Laozi

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A man on the back of a water buffalo rides toward a mountain pass, away from the capital and toward the dust of the western frontier. He has resigned his post. The dynasty he served is sliding into ruin, and he means to vanish into it. At the gate the warden recognizes the rank of his visitor and will not let him pass empty-handed: “Write something down,” he asks, “before you go.” The traveler dismounts, sets out a brush, and in roughly five thousand characters leaves behind a book about the Way and its power. Then he goes through the gate, and no one knows what became of him.

The scene is the founding image of Daoism, repainted for two thousand years, and almost nothing in it can be fixed to a date. The rider has at least three names, two possible centuries, and one habit that survived every retelling: a preference for the unsaid over the said.

Laozi departing on his ox, by Zhang Lu (c. 1464–1538), National Palace Museum, Taipei. The motif of the sage leaving through the western pass is among the oldest and most reproduced in Chinese painting. — Zhang Lu, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The man in the archive

The earliest sustained account stands in the Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian compiled by Sima Qian around 100 BCE. It is a strange document to be foundational, because its author keeps interrupting himself to admit that he does not know. Sima Qian gives a name: a man from the state of Chu, surname Li, personal name Er, styled Dan — Li Er, or Lao Dan, the Old Dan. He places him as a keeper of the archives at the Zhou royal court, an official in charge of the records, which would have made him a custodian of ritual texts and dynastic memory rather than a teacher with a following. So far the biography reads like history.

Then it splinters. Sima Qian sets down a second candidate, a recluse named Lao Laizi, also of Chu, also a contemporary of Confucius, who supposedly wrote a work in fifteen sections on the uses of the Daoist school. He sets down a third, the Grand Astrologer Dan of Zhou, a figure datable to the fourth century BCE — more than a hundred years after the first candidate could have lived. The great historian declines to choose. “No one in the world can say whether this is so or not,” he writes of the identification, and the sentence is doing more work than it appears to. It records, near the very birth of the tradition, that the tradition could not name its own founder.

Out of this composite dossier later ages assembled a single life. The dates conventionally attached to Confucius are 551 to 479 BCE, and the Shiji stages a meeting between the two within that window. Confucius travels to the Zhou capital to ask the archivist about the rites. The older man rebuffs him, dismissing the seeker’s pride and ambition and his appetite for the trappings of antiquity, telling him to let go of his arrogant airs and his endless desires, none of which will profit him. Confucius retreats and, the story goes, is shaken. He tells his disciples that he understands how birds fly and fish swim and beasts run, that such creatures can be netted and hooked and snared — but the dragon, which mounts the wind and cloud and ascends to heaven, is beyond him. “Today I have seen Lao Dan,” he says, “and he is like a dragon.”

The encounter is almost certainly legend. The chronologies do not align cleanly, the anecdote serves an obvious purpose, and the field reads it as a Daoist claim to seniority over the rival school rather than as reportage: the founder of one tradition humbling the founder of the other. What the field does not doubt is the shape of the claim. From the start, Laozi was positioned as the elder, the one who already knew what Confucius was still chasing.

A book without a single author

The book left at the pass is the Daodejing, the “Classic of the Way and Virtue” — dao the Way, de its virtue or inherent power, jing a canonical text. Tradition treats it as the deposit of one mind in one sitting. The manuscript record tells a different story, and the manuscripts are unusually eloquent.

In 1973, two silk copies of the text came out of a tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan, sealed in 168 BCE. They are close to the version read for centuries, but their order is inverted: the section on de comes first and the section on dao second, so that the work might more properly be called the Dedejing — the De-Dao classic. Two decades later, in 1993, a tomb at Guodian, in Hubei, sealed around 300 BCE, yielded bamboo slips carrying perhaps forty percent of the received text, in a sequence different again, with no sign that the whole had yet been fixed. The Guodian slips are the oldest witnesses, and they show a text still in motion: gathered, reordered, not yet closed.

The scholarly consensus, set out in surveys such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, reads these layers as the signature of an anthology. The Daodejing appears to be a Warring States compilation, an accretion of rhymed sayings, oracular fragments, and aphorisms drawn into shape over generations, redacted rather than authored, with “Laozi” functioning less as a person who wrote a book than as the name a book acquired. The figure and the text grew toward each other. By the time Sima Qian wrote, both already wore the gloss of legend, and he transmitted the gloss honestly, uncertainty and all.

