Ken Liu, author of The Book That Finds the Way: Tao Te Ching. He sweeps the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards with the short story The Paper Menagerie and translates Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem into English, turning it into a global bestseller. /Courtesy of

"More knowledge only leads you down a narrower path, so it's better to stay empty and open." —from Ken Liu's "The book that finds the way, Daodejing"

As a reader it was far too late, but as someone crossing the river of time it was the perfect moment to read Laozi. It was Ken Liu's "The book that finds the way, Daodejing." I had previously read Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie," and as a Chinese American, I was often impressed by the layered strata of perspective he showed and his uncanny voice that seamlessly connects the boundary between the major and the minor.

Why did Ken Liu choose to talk about Laozi at a time like this? In this chaos when the world's value systems are shaken by confusion and desire amid AI and Trump's sudden acceleration.

He writes in the preface, "When Laozi was writing, it was a time of great inventions and technological and social change; everyone groped in the dark for the emergence of a new world order; the lords praised war; wise strategists fretted over hegemony and subjugation. Beauty contended with terror, and whether for an individual or a nation, no path out of the dark forest could be seen."

It was almost unbelievable that the 4th century B.C. felt so contemporary.

"The book that finds the way, Daodejing" is a book in which Ken Liu translates Laozi's aphorisms on life, relationships and freedom, adding his commentary. As in the confession that growing up Chinese was like breathing in Laozi through the air, Laozi's poetry and Ken Liu's prose read like a time-slip drama that goes back and forth over 2,000 years.

For example, the idea that governing a country is no different from cooking a small fish; the realization that all life is a dance where terror and beauty move together; and the admonition not to let victory make you do more, because you won only for lack of other choices, not to build power—these sapped the strength from my whole body the more I read.

A wheelwright and a butcher, Confucius and Zhuangzi, a turtle and the giant bird Peng came and went at every turn, telling stories so precious that the very air grew still.

The more I listened to this literary dialogue where Laozi cast the line and Ken Liu answered, the more it stripped me of my inner combativeness. Imagining choices beyond binaries and weighing experience and meaning outside the world of AI, before I knew it the old year had passed and the Lunar New Year was approaching.

To encounter Laozi's language—sharp without cutting, hopeful without being sweet—I asked for an interview with Ken Liu, the author of "The book that finds the way, Daodejing."

According to Sima Qian, Laozi was born in the state of Chu. He worked as the keeper of the archives of the Zhou court. Some records say he lived in the same era as Confucius, which would put him around the 6th century B.C. But some also see him as a contemporary of Zhuangzi, who lived in the 4th century B.C. Laozi left a single two-part book of about five thousand characters, which is the Daodejing.

Ken Liu's The Book That Finds the Way: Tao Te Ching, hailed as the most literary Tao Te Ching. /Courtesy of

-What led you to the Daodejing?

"Laozi's insight embraces uncertainty itself. He whispers that it's okay to surrender myself to the beauty and terror of the cosmos. What drew me to the Daodejing was precisely his radical openness."

-The Daodejing's refusal to be defined stands in stark contrast to modern AI's omniscient posture that coughs up an answer even if it has to hallucinate. How are you coping with the age of AI? What would Laozi have said about AI?

"I don't know Laozi's answer about AI, but if you ask an LLM, it can give you a confident one. That, right there, is the key to retaining our humanity. If you've used an AI that claims to converse with famous philosophers or thinkers, you'll know this. The answers are shallow, cringeworthy, and merely a mimicry of the intellectual."

The reason is simple. LLMs are trained on the records thinkers left behind, not their actual thoughts. Anyone who has written or created knows that behind one thing someone says are ten things they decided not to say. Every published sentence is a particular path that leads us somewhere at the end of a long journey.

To say that a model trained on someone's sentences can properly emulate that person's thinking is like saying you can know an entire iceberg by looking only at its tip. That's exactly why an LLM confidently declares it knows what Laozi would have said about AI and produces a bogus answer. All I can say is that I don't know."

A scene from the film The Matrix, which depicts humanity's future immersed in digital cocoons. /Courtesy of

-Is the sense of not knowing important?

