Taoism

Laozi

老子 · 李耳 · 老聃 · 太上老君

c. 571 BCE – ?Historicity debated

Founding figure of Taoism, to whom Chinese tradition attributes the Daodejing, the short book of the Way and its Virtue. Sima Qian describes him as an archivist at the Zhou court, consulted by Confucius, who vanished westward after dictating five thousand characters. Modern scholarship holds that the text took shape between the fourth and third centuries BCE and that its author is largely a traditional construct; the Guodian and Mawangdui manuscripts are now the firm ground on which the debate rests.

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works: 12works
editions: 26editions
quotes: 10quotes
videos: 11videos
images: 8images

Laozi cabalgando un buey · Public domain

In their words

«The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.»

Daodejing, capítulo 1 (trad. inglesa de Legge, 1891)

To begin, one work

Daodejing (Tao Te Ching). The Book of the Way and its Virtue

Read the full text

Their central idea

Dao (the Way): The word dao means "road", "way" and, by extension, "method" or "doctrine"; all Chinese schools use it.

See in context

Biography

5 min read

A name that means "the Old Master"

Of Laozi we know, with any certainty, very little; of his book, more each year. That asymmetry defines the figure. The name by which we know him is not a personal name but a title: Lao ("old", "venerable") and zi ("master"). Tradition assigns him a surname, Li, a given name, Er ("ear"), and a courtesy or posthumous name, Dan; places his birth in the village of Quren, in the county of Ku, within the southern state of Chu, in what is now Luyi, Henan province; and makes him a contemporary—somewhat older—of Confucius, that is, it sets him in the sixth century BCE. All of this derives, ultimately, from a single page: chapter 63 of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) by Sima Qian, written around 94 BCE, four centuries after the events it claims to relate.

What is remarkable about that page is its honesty. Sima Qian relates that Laozi was "historian of the archives" at the royal court of Zhou, that Confucius travelled to consult him about the rites, that on seeing the dynasty decline he departed westward and that, at the request of Yin Xi, the keeper of the pass, he wrote a book in two parts on the meaning of the Way (dao) and Virtue (de), of somewhat more than five thousand characters, after which "no one knows where he ended." But the historian then doubts aloud: perhaps Laozi was Lao Laizi, also from Chu, author of another book; perhaps he was the Grand Historian Dan, who one hundred and twenty-nine years after the death of Confucius visited Duke Xian of Qin. "No one in the world knows whether this is so or not," he concludes. It is the earliest acknowledgement that the figure was already, in Han times, a problem.

What the texts before the Shiji say

Before Sima Qian, the name Lao Dan appears in the Zhuangzi, in the Lüshi chunqiu, in the Han Feizi—which devotes two chapters of commentary to him—and in the Liji, where Confucius recalls having learned from him details of funeral rites. In the Zhuangzi the Old Master is a sage who receives the visit of a dazzled Confucius and who even dies, mourned by his disciples, in a celebrated passage of the third chapter. None of these mentions allows us to date a person; all of them show, however, that by the fourth century BCE there already existed the figure of an aged master linked to a knowledge of the Way, and that this figure was used to measure—and sometimes to diminish—that of Confucius.

Contemporary research, from A. C. Graham to D. C. Lau, has reconstructed with considerable plausibility how three threads were fused into a single character: the master of rites whom Confucius consults, the Taoist sage of the Zhuangzi, and the historian Dan of the Zhou court. The result is a composite biography, useful to a school that needed a founder earlier than Confucius. This is why the entry classifies him as a figure of debated historicity: there is no reason to deny that such a master existed, but neither is there any document that proves it.

The book: from silk scroll to bamboo slips

The Daodejing—also called simply the Laozi—is a text of some five thousand characters, traditionally divided into 81 short chapters, a good part of them in rhymed verse. It speaks of an unnameable Way that precedes heaven and earth, of the strength of the soft over the hard, of the ruler who achieves more the less he intervenes, of the uncarved block, of water that overcomes everything because it does not compete. Its form is aphoristic and its authorship collective: specialists agree that it is an anthology of sayings from a wisdom tradition, gathered and polished over generations.

