I once read a book which made a pretty convincing case that the Tao Te Ching was written as a mystically-worded manual of statecraft for a totalitarian regime, pointing out the context of the times (the pre-unification period offering many other works like that), translation issues, and similarities of the passages about keeping the people ignorant and simple to other passages in statecraft manuals like the Book of Lord Shang. Ever since, I've been a bit dubious about how well we can understand classical Chinese thought...