Like its accredited author, the Tao Te Ching is a multifaceted maze of understanding. Separated into 81 pithy chapters composed in verse, the Tao is one of two fundamental scriptures of the Taoist religion (the other being the Zhuangzi ). Its message is paradoxical, more than a little counterintuitive, and oftentimes self-contradictory. For some readers, these qualities express the complexity and nuance of the text. For others, they signal that it is not the work of a single thinker but a collection of oral proverbs circulating around the second half of the third century B.C.