For centuries the oldest available text was the one fixed by the commentary of Wang Bi (226–249), together with the recension attributed to the "Old Man of the Riverbank" (Heshang Gong). Two archaeological discoveries changed the picture. In 1973, in tomb 3 at Mawangdui, in Changsha (Hunan), sealed in 168 BCE, two complete copies on silk appeared, called A and B: the first in small seal script, earlier than 195 BCE; the second in clerical script, from the following decade. Both present the section on Virtue before the section on the Way, so that the book could have been called the Dedaojing. In 1993, in tomb 1 at Guodian, near Jingmen (Hubei), dated to around 300 BCE, 71 bamboo slips were recovered, distributed in three bundles, containing material corresponding to some thirty-one chapters of the received text, in a different order and without the hostility towards Confucian benevolence and righteousness that characterises the later version. They are, at present, the oldest witnesses of any Chinese classic, and they prove that by the end of the fourth century BCE the Laozi was already in circulation, though not yet in its final form.

From philosopher to god

Laozi's later fate was extraordinary. Under the Han dynasty, as the Daodejing came to be read as a manual of government and of longevity, its author rose from master to immortal. In 165 CE Emperor Huan offered sacrifices to him at Luyi and commissioned from Bian Shao the Inscription for Laozi (Laozi ming), in which the Old Master already appears as a being who transforms himself through the ages of the world. In the religious Taoism born with the Celestial Masters he would be the Most High Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun), revealer of scriptures, and in the polemic with Buddhism it would be said that, after crossing the pass, he travelled to India to "convert the barbarians" and teach as the Buddha. The Tang dynasty, whose imperial house bore the surname Li, adopted him as an ancestor: in 666 Emperor Gaozong granted him the title "August Emperor of the Mysterious Origin."

The West discovered him late and all at once: the first complete translation into a European language is the French one by Stanislas Julien (1842), followed by the English of James Legge (1891) and the German of Richard Wilhelm (1911). Since then the Daodejing has been, with the Bible, one of the most translated books in the world, and Laozi—the man of whom we know nothing—one of the most recognisable voices in the history of thought. What that voice says, and not who uttered it, is what this entry attempts to document.

Sources: Sima Qian. Shiji (Memorias históricas), juan 63, «Laozi Han Fei liezhuan», y juan 47, «Kongzi shijia». c. 94 a. C. Ed. Zhonghua shuju, Pekín, 1959. Trad. francesa parcial: Chavannes, Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, 1895–1905. · Lau, D. C. (trad.). Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1963 (introducción y apéndice «The problem of authorship»). ISBN 9780140441314. · Henricks, Robert G. Lao-Tzu: Te-Tao Ching. A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts. Ballantine Books, Nueva York, 1989. ISBN 9780345370990. · Henricks, Robert G. Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian. Columbia University Press, Nueva York, 2000. Edición príncipe: Jingmen shi bowuguan (ed.), Guodian Chu mu zhujian. Wenwu chubanshe, Pekín, 1998. · Kohn, Livia y LaFargue, Michael (eds.). Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1998. Incluye A. C. Graham, «The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan».

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

571 BCE7071113521993

c. 571 BCEQuren, condado de Ku, Chu (hoy Luyi, Henan)

Traditional birth

Date and place assigned by late tradition to the birth of Li Er, "Laozi". The Shiji gives the place but not the date; the year is a convention that makes him somewhat older than Confucius. Years BCE are expressed as negative numbers.

TraditionSima Qian. Shiji (Memorias históricas), juan 63, «Laozi Han Fei liezhuan», y juan 47, «Kongzi shijia». c. 94 a. C. Ed. Zhonghua shuju, Pekín, 1959. Trad. francesa parcial: Chavannes, Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, 1895–1905.

