I stumbled across it when I was about twelve and made a habit of reading it fairly frequently for the following fifteen years or so.
In my mid twenties I was in a graduate psychology program at a Buddhist college and one of my instructors was a Chinese Buddhist nun. She said that she knew of the Tao Te Ching, but had not read it, so I brought her a copy with the text in Chinese, as well as in English translation.
On a subsequent day of the class she took a little time to comment on it. She said it was like the answers in the back of a mathematics textbook: the answers were correct, of course, but they weren't useful unless you first did the work needed to correctly understand the corresponding questions.
There was one other occasion when making a gift of that book to someone elicited a memorable response: when I was in high school my neighbor from India had a baby, and her father, a philosophy professor from Delhi, came to stay for a few months. A friend of mine and I struck up a friendship with him. On one visit we gave him a copy of the Tao Te Ching, which he had not read before. He responded by giving me a beautiful copy of the Rig Veda, and giving my friend a sitar.
> the answers were correct, of course, but they weren't useful unless you first did the work needed to correctly understand the corresponding questions.
That's a beautiful way to put it. Actually explains why some people find the books useless - they just didn't experience questions at the stage of their lives.
In my mid twenties I was in a graduate psychology program at a Buddhist college and one of my instructors was a Chinese Buddhist nun. She said that she knew of the Tao Te Ching, but had not read it, so I brought her a copy with the text in Chinese, as well as in English translation.
On a subsequent day of the class she took a little time to comment on it. She said it was like the answers in the back of a mathematics textbook: the answers were correct, of course, but they weren't useful unless you first did the work needed to correctly understand the corresponding questions.
There was one other occasion when making a gift of that book to someone elicited a memorable response: when I was in high school my neighbor from India had a baby, and her father, a philosophy professor from Delhi, came to stay for a few months. A friend of mine and I struck up a friendship with him. On one visit we gave him a copy of the Tao Te Ching, which he had not read before. He responded by giving me a beautiful copy of the Rig Veda, and giving my friend a sitar.