow." Zhuangzi is not a mystic. The actual philosophy is stranger, more demanding, and more useful than the popular versions suggest.

This site is my attempt to do better than that. I read multiple translations and credit them. I cite chapter numbers so you can check me. I draw on the working scholars who've taught me how to read these texts more carefully — Edward Slingerland on wu wei, A.C. Graham on the Zhuangzi, Hans-Georg Moeller on Daoist philosophy. Where I have an opinion I say so. Where I'm uncertain I say that too.

I live in Europe. I write here under a pen name because I want the site to be judged on whether it gets the philosophy right, not on who I am at my day job. The email address on the contact page is real; reader corrections are welcome and have already made several articles better.

This site is reader-supported through Amazon affiliate links to books I genuinely recommend. The full disclosure is on the affiliate disclosure page.

— Owen Marsh