c. 571 BCE
Traditional birth
Date and place assigned by late tradition to the birth of Li Er, "Laozi". The Shiji gives the place but not the date; the year is a convention that makes him somewhat older than Confucius. Years BCE are expressed as negative numbers.
Tradition
VI century BCE
Archivist at the Zhou court
According to Sima Qian, Laozi was "historian in charge of the archives" (shoucangshi zhi shi) of the Zhou royal house. It is the only office tradition attributes to him.
Tradition
c. 518 BCE
Confucius consults him on the rites
The Shiji (chs. 47 and 63), the Liji and the Zhuangzi relate a visit by Confucius to the Old Master. The date is a conjecture of commentators; for critical scholarship the episode is a construction meant to subordinate Confucius.
Tradition
V century BCE
Departure westward and dictation of the book
Seeing the decline of Zhou, Laozi departs; the keeper of the pass, Yin Xi, asks him to set down his knowledge and he composes the book in two parts on the Way and Virtue. "No one knows where he ended."
Tradition
c. 300 BCE
Guodian slips: the earliest witness
Tomb 1 at Guodian is sealed with 71 bamboo slips containing material from some 31 chapters of the Laozi, in three bundles. It proves the text was already circulating by the late 4th century BCE, though not in its final form.
Documented
c. 240 BCE
Wang Bi's commentary
The young philosopher Wang Bi (226–249) fixes the text and commentary that would be, for seventeen centuries, the reference version of the Daodejing.
Documented
c. 195 BCE – 168 BCE
Mawangdui silk copies
Two complete silk copies of the Laozi (A and B), the first earlier than 195 BCE and the second from the following years, are placed in tomb 3, sealed in 168 BCE. Both put the De section before the Dao section.
Documented
165 BCE
Emperor Huan offers him sacrifices
Emperor Huan of the Han sends offerings to Laozi's birthplace and Bian Shao composes the Inscription for Laozi (Laozi ming), the earliest testimony of his deification.
Documented
c. 94 BCE
Sima Qian writes the first biography
Chapter 63 of the Shiji gathers what was told of Laozi and confesses the doubt: he may have been Li Er, Lao Laizi or the historian Dan. It is the source of almost everything tradition would repeat.
Documented
666
Ancestor of the Tang imperial house
Emperor Gaozong, surnamed Li, grants Laozi the title Taishang Xuanyuan Huangdi ("August Emperor of the Mysterious Origin"), consecrating the dynasty's claim of descent.
Documented
1842
First complete translation into a European language
Stanislas Julien publishes Lao Tseu, Tao Te King at the Royal Press in Paris. Legge (1891) and Wilhelm (1911) would follow.
Documented
1973
Discovery of the Mawangdui manuscripts
The excavation of Mawangdui tomb 3 brings to light the two silk copies of the Laozi, now in the Hunan Museum.
Documented
October 1993
Discovery of the Guodian slips
The Jingmen Museum excavates Guodian tomb 1 and recovers the three bundles of Laozi slips, published in 1998.
Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Traditional attribution · c. 300 BCE

Daodejing (Tao Te Ching). The Book of the Way and its Virtue

道德經

Some five thousand characters in 81 short chapters, many in verse, divided into two parts: the Way (chs. 1–37) and Virtue (38–81). It sets out an unnameable Dao, prior to heaven and earth, which engenders everything without possessing it; it proposes to ruler and sage non-action (wuwei), spontaneity (ziran), the simplicity of the uncarved block and the strength of the soft, symbolised by water. Its tone shifts between mysticism, political strategy and critique of civilisation. It is, with the Bible, one of the most translated books in the world.

Buy the book View the book Read the full text

15 editions · amazon.com

Laozi

The Guodian Laozi (bundles A, B and C)

The Conscious Library

Manuscript · c. 300 BCE

The Guodian Laozi (bundles A, B and C)

郭店楚簡《老子》甲、乙、丙

The 71 slips contain some two thousand characters corresponding to 31 chapters of the received text, in a different order and with substantive variants: missing, for instance, is the attack on benevolence and righteousness in chapter 18. Bundle C is accompanied by the Taiyi sheng shui ("The Great One Gave Birth to Water"), a cosmological text unknown until then. Published in 1998 as Guodian Chu mu zhujian, they are the oldest witness of the Laozi and have forced the text's history to be rewritten.

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2 editions

Manuscript · c. 195 BCE

The Mawangdui Laozi (silk copies A and B)

馬王堆帛書《老子》甲本、乙本

Both copies place the part on Virtue (De) before that on the Way (Dao), lack chapter divisions and present hundreds of variants against Wang Bi's text, many minor and some weighty (such as "the Way is great" instead of "Heaven is great" in chapter 25). Published in 1980 by Wenwu, they formed the basis of Henricks's translation (1989) and revolutionised study of the text.

