WENDAO · VERSION 1.0
Based primarily on the Mawangdui Silk Manuscript B, Wendao brings source text, textual notes, modern translation, interpretation, and daily practice into one quiet reading experience.
Today, Wendao 1.0 officially arrived on the Apple App Store.
It is currently available as a free download in App Store regions outside mainland China and supports iOS 15.0 or later. Readers who prefer not to install the app can continue using the web edition:
https://wendao.wonderelian.com
For me, this is more than a product release.
It is a milestone from a period in which I reread the Tao Te Ching, reconsidered how to live, and relearned how to make a quiet product.
Why Make Another Tao Te Ching App?
The internet is not short of original text, translations, or interpretations of the Tao Te Ching.
What we may truly lack is not more explanation, but a way of reading that is clearer, more honest, and closer to life as we live it now.
The Tao Te Ching often reaches us as a collection of famous lines.
“The highest goodness is like water,” “The Way follows what is natural,” “Govern through non-action” — the lines are familiar. But once removed from their chapter, textual version, and context, they easily become beautiful yet distant slogans.
I wanted to return these ancient words to their proper place:
to show where the characters came from, disclose where reconstruction occurred, explore what a sentence might mean, and allow it to meet our work, relationships, choices, and anxiety today.
Wendao is therefore not trying to give anyone the “correct answer.”
It offers a quiet entrance: slow down, read one chapter, and consider what that chapter might have to do with you.
Three Layers of Text: See the Boundaries Before Entering the Meaning
Using the Mawangdui Silk Manuscript B as its primary source, Wendao separates the text into three layers.
Layer one: transcription of Silk Manuscript B
The transcription preserves original characters, damage, and the limits of what can be identified wherever possible. Later judgments are not quietly disguised as “the original.”
Layer two: edited reading text
Necessary reconstructions, punctuation, and references to received editions are made explicitly, so readers know where changes have occurred.
Layer three: modern interpretation
Tone-marked pinyin, line-by-line modern Chinese, a chapter summary, and contemporary interpretation help today's reader enter the text rather than stopping at its surface.
I care deeply about this layering.
Respecting a classic transmitted for more than two thousand years does not mean refusing to explain it. Real respect means making the boundaries between source, editing, and understanding clear.
From “I Understand the Sentence” to “What Can I Do Today?”
If reading a chapter ends with “I think I understand it,” a large distance still remains between the text and life.
Alongside the source, translation, and interpretation, every chapter therefore includes three fuller reflections on what it may offer us.
Each chapter also includes one low-pressure practice for the day.
It does not ask us to transform our lives immediately, and it is not another habit-tracking task to complete.
It simply turns reading into one small action available now: answer more slowly, notice one response in the body, make one fewer decision driven by the urge to prove yourself, or let emotion pass before acting in a conflict.
The Tao Te Ching does not have to remain on a distant pedestal.
It can enter today's meeting, a relationship, a choice, or a sleepless night.
A Reading Tool You Can Open at Any Time—and Leave Quietly
Wendao contains all 81 chapters of the received text.
The contents, search, a chance encounter with one chapter, and continuous reading work together. Day and night modes and adjustable text size help each reader find a comfortable state.
All 81 core chapters and the reading interface are bundled with the app. No account is required, and the text is available offline.
I wanted it to be a low-pressure tool.
You can read carefully from chapter one to eighty-one, or encounter a single chapter on an ordinary day. You can take notes and keep thinking, or simply put the phone down when you finish.
A product does not need to compete endlessly for attention.
Sometimes the best experience is one that knows when to become quiet.
A Personal Guide: Not a Definition, but Another Angle for Self-Observation
Wendao also offers an optional “Personal Guide.”
Readers who choose to provide birth information receive content shaped by type, strategy, authority, profile, and definition, followed by twelve more specific themes for self-observation.
I do not believe any system can tell a person who they should become.
The Personal Guide is closer to a mirror. It does not make decisions for you; it offers new questions for observing your rhythm, relationships, way of working, and genuine responses.
Its content is for self-observation. It is not medical, psychological, or legal advice, and it is not a prediction of fate.
Knowing yourself does not mean attaching a fixed label to yourself.
It means seeing yourself more honestly while you change.
Rest, Wholeness, Slowness, and Water
While making Wendao, I gradually gathered four Chinese phrases that became important to me.
Yixiu: care for the body first, and care for emotion too.
Buer: accept that life contains both peaks and valleys.
Sanman: slow down, take your time, and slowly become.
Rushui: do not cling to one identity; keep your inner nature while moving with change.
Together they became one line:
Know yourself within.
Move like water through the world.
Wendao 1.0 is only a beginning.
I will continue refining the text, the reading experience, and additional languages. I also welcome your questions and reflections from using it.
Be real. Live fluidly.
May we all preserve a little room to slow down in a very fast world.
App Store and Web
Wendao 1.0 is available free in App Store regions outside mainland China and supports iOS 15.0 or later.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wendao-daodejing/id6796945428
No installation is required for the web edition:
https://wendao.wonderelian.com
WENDAO
Be real. Live fluidly.