"Saying 'I don't know' is the most human act. The moment we acknowledge ignorance and make empty space for intellectual potential, curiosity, learning, exploration and research begin. It's the process of following scales and footprints to find the dragon. When we say we don't know, we become the vessel that can hold truth.

As long as we don't lose the strength to say we don't know, no machine will replace us."

-However, given my ambition to convey the wisdom of 'how to work, how to relate, and how to grow old,' I do worry whether our interview can move beyond abstraction toward practical wisdom.

"As someone who has learned technology, I understand the Dao through technology. The technological era we live in is very different from Laozi's time. Today, the more technology advances, the more ancient philosophy is dismissed as useless—like people who think their grandparents' nagging isn't much help because the world has changed. But I don't agree, and I want to offer a new frame to explain why.

Humans are a technological species. Just as beavers express their nature through dams and bees through hives, people reveal themselves through technology. Therefore, it's impossible to understand humanity without understanding technology. Daoism is a philosophy that seeks to understand human nature, and it is in fact well suited to the age of advanced technology."

Ken Liu invokes Zhuangzi's fable of the wheelwright to speak to the futility of words. To craft a proper wheel, one must read the wood's nature, feel the flow of its grain, and understand how the rim wears differently in mud and sand in summer and in winter. Because neither wisdom nor knowledge can be fully conveyed in words, the artisan keeps carving wheels even at seventy. /Courtesy of

-You're saying Laozi's Dao is precisely the philosophy needed in a high-tech era?

"Yes. Laozi notes that humans express themselves through the things they make. So we look back at things to gain insight into ourselves. The notion that Daoism is anti-technology is truly an absurd reputation. Let me give an example.

"Thirty spokes converge in a single hub for the axle.

Because of the empty space, the wheel becomes useful to the cart.

Fired clay hardens around unseen possibilities.

Because of that emptiness, the vessel can hold things."

As in the line "The great vessel is uncarved," the vessel is a key concept in Daoism that implies technology. A vessel is also an enabler. Without a vessel, water can't be contained and spills into the ground. At the same time, a vessel confines water and keeps it within the vessel's shape. Like human nature, a vessel possesses both yin and yang."

-So we can find human nature in a vessel.

"Yes. By making some things possible, a vessel makes other things impossible. Thanks to a vessel, water is contained, but it cannot flow. Human nature is the same way. It is an unseen potential and also the solid wall that blocks that potential. Rather than rejecting technology, we must recognize and contemplate that nature.

As water is lifted when held in a vessel, we should yield to that power while not letting ourselves be trapped to stagnate and rot.

Today we are buried in artifacts and illusions created by technology. Amid our piles of possessions, what is the "empty space" that opens up possibilities for change and movement? In our minds, which we try to fill every gap with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, is there any blankness left in which to dream? A single passage can be so powerful in drawing out reflection that this alone could fill several books."

Thanks to the vessel, water is contained but cannot flow—technology and human nature show two sides of the same coin. /Courtesy of

-The Daodejing begins, "Nonbeing is the beginning of heaven and earth; being is the mother of the myriad things." As a scientist, how does this sentence strike you?

"One could take this literally and give a hasty answer that shoehorns modern science into a Daoist shell by arguing for the physics of the void or the fundamental unreality of reality. It's the same way LLMs perform intelligence through the rearrangement of words.

I won't do that. I will infer Laozi's intention and take the passage as a metaphor. The world may exist out there, but our minds are trapped inside our skulls and we experience the world mediated by sensation, subjectivity and language.

To understand the truths of the world, we must first dream deeply. Things exist only through thought, and all creation begins with the belief that something exists. This is the paradox of experience, in which we mortals must understand the infinite."

-I'm curious. If Laozi saw the current international climate, which is drifting toward confrontation, hatred and war, what would he say?

"'How could a lord of ten thousand chariots treat the fate of the world so lightly?

Frivolity has no root; purposeless haste has no lord.'

When mighty lords with ten thousand chariots clash on the battlefield, they threaten us that our well-being hinges on a binary choice. It was utter nonsense 2,000 years ago, and it is utter nonsense today. These lords treat the fate of the world and everyone else as if it were numbers in a ledger, stones on a Go board, or bodies for a meat grinder. Their words are purposeless agitation and hypocrisy, cut off from the reality of suffering.