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2 editions · amazon.com

Complete works (12)

Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。

VerifiedDaodejing, capítulo 1 (trad. inglesa de Legge, 1891)

1 / 10

Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (3)

«If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.»
Appears in no chapter of the Daodejing nor in any ancient source on Laozi. It has circulated online since the early 21st century; its psychological vocabulary ("depressed", "anxious") is modern.
«Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.»
Attributed indiscriminately to Laozi, Confucius or a "Chinese proverb". It is found neither in the Daodejing nor in the Analects; its modern form is first documented in English in Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie's novel Mrs. Dymond (1885).
«Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.»
No correspondence in the Daodejing. Possibly a very loose paraphrase of chapter 67 ("compassion gives courage"), turned into a sentimental maxim.

Last words

There are no verifiable records of their last words.

No record exists. Sima Qian closes the biography with "no one knows where he ended" (莫知其所終). The Zhuangzi (ch. 3) relates the death of Lao Dan and his disciples' mourning, but as a parable on attachment, without final words; later hagiographies make him an immortal and therefore deathless.

Source: Sima Qian. Shiji (Memorias históricas), juan 63, «Laozi Han Fei liezhuan», y juan 47, «Kongzi shijia». c. 94 a. C. Ed. Zhonghua shuju, Pekín, 1959. Trad. francesa parcial: Chavannes, Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, 1895–1905.

Ask

What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
The Dao that can be named is not the constant Dao
The unnameableStated explicitly
The Daodejing, the text attributed to Laozi, opens with the warning that the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao, and the name that can be named is not the constant name. In chapter 25 it describes something formed in undifferentiation, prior to heaven and earth, silent and empty, that may be the mother of the world: the text declares it does not know its name and calls it Dao for want of another. In chapter 4 it suggests it seems to precede even the ancestral Lord (di). The Dao is not a personal God: chapter 5 states that heaven and earth are not benevolent and treat beings as straw dogs. Nor is it mere nothing: it begets, nourishes and does not possess. The ultimate here is what precedes every name, which language can only point to obliquely.
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Who am I? Is there a true self?
No theory of the self: it advises emptying it, putting it last, knowing oneself
Did not address it
The Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, does not pose the question of a true self in terms of a soul or a Self. What it offers are practical indications about the self. Chapter 7 says that the sage puts his person last and is therefore first, and that precisely by having no private interests he fulfils them. Chapter 13 links great afflictions to having a body, understood as the self that protects itself. Chapter 19 recommends lessening the private and reducing desires, and chapter 33 distinguishes knowing others, which is intelligence, from knowing oneself, which is clarity. Its ideal is the simplicity of the uncarved block. From all this one can infer a distrust of the self-assertive self, but no doctrine of what the self is.
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Why do we suffer?
Abandoning the Way brings desire, rivalry and disaster
Social and moral disorderInferred from their doctrine
The Daodejing does not pose suffering as a metaphysical problem, but it does diagnose the causes of disorder. When the great Dao is abandoned, says chapter 18, humaneness and righteousness appear as belated remedies; when cleverness and cunning arise, great hypocrisy appears. Chapter 46 states that there is no greater misfortune than not knowing contentment and no greater fault than the desire to acquire; chapter 12, that the five colours blind the eyes and rare goods lead conduct astray. Anxiety, war and ruin arise from forced action, the urge to accumulate and estrangement from natural simplicity. The remedy is not a salvation but a return: acting without forcing (wuwei), knowing when enough is enough, and going back to the root, which chapter 16 calls stillness.
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What happens after death?
Returning to the root: the text describes no personal beyond
Silence or reserveInferred from their doctrine
The Daodejing does not describe what happens to the person after death. It speaks of death, but in another register. Chapter 16 presents the life of all beings as a return to the root, which it calls stillness and the fulfilment of destiny; chapter 50 contrasts those who cling to life and shorten it with the one who knows how to preserve it; chapter 74 warns that it is useless to threaten with death a people that no longer fears it. Chapter 33 contains a disputed line — one who dies without perishing is long-lived — which some read as permanence in the Dao and others as lasting fame. What the text allows us to affirm is an attitude: to accept the cycle of arising and returning, neither forcing life nor fearing its end. The quest for physical or spiritual immortality belongs to the later Daoist tradition.
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How is liberation or salvation attained?
There is no salvation to attain: one returns to the root, to the Way
Through virtue and harmonyInferred from their doctrine
The Daodejing does not speak of salvation or liberation in a religious sense. What it proposes is a return: attaining utmost emptiness, keeping stillness and watching the ten thousand things go back to their root, what chapter 16 calls knowing the constant. The path is not cumulative: whoever devotes himself to learning increases daily, and whoever devotes himself to the Way decreases, until reaching non-action (wuwei), according to chapter 48. Hence the call to simplicity, to fewer desires and to abandoning cleverness and prescriptive morality (chapter 19). The fruit is not escape from the world but living in accord with the course of things, without forcing it, and thereby enduring without danger.
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Is a teacher necessary?
The sage teaches without words; slighting the teacher, however clever, is great confusion
Helpful but not indispensableInferred from their doctrine
The Daodejing does not treat discipleship as an institution, but it offers two indications. The first is that the sage teaches without words (chapter 2; also 43): his teaching is his way of being, not a doctrinal body or an authority imposed. The second is in chapter 27: the good man is the teacher of the one who is not good, and the one who is not good is material for the good; not to value the teacher nor care for the material is, however much one knows, a great confusion. The teacher therefore has value, though his way of transmitting is silent example. Since the Way cannot be spoken (chapter 1), no verbal instruction delivers it entirely.
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Is the world real?
The ten thousand things are born of the Way and return to it in constant cycle
Natural order in transformationStated explicitly
The Daodejing does not ask whether the world is real or illusory; it describes it as a process. The Way begets the one, the one the two, the two the three, and the three the ten thousand things (chapter 42); things arise from being and being from non-being (chapter 40), and all eventually return to their root (chapter 16). The course of the world is an alternation of opposites that generate each other, soft and hard, full and empty, and the Way follows what is so of itself (ziran, chapter 25). The world is therefore fully real but changing; wisdom consists in attuning to that course without forcing it.
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What is love?
The highest good is like water: it benefits without contending or proclaiming itself
What appears when the self ceasesInferred from their doctrine
The Daodejing distrusts love understood as a virtue to be preached. Chapter 5 says that Heaven and Earth are not benevolent (ren) and treat beings as straw dogs; chapter 18, that humaneness and righteousness appear when the great Dao has been lost; chapter 38, that superior virtue does not regard itself as virtuous and therefore has virtue. Against the cultivated benevolence of the Confucians, the text proposes a goodness without self-assertion: that of water, which benefits all beings and does not contend with them (ch. 8), and that of the sage, who puts himself last and therefore comes first (ch. 7). Among its three treasures, chapter 67 names compassion (ci), comparable to a mother's care, from which courage is born. True love is not manufactured: it flows when the urge to stand out ceases.
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Are we free, or is everything determined?
The Daodejing does not pose freedom: it proposes moving with the Dao
Did not address it
The *Daodejing* does not know the dilemma between free will and determinism as the West framed it, and attributing a position to it would be anachronistic. What it offers is something else: the Dao acts without acting and nothing is left undone (ch. 37), and the sage imitates that non-forcing (*wuwei*). In chapter 16, returning to the root is stillness, and stillness is «returning to one's destiny» (*fuming*): destiny is not an imposed chain but each being's own course, to which it is fitting to return. Chapter 73 adds that Heaven's net is vast and wide-meshed, yet nothing slips through. The freedom the text cares about is not choosing among options but ceasing to resist the natural course of things.
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Why meditate or pray?
Empty and still oneself to watch all things return to their root
Seeing reality as it isInferred from their doctrine
The *Daodejing* describes no meditation technique, but it contains passages the Daoist tradition read as such. Chapter 16 asks one to reach utmost emptiness and hold fast to stillness; then, as the ten thousand beings arise together, one watches their return: all things flourish and go back to their root. Chapter 10 asks whether one can embrace unity without parting from it, make the breath soft as a newborn's and cleanse the mysterious mirror until it is spotless. Chapter 48 adds that the Way is followed by diminishing each day. The aim is not an extraordinary experience, but to see clearly the natural movement of things and stop getting in its way.
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Can reason know the ultimate?
The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao
The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly
The *Daodejing* opens by denying that the ultimate can be captured in words: the Way that can be spoken is not the enduring Way, and the name that can be named is not the enduring name (ch. 1). Throughout the text accumulated knowledge appears as an obstacle: whoever devotes himself to learning increases each day, whoever devotes himself to the Way diminishes each day (ch. 48); the one who knows does not speak and the one who speaks does not know (ch. 56). This is not irrationalism but the conviction that the Dao precedes every conceptual distinction and is known only by ceasing to impose categories on it. The knowledge it proposes is of another order: clarity (*ming*) in knowing oneself and in contemplating the return of things.
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Withdraw from the world or transform it?
Governing without forcing: of the best ruler the people barely know he exists
Order societyStated explicitly
Although the legend recorded by Sima Qian tells that Laozi left the Zhou court and departed westward, the Daodejing is largely addressed to the ruler. Its ideal is not withdrawal but an order achieved without imposing: of the best ruler the people barely know he exists (ch. 17); the more prohibitions, the poorer the people, and the sage does not act and the people transform themselves (ch. 57); governing a great state is like frying a small fish, without stirring it too much (ch. 60). Chapter 80 describes a small, sparsely populated community, content with what it has, where the neighbours' cocks can be heard and no one feels the need to travel. Wisdom is realised in the world and in politics, but through non-action (wuwei): reducing desires, weapons and laws until the natural order is restored.
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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

They clash onFundamental disagreement

Laozi · Teresa of Ávila

A Thou who loves versus a Way without a name

For Teresa of Ávila the Absolute is a Thou: the Book of Her Life (ch. 8) defines prayer as friendly converse with the one we know loves us, and in the seventh dwelling places of the Interior Castle the three Persons of the Trinity communicate themselves to the soul and remain in it. The Daodejing opens by warning that the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao; in chapter 25 it says it does not know its name and calls it Dao for want of another, and in chapter 5 it states that heaven and earth are not benevolent and treat beings as straw dogs. Teresa converses with the ultimate, which knows, seeks and loves her; the Daodejing points to it sideways, as a faceless mother that gives birth and does not possess. In her the Absolute is relationship; in the text, source.

Why: The contradiction is substantive, not verbal. Teresa writes within the Catholic faith and for nuns who pray; her language is that of the revelation of a God who has made himself known as a person in Christ, and her whole itinerary depends on someone answering. The Daodejing is an anthology of aphorisms from the fourth and third centuries BCE, addressed partly to rulers, which describes the course of things and distrusts any preached benevolence. There is a point of contact: Teresa too admits that what is received in the higher dwelling places exceeds the understanding. But in her that ineffability is that of a friend too great; in the Daodejing, that of a principle that is no one's friend.

They clash onFundamental disagreement

Laozi · Confucius

Two orders for a world at war: ritual that gives form and the Way that removes it

Both seek order and both locate wisdom in government, not in withdrawal: Confucius answers the hermits that one cannot live with birds and beasts (Analects 18.6), and the Daodejing wants a ruler whose existence the people barely notice (ch. 17). But the remedy is opposite. Confucius orders through virtue, ritual and the rectification of names: let the prince be a prince and the father a father (12.11). The Daodejing sees those very virtues as symptoms of the illness: when the great Dao is abandoned, humaneness and righteousness appear (ch. 18), and ritual is the husk of loyalty and the beginning of disorder (ch. 38). One adds cultivated form; the other removes it until the natural course of things restores itself.

Why: The conflict is real and polemical, though between texts and schools rather than persons. The Daodejing names and discredits the central Confucian concepts, humaneness, righteousness and ritual, which suggests it was composed, at least in part, against that school. The meeting between Confucius and Laozi recounted by Sima Qian in the Records of the Grand Historian (ch. 63) belongs to legend and is not considered historical. The underlying difference is anthropological: Confucius trusts that cultivated form educates human nature; the Daodejing suspects that every imposed form falsifies it. Chinese culture eventually read them as complementary, one for public office and the other for retirement.

They agree on

Laozi · Jiddu Krishnamurti

What can be said is not it: the nameless Way and the pathless land

The Daodejing opens by denying that the ultimate can be captured in words (ch. 1) and adds that whoever pursues learning increases daily while whoever pursues the Way decreases daily (ch. 48), and that the one who knows does not speak (ch. 56). Krishnamurti holds that thought is the response of memory and therefore always limited and old, unable to touch the immeasurable, and that every God that is thought is a projection (Freedom from the Known; The Ending of Time). Both refuse to build doctrine about the ultimate, distrust accumulated knowledge as a way to it and propose knowledge of another order: the clarity of one who empties and contemplates, in the Daodejing; the perception that arises when thought sees its limit and falls silent, in Krishnamurti.

Why: There is no record that Krishnamurti engaged with the Daodejing; the affinity is structural. Both react against an excess of form: the Chinese text, against the proliferation of virtues, rites and learning in the schools of its time; Krishnamurti, against organisations, beliefs and spiritual methods, starting with those of the Theosophical Society that raised him. Hence the same gesture of subtraction. The difference lies in context and aim: the Daodejing also addresses the ruler and seeks a natural order of the community; Krishnamurti speaks to individuals and seeks a mutation of consciousness. One contemplates the return of things to their root; the other, the movement of thought.

Anecdotes and stories

Oral traditions. VI a. C. (tradicional)

Confucius asks about the rites

The most repeated scene of Chinese tradition brings its two masters face to face. Confucius, still young, travels to the Zhou capital to consult Laozi, the court archivist, about the rites. The Old Master answers with a lesson in detachment: "Those of whom you speak are already dead and their bones have turned to dust; only their words remain. The gentleman, if he finds his moment, rides in a carriage; if he does not, he walks with his head covered like a vagrant. I have heard that the good merchant hides his treasure as if he had nothing, and that the gentleman of full virtue looks like a fool. Rid yourself of your pride and your many desires, of your affected air and your ambitions: none of that serves you. That is all I have to tell you." The episode appears in the Shiji (chs. 47 and 63), in the Liji—where Confucius recalls having learned from Lao Dan details of funeral rites—and, in mocking tone, in several chapters of the Zhuangzi. Historians regard it as a construction of the Taoist school to place its founder above the Confucian one; but it was so influential that a stele in Luoyang still marks the spot where "Confucius questioned Laozi about the rites."

Origin of the story: Shiji 63 ("Biography of Laozi and Han Fei") and 47 ("Hereditary House of Confucius"); Liji, "Zengzi wen"; Zhuangzi, chs. 13, 14 and 21. Analysed as a school legend by A. C. Graham, "The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan" (in Kohn and LaFargue, 1998).

Oral traditions. VI a. C. (tradicional)

"Today I saw Laozi: he is like a dragon"

On returning from the interview, the disciples ask Confucius what he made of the Old Master. According to Sima Qian, the Master replies: "Of birds I know that they fly; of fish, that they swim; of beasts, that they run. For what runs one can set a net; for what swims, a line; for what flies, a corded arrow. But the dragon, which rises to heaven riding wind and clouds, I do not know how to catch. Today I saw Laozi: he is like a dragon!" The image fixed forever the relation between the two figures: Confucius, the man of rules and of what can be learned; Laozi, the ungraspable. The dragon thereafter became an emblem of Laozi himself, and the scene—with the carriage, the disciples and the old man—one of the most depicted motifs in Chinese iconography, from Han funerary reliefs to Ming paintings.

Origin of the story: Shiji 63. The comparison with the dragon does not appear in sources earlier than Sima Qian.

Hagiographic accounts. VI–V a. C. (tradicional)

The keeper of the pass and the five thousand characters

Laozi lives a long time in Zhou; when he sees the dynasty declining, he leaves. On reaching the pass—later tradition would identify it with Hangu, the gorge dividing the Yellow River valley from the central plain—the keeper Yin Xi says to him: "Since you are about to withdraw, I beg you to write a book for me." Laozi then composes a text in two parts, on the meaning of the Way and of Virtue, of somewhat more than five thousand characters, and departs. "No one knows where he ended." Thus, in six lines, Sima Qian explains the origin of the Daodejing and the disappearance of its author. Taoist hagiography would enrich the scene: Yin Xi will have seen from his tower a purple cloud coming from the east, sign of a sage's arrival; the journey will continue to India; the keeper will be the first disciple and recipient of new scriptures. Zhang Lu's painting illustrating this entry, with Laozi astride an ox, is the Ming version of that moment. Historically, the story serves to give an author and an occasion to a text that archaeology has shown to be anonymous and cumulative.

Origin of the story: Core in Shiji 63; expansions in the Liexian zhuan (1st–2nd c.), Ge Hong's Shenxian zhuan (4th c.) and the Scripture of Western Ascension (5th c.).

Documentedc. 94 a. C.