Inside the tradition’s own frame the matter looks otherwise. There the Old Master walked the earth, the transmission at the pass took place, and the warden has a name — Yinxi, Guardian of the Pass, the first to receive the teaching and the first disciple, who in later legend follows his master westward into the unknown. The two accounts do not cancel. The documentary record describes a text assembled by many hands over centuries; the tradition holds that a single sage set down the Way before he disappeared. Both are kept here exactly as they are.

The Way that cannot be named

The teaching opens by refusing itself. “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao,” James Legge rendered the first line in 1891; “the name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.” The Way is the source from which the ten thousand things arise, prior to heaven and earth, and it is precisely what language cannot hold. To name it is to lose it. The text proceeds by a kind of disciplined negation, circling its subject through paradox because the subject withdraws from any direct grip.

If dao is the source, de is its presence in things — the virtue, the inner power, the way a thing has of being most fully itself. The book’s distinctive ethic follows from the relation between the two, and its central term is wu wei: literally non-action, but better understood as non-coercive action, action that does not force. The sage acts as water acts. Water is the recurring emblem: it seeks the low places everyone disdains, yields to every obstacle, and yet wears down stone, so that nothing is softer and nothing more capable of overcoming the hard. The cognate ideal is ziran, self-so-ness, the spontaneity of what unfolds of its own accord without contrivance — the way a valley fills, the way an infant grasps, the way an uncarved block is whole.

That last image, pu, the uncarved block, is the book’s quiet center. Raw timber, unworked and unpainted, holds every possible form within it; the moment the carver begins, possibility narrows into a single shape and the rest is lost. Society, in this reading, is the carving — the cutting of whole persons into roles, ranks, and named virtues. To return to the uncarved block is to recover the totality that civilization spends itself dividing. Alongside it run the valley, which is empty and therefore receptive and therefore inexhaustible, and the feminine, which conquers the masculine through stillness, holding its ground by lying low. These are not soft sentiments. They are a sustained argument that yielding is a form of strength and emptiness a form of plenitude.

Confucius (right) meeting Laozi, a Western Han funerary stone painting from Dongping County, now in the Shandong Museum. The encounter was a favored subject of Han tomb art, evidence of how early the legend circulated. — Shandong Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From this springs a politics. The best ruler is the one the people barely know is there; he governs by wu wei, letting the people return to their own ziran, and when the work is done they say they did it themselves. The text is sharp toward the alternative. Where the Confucian program builds the good society through ritual, learning, and the cultivated virtues — ren, benevolence; yi, rightness; the elaborate patterns of the sage-kings — the Daodejing reads those very virtues as symptoms of decline. When the great Way is lost, it says, then we get benevolence and rightness; when wisdom appears, so does great hypocrisy. Carve enough names into the block and the block is lost. The contrast with the rival school is built into the grain of the work: against artifice, the natural; against accumulation, simplicity; against the named virtue, the unselfconscious good.

Lao and Zhuang

The Old Master did not stay solitary for long. Within a century or two a second voice joined his, that of Zhuang Zhou — the philosopher known as Zhuangzi — whose book multiplies the Way into parables, butterflies, useless trees, and skilled butchers whose blades never dull because they move through the gaps. Where the Daodejing is gnomic and addressed partly to rulers, the Zhuangzi is exuberant, comic, and addressed to the free individual. Read together, the two became the twin roots of what later thinkers called Lao-Zhuang, the philosophical Daoism that treats the Way as a matter of living rather than worship. It is the Lao-Zhuang current, more than the religion that grew from it, that has carried Daoist thought into the philosophy of the wider world.

That philosophical stream also fed something far from the archive. When Buddhism entered China, its translators reached for Daoist vocabulary to render foreign ideas, and the meeting changed both. The Daoist taste for the wordless, for spontaneity, for the truth that cannot be taught directly, ran into Buddhist meditation and helped shape the school the Chinese called Chan — the lineage the West knows by its Japanese name, Zen. The famous Chan distrust of scripture and doctrine, its preference for the sudden and the unsaid, carries the accent of the Way that cannot be named. The threshold ideas of Buddhism in its Chinese forms, including the devotional path of Pure Land Buddhism and the goal it calls nirvana, were