Laozi

Laozi, "the Old Master", is the figure traditionally credited with the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), the short, poetic book at the root of Daoism. Tradition makes him an archivist at the court of the Zhou dynasty in the sixth century BCE and an older contemporary of Confucius, but whether he existed at all is genuinely uncertain, and most scholars think the book bearing his name grew over time rather than flowing from a single pen. Historical or not, Laozi became one of the central names of Chinese philosophy and, in religious Daoism, a god.

Almost everything said about Laozi comes from a brief biography written by the Han historian Sima Qian around 94 BCE, some four centuries after the time it describes. Sima Qian himself was unsure. He gives the most familiar account, of a man named Li Er, also called Lao Dan, born in Quren village in the southern state of Chu, in today's Henan province, who kept the archives at the Zhou royal court. But he also records two alternative identifications: a Lao Laizi of Chu, another contemporary of Confucius who wrote a book in fifteen sections, and a Zhou court historian named Dan who visited Duke Xian of Qin in the fourth century BCE. Sima Qian adds that some said Laozi lived for 160 years, others more than 200.

The name itself is not a personal name but a title of respect, meaning roughly "old master", formed like Kongzi (Confucius) or Mengzi (Mencius). The traditional birth date of 571 BCE is a later reckoning, not a recorded fact, and no reliable date of death exists.

Two stories dominate the tradition. In one, the young Confucius visits Lao Dan to ask about ritual and comes away awed, comparing him to a dragon. Versions of this meeting appear in Confucian as well as Daoist texts, which some scholars take as a sign that a real teacher called Lao Dan stood behind it. In the other, Laozi, weary of the decline of Zhou, rides west on a water buffalo. At the frontier pass the gatekeeper, Yin Xi, asks him to write down his teaching before he leaves, and Laozi produces a book of some five thousand characters in two parts, then disappears.

In the 1920s and 1930s many Chinese and Western scholars rejected the traditional dating and placed the Daodejing in the fourth or third century BCE, partly because its ideas seemed to respond to debates that came after Confucius. Opinion has never settled. Some historians regard Laozi as essentially a legend assembled from several figures; others think a historical Lao Dan, senior to Confucius, is a reasonable reading of the evidence.

Archaeology changed the debate without ending it. In 1973 two silk manuscripts of the text were found in a Han tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE; they put the section on de, "virtue" or "power", before the section on dao. In 1993 bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian in Hubei, buried around 300 BCE, turned out to contain roughly 2,000 characters matching about two fifths of the received text, in a different order and mixed with other material. Many scholars now see the Daodejing as a collection of sayings that circulated, changed and expanded over generations before reaching the standard 81-chapter form. Whether any of those sayings go back to a man called Lao Dan cannot be proved either way.

The book is terse, rhythmic and often paradoxical. It opens by warning that the dao, the "way", that can be spoken of is not the constant dao. The dao is the nameless source from which all things arise and to which they return: invisible, yet behind everything; immensely powerful, yet humble, like water that settles in low places and still wears away stone.

Its best-known teaching is wu wei, often translated as "non-action" but closer to acting without forcing, striving or imposing. The sage does not push against the grain of things, and so accomplishes much while seeming to do little. Linked to this is ziran, "being so of itself", the spontaneous naturalness the text prefers to artificial effort. It praises softness over hardness, emptiness over fullness, and the female over the male, using images such as the uncarved block, the valley and the infant.

The Daodejing is also a book about government, addressed largely to rulers. It argues that the more laws and prohibitions there are, the more thieves and poverty appear; that heavy taxes and war ruin a state; and that the best ruler is one the people barely know exists. Some passages advise keeping the people simple and free of desires, which readers have interpreted variously as a call for contentment or as a recipe for control. Against the Confucian programme of ritual, learning and named virtues such as benevolence and righteousness, the text suggests that such virtues are what people talk about once the dao has already been lost.

Laozi's reputation grew enormously after his presumed lifetime. Early Han rulers favoured a political philosophy called Huang-Lao, named after the Yellow Emperor and Laozi. In 166 CE Emperor Huan of the Han dynasty sacrificed to Laozi, and the organised Daoist movement of the Celestial Masters, founded in the second century CE, revered him as Lord Lao, a divine embodiment of the dao who had appeared many times in history to teach humankind.

As Buddhism spread in China, a polemical tradition claimed that Laozi had gone west to India and taught, or even become, the Buddha, a story Buddhists strongly contested. The emperors of the Tang dynasty, who shared his supposed surname Li, claimed him as their ancestor; in 666 Emperor Gaozong granted him an imperial title, and the Daodejing was for a time included in the state examinations.

The Daodejing, together with the later Zhuangzi, became the foundation of philosophical Daoism and a lasting counterweight to Confucianism in China. Its ideas shaped Chinese poetry, painting, medicine and martial arts, and fed into Chan Buddhism, known in Japan as Zen. Even rulers and officials who were Confucian in public often drew on it for consolation or political advice; the book of the Legalist Han Fei contains two chapters interpreting it.

Since the nineteenth century the book has been translated into Western languages more often than almost any other text apart from the Bible, in versions ranging from careful philology to very loose adaptation. Its brevity and openness have made it a mirror for readers of every kind. The man behind it, if there was one, remains out of reach: what survives is a book and a name for the voice that speaks in it.