Sima Qian's three Laozis

The most revealing anecdote about Laozi is not a story about him but about his historian. After recounting Confucius's visit and the departure westward, Sima Qian pauses: "Some say that Lao Laizi was also from Chu, that he wrote a book in fifteen chapters on the use of the Way and that he was a contemporary of Confucius." And he adds: "Laozi lived, it is said, more than one hundred and sixty years; others say more than two hundred, through cultivating the Way and nourishing longevity. One hundred and twenty-nine years after the death of Confucius, the annals relate that the Grand Historian Dan of Zhou visited Duke Xian of Qin... Some say Dan was Laozi; others, that he was not. No one in the world knows whether this is so or not." He closes with a phrase worth his whole biography: "Laozi was a hidden gentleman." That the first biographer confessed not knowing who his subject was, and offered three candidates two centuries apart, is the most solid datum we have; on it rests the modern discussion, which sees in "Laozi" the fusion of a master of rites, a sage of Chu and a Zhou archivist.

Origin of the story: Literal text of Shiji 63. The critical reading follows A. C. Graham (1986/1998) and D. C. Lau (introduction to his translation, 1963).

Hagiographic accountsiglos II–IV (hagiografía Han y Jin)

Eighty-one years in his mother's womb

The hagiographies explain the Old Master's name literally. According to the Shenxian zhuan attributed to Ge Hong (4th century), his mother conceived him while gazing at a shooting star—or on swallowing a pearl fallen from heaven—and carried him in her womb for seventy-two years, or by other accounts eighty-one, as many as his book has chapters. He was born beneath a plum tree (li), whence he took his surname, and he was born already old, with white hair and the long ears that earned him the name Er. Other versions have him emerge from his mother's left side, as the Buddha from Maya's, in a contest of marvels with the Buddhism then taking root in China. None of this claims to be history: it is the biography of a god in the making, the Lord Lao who transforms himself from era to era and who, in the Inscription for Laozi of 165, is already described as coeval with primordial chaos. But these tales fixed the image by which he has been represented ever since: an old man with a domed forehead and long ears, often riding an ox.

Origin of the story: Shenxian zhuan ("Biographies of Divine Immortals"), entry on Laozi; Inscription for Laozi (Laozi ming, 165); Laozi bianhua jing (Dunhuang S.2295). Reference study: Anna Seidel, La divinisation de Lao tseu dans le taoïsme des Han (1969); Shenxian zhuan translated by Robert F. Campany (2002).

Source: Campany, Robert Ford. To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002.

Disputedsiglos II–XIII

The conversion of the barbarians

Around 300 CE, as Buddhism gained ground among the Chinese elites, the Taoist Wang Fu wrote a book to explain that foreign religion: after crossing the pass, Laozi had not disappeared but had journeyed on to India where, under the name of Buddha, he taught the barbarians a simplified and severe version of his doctrine suited to their coarseness. Buddhism would thus be Taoism for foreigners, and its return to China the homecoming of a native teaching. The theory had a respectable precedent—already in the 2nd century a memorial to Emperor Huan said that Laozi "had gone to the barbarians and become the Buddha"—and an extremely long life: for eight centuries Buddhists and Taoists debated before the emperors over the Scripture of the Conversion of the Barbarians, until Kublai Khan, after a public debate in 1281, ordered every copy burned. Fragments survived at Dunhuang. The episode shows how far Laozi's life went on being written according to the disputes of each age.

Origin of the story: Memorial of Xiang Kai (166) in the Hou Hanshu; Wang Fu's Laozi huahu jing (c. 300), known from Dunhuang fragments and quotations; debates of 1255–1281 at the Mongol court. Study: Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (1959).

Source: Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Brill, Leiden, 1959 (cap. 6 sobre la teoría del huahu).

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

Dao (the Way)dao

The word dao means "road", "way" and, by extension, "method" or "doctrine"; all Chinese schools use it. What is distinctive in the Daodejing is to make it the name of what has no name: a reality prior to heaven and earth, "confused and complete", which engenders the ten thousand beings without possessing them and which the text calls "mother". The first chapter warns that the Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way: the Dao is not a concept but the ground from which concepts arise, and so it can only be pointed to by images—water, the valley, the bellows, the root. It also has a practical dimension: to follow the Dao is to accord with the way things happen of themselves, without forcing them. In Wang Bi it will be identified with non-being (wu) as ground; in religious Taoism, with the body of Lord Lao; in Western reception, often with the Logos or the absolute. Archaeology shows that at Guodian the term already had this cosmological sense by around 300 BCE.

Core of philosophical Taoism; shared with the Zhuangzi and reinterpreted by Confucianism, Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.