In The Dao of Translation, the author puts Daoism (and ancient Confucianism) into dialogue with nineteenth-century Western theorists of the sign, Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure (and their followers), in order to develop an "icotic" understanding of the tensions between habit and surprise in the activity of translating. For the first time, the author discusses both Hartama-Heinonen on Peirce on semiosis as mystical philosophy and Simeoni on Bourdieu on habitus as agent-based sociology in the same context, bringing much interest to scholars, both professors and postgrads of translation as well as scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy.