Laozi

Laozi is the only figure in this collection whose existence is doubted by the tradition's own earliest biographer.

Sima Qian, writing the Records of the Grand Historian around 100 BCE, gives the account everyone repeats: a keeper of the archives at the Zhou court, named Li Er, who met Confucius and rebuked him, who grew weary of the decline of the state, rode west, and was stopped at a mountain pass by a gatekeeper who asked him to write down his teaching before leaving. He produced five thousand characters in two parts and went away, and nobody knows where he died.

Sima Qian then does something remarkable. He offers two further candidates, Lao Laizi, a contemporary of Confucius, and a court historian named Dan who lived over a century later, says that the world cannot tell which of them Laozi was, and concludes that Laozi was a hidden gentleman. The founding biography is explicitly uncertain about who its subject was.

The name is not a name. Laozi means old master or old child, a title rather than a personal designation.

Modern scholarship is largely comfortable treating the text as a composite work, assembled from a body of aphoristic material over a period, rather than as the product of a single afternoon at a mountain pass. The manuscript evidence supports layered growth: the Mawangdui silk manuscripts of about 200 BCE have the two parts in the reverse of the received order, and the Guodian bamboo slips from a tomb closed around 300 BCE contain roughly a third of the received text in a different arrangement.

The text turns on terms that resist English, and translations differ so much that readers can be arguing about different books.

Dao is conventionally the Way. The first line of the received text says that a dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao, which is a warning about the word placed at the head of the book that uses it. It is not a deity and not a moral principle; it is closer to the pattern or course things follow when nothing interferes.

Wu wei is usually non-action or effortless action, and both mislead. It does not mean doing nothing. It is more nearly acting without forcing, in the way a swimmer works with a current, and in the political chapters, which are numerous, and which readers who come for the mysticism tend to skip, it means a ruler who governs least and leaves people alone. A substantial part of the text is advice to rulers, including on warfare.

There are well over a hundred English translations. Many are made by people who do not read Chinese, working from earlier English versions, and some are frank paraphrases. The differences are not stylistic: chapter 1 alone admits readings that make the book epistemological, cosmological or apophatic.

The religious Daoism that developed from the second century CE, with its liturgy, priesthood, alchemy and pantheon in which Laozi is a deified figure called Taishang Laojun, is a different thing again from the text. Treating philosophical and religious Daoism as two separate traditions is itself a Western scholarly convention that specialists now question.

The book attributed to Laozi, the Daodejing, Classic of the Way and Its Power, also romanised Tao Te Ching, is short, around five thousand characters in eighty-one brief chapters, and its influence is out of all proportion to its length.

Its themes extend well beyond the two famous terms. It prizes the soft over the hard and the yielding over the rigid, taking water as its model, weakest of things, yet wearing away stone. It praises the uncarved block and the uncarved life, the usefulness of emptiness (the use of a vessel is the space inside it), and a receptive, "feminine" principle it sets above force. Much of it is addressed to rulers, counselling a government so light that the people barely know it is there. Alongside the roughly contemporary Zhuangzi, whose wit and parable complement the Daodejing's aphorism, it forms the core of what later scholars grouped as the daojia, the philosophical current of Daoism.

Its reach outside China is remarkable. By one common count the Daodejing is among the most translated books in the world, with well over a hundred English versions alone, and it has been read by figures as far apart as Heidegger, who worked on a translation, and the Western counterculture, which took it up in the twentieth century. Some of that reception rests on paraphrase and projection, but the appetite is real: a text that opens by warning that the Way which can be spoken is not the constant Way has been spoken about more than almost any other.

The Laozi of philosophy is only half the figure. In religious Daoism he was raised to a god, and the history of that elevation is a subject in its own right.

By the second century CE the movement of the Celestial Masters, conventionally dated to a revelation received by Zhang Daoling in 142, venerated a deified Laozi as Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao, a cosmic deity who periodically descends to teach humanity and who came in time to be numbered among the Three Pure Ones at the summit of the Daoist pantheon. The philosopher of the mountain pass had become an eternal manifestation of the Dao itself; Livia Kohn's study traces how the man, the book and the god were woven together over the centuries.

Two episodes show how far the myth could be pressed. The old story that Laozi rode west through the pass was extended into the claim, the huahu, "conversion of the barbarians", that he continued into India and there became, or taught, the Buddha. Advanced in the rivalry between Daoists and Buddhists, the Huahujing that set it out was repeatedly attacked and, under the Mongol Yuan, ordered destroyed. And in the Tang dynasty the imperial house, which shared Laozi's surname Li, claimed him as its ancestor and honoured him with grand titles, binding the deified sage to the legitimacy of the state.

The distance between this cosmic Lord Lao and the elusive archivist of the earliest accounts is a measure of what a tradition can build on a figure whose very existence its first biographer could not confirm.