Laozi

Who they were

Laozi — the Old Master — is the figure to whom the Daodejing is attributed, and the founding figure of Daoism.

Whether he existed is genuinely doubtful, and the doubt is not a modern sceptical imposition. It begins with the first person who tried to write his biography.

Where they came from

The traditional account, from Sima Qian's Shiji around 100 BCE: he was Li Er, also called Lao Dan, an archivist at the Zhou court; Confucius came to consult him about ritual and was reduced to awe, telling his disciples afterwards that he had met a dragon; and in old age, disgusted with the decline of the age, he rode west on an ox toward the frontier. The gatekeeper Yinxi recognised him and refused to let him pass until he had written down his teaching. He produced five thousand characters and departed. Nobody knows what became of him.

Sima Qian himself did not believe he could establish this. In the same passage he offers other candidates — a Lao Laizi, and a Grand Historian Dan of Zhou who lived considerably later — notes the chronological problems, and concludes that Laozi was a hidden sage and that the world does not know the truth of the matter.

The earliest attempt at his biography is therefore a shrug.

The textual evidence points away from a single author. The Guodian bamboo manuscripts, buried around 300 BCE, contain only about a third of the received Daodejing, in a different arrangement, in three separate bundles. That is what a text looks like when it is being assembled, not when it is being copied.

The scholarly consensus is that "Laozi" is most likely an honorific or a composite — a name attached to a body of material by a tradition that needed an author.

What they taught

Whatever the Daodejing teaches, which is treated in its own article: the Dao that cannot be named, wu wei, the strength of yielding, and a political programme of governing by not interfering.

And then something happened that is more interesting than the biography. In religious Daoism, Laozi was deified. As Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao, he became a supreme deity — an eternal cosmic principle who takes human form in successive ages to teach, with temples, liturgy and iconography. The Celestial Masters movement of the second century CE received revelations from him.

A possibly fictional archivist became a god, and remains one.

He was also weaponised. The huahu — conversion of the barbarians — texts claimed that after riding west, Laozi continued to India and became the Buddha, making Buddhism a simplified Daoism for foreigners. Buddhists objected strenuously; the polemic ran for centuries; the texts were repeatedly condemned and ordered destroyed under several dynasties.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the historicity is unresolved and probably unresolvable, and that this matters less than it might. The Daodejing exists and has done its work regardless of who assembled it.

We can say the legend is significant as legend. A sage who refuses office, writes only under duress, and disappears westward without founding anything is a portrait of the tradition's own values — the opposite of Confucius, who spent his life seeking employment and teaching disciples. The two founding figures are constructed as complementary opposites, and the story of Confucius visiting Laozi and being humbled is preserved in Daoist sources for obvious reasons.

We can say the deification is a major fact about Daoism that Western readers rarely encounter, because the Western reception of Daoism is essentially confined to one book read as philosophy. There are temples to this man.

We cannot say anything secure about a historical individual. The most that can be said is what Sima Qian said two thousand years ago: the world does not know whether it is so.

Further reading

• Sima Qian, Shiji, the Laozi biography — short, and worth reading for the visible uncertainty.
• A.C. Graham, "The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan" (1986).
• Livia Kohn, God of the Dao (1998), on the deification.