Laozi, on the other hand, urges us to reject binary thinking. He advises us to seek rest from the easy indulgence of contention. He tells us to find refuge in the "weight of life" rooted in our mortality. The comfort Laozi offers comes from his plain refusal to submit to the "bad choices" that are presented as unavoidable."

-Then what does the Daodejing say the best leader looks like?

"The best ruler is one whom the people hardly know exists. When the work is done, the people believe they have done it themselves. Next best is the leader the people praise; next is the one they fear; the worst ruler is the one the people despise."

Trump forces "worse choices" every day with tariff bombs and deportations of immigrants. Laozi's words come to mind: "How can a lord with ten thousand chariots treat the world's fate so lightly?" /Courtesy of

-Let me ask a slightly offbeat question. Why are modern people drawn to Wittgenstein, who defines the world as language games, and to Laozi, who "tried to speak the unsayable"? Until recently, the star of Korea's humanities publishing scene was Schopenhauer.

"Thinking of LLMs may help answer this. LLMs know the world only through language and sometimes display intelligence that surpasses humans. But both Wittgenstein and Laozi would point out the same thing: LLMs in fact know nothing.

LLMs rearrange symbols with finesse, and their "intelligence" is merely mined from the quality datasets humans have built over millennia to surface their modes of thought in language. The factors that recently drove explosive advances in machine learning are datasets like Reddit, Wikipedia, GitHub and Stack Overflow. These are spaces where humans help each other through language.

The intelligence LLMs display is nothing but the ghost of kindness recorded in these datasets."

-A kind ghost...

"A ghost trained to rearrange words in place of experience is gaining authority in every field. People trust an LLM's answers more than any source. But neither philosopher centers language.

For Wittgenstein, words have meaning only in their concrete use within language games. For Laozi, words are traces left after meaning has passed—like the scales left where a dragon has gone—serving only to remind us of the Dao. Because imbuing meaning is the most human act, he asks us to go beyond language. The point is not to just read about how to swim, but to swim in the sea."

According to Laozi, the highest good is like water. In spring, water carries; in winter, ice supports. /Courtesy of

-You also spoke of the sea's grandeur through the frog in the well and the sea turtle. How does Daoism treat the sea?

"The reason the sea becomes a powerful metaphor in Daoism is that it symbolizes both the beauty and terror of the universe. This is crucial. Laozi is not the often-caricatured "New Age sage" who sees the cosmos as a personified being full of harmony and kindness. The universe is decidedly not benevolent. The sea can kill without the slightest hesitation.

A wave can swallow a castaway in an instant and leave not even a mist behind. And yet who can deny the sea's grandeur and beauty? It's no accident that children fall silent in awe when they first see the ocean. The sight simply takes your breath away.

To go out to sea, you must follow its patterns and yield to its power. Ships are designed not to fight the sea but to harmonize with its movement. They heave with the waves, run with the currents and move by the wind. The ancient Polynesian navigators learned to read the sea's currents and, by sailing along the "Dao" of a trackless ocean, built one of the greatest civilizations of the premodern world.

The sea is not something to be tamed. Nor is the universe. We should aspire to be the "wandering Peng" of the cosmos, or its sea version, the giant fish Kun (鯤)."

-I often stop not at grand statements but at practical admonitions, such as "When you do not prize talent, the desire to compete disappears." But today talent and display are the standards for almost all success and lifestyle. The same goes for infamous Silicon Valley stars like Elon Musk and pop stars who chase love and popularity. What do you think?

"As I said, we reveal our nature through what we make and choose. But there is a difference between what we think we want and what makes us happy. Tragically, modernity contains the error of a false equivalence that value and price are the same. If a price can be put on it, it's valuable; if not, it's worthless. That's foolish.

How much is a spouse's hug worth? A child's drawing? What about the last hour with your grandparents before they passed away? The most precious things that make us happy cannot be priced.

So don't worry too much about priced talent. The tiger is hunted for its beautiful fur, and the circus monkey, clever and quick, ends up in chains. When we reject price and accept value, we can walk our own path."

"AI completes our sentences, but the Tao Te Ching teaches us how to leave sentences incomplete," says Ken Liu. /Courtesy of

-You, too, are rich in talents many envy. Tell us about the pleasures and pains you feel moving among your three jobs: science fiction writer, futurist and translator.

"First of all, labels have always made me uncomfortable. They're useful for identification, but they carry the risk of definition. I don't understand putting people, objects or ideas into boxes. I don't know why my works are "SF." I don't even know why I'm a "translator." I can't guess why others think of me as a "futurist."

I just do what I find interesting. I enjoy writing stories in which metaphors become reality, literally. Some say my works are similar to "SF." Others say they aren't SF—probably because I don't fit in their boxes.

I also like reading ancient texts that have survived a thousand years and conveying the truths I find there into another language, so some call me a "translator." But others say I'm unqualified for reasons like lacking proper paperwork or titles.

I enjoy imagining the future and writing about it, and I sometimes earn money helping people think about the future in interesting ways. So some call me a "futurist," but many others say there's no such thing as a futurist, and even if there were, I wouldn't fit it."

-How do you deal with people who want definitions and compartments?

"I've never argued with people who try to put me in a box. Life is too short to fit into boxes, and I like to roam around. One advantage of not labeling what I do is that I don't have to wonder whether I'm allowed to try something new. There's no job description anyway.

What I do is very interesting, but debating what to call it is not interesting at all. Still, we live in a world where everything belongs in and is confined and blocked by labels, boxes, boundaries and neat compartments. Without a respectable label, people won't spend time on you.

You haven't changed at all—strange, isn't it? But maybe that's for the best. I'm too busy having fun to be sad about not fitting into imaginary lines. So I try to emulate the turtle in Zhuangzi's fable.

Just as the turtle preferred to drag its tail through the mud, I find joy in the interesting things I do; and as the turtle rebuffed the ministers who wanted to put its shell in a ceremonial vessel and left, I leave the debates over labels to others."

Ken Liu says that after conversing with Laozi's text, he feels the urge to write again. /Courtesy of

-You also wrote, "The unchanging surpasses ambition." What does that mean?

"That line is one of my favorites. It's a very simple statement about the true measure of success, but some take a lifetime to understand it.

"Those who are content are wealthy.

Those who are unchanging surpass ambition."

We are exposed to messages to compete and desire—because modernity is built on "growth." When people are content, the economic system immediately manufactures and stokes new desires and lacks. It's much like how cancer cells behave.

As a writer, I too am constantly pressed to measure my worth by how many books I've sold, what awards I've won and how many fans I have. But the end of that road is madness. If I measured success that way, I would be surrendering my self-worth to others' judgments. I would be no different from a weather vane that depends on the wind's whims."

-What's the crux?

"The first step to freedom is to transcend ambition—that is, to break free from the logic of cancer cells and the urge to please others."

-In the book, the butcher Pao Ding parts an ox with artistic movement, then immediately wipes and puts away the knife.

"The only way to sustain the joy of achievement is to step back at once."

A scene from the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. A work that visualizes Daoist thought well, its most powerful force is not Evelyn's might but Waymond's kindness. /Courtesy of

-As a reader, I was happy reading your translation. Did you feel the joy of achievement, too?

"I chose clarity over erudition. I captured what struck me most in the original, sketched it simply and moved toward plainness. It was a joy to find the path toward the Dao. The world offered new wonders, and I found joy in the most trivial things.

I write down what made me happy each day—very simple things, like my daughter's jokes, quiet time with my wife and a satisfying round of a game. I'm not saying I have realized the Dao or found it. That would be a very foolish thought. Those who believe they've found the Dao are farthest from it.

I simply no longer wander in the bustle of modernity where only price exists and value does not."

-Lastly, as Korea enters 2026 amid political and economic upheaval, please offer an attitude and advice to help our passionate readers get through the year.

"If I were to give advice here, I would be a poor Daoist thinker. I am ignorant and know nothing. Instead, I will borrow Laozi's words, which flow like water.

In society, goodness means becoming kind. In governance, goodness means becoming orderly. In work, goodness means becoming competent, and in action, goodness means becoming timely.

Empty yourself, and create with that potential. I hope each of you finds your own path to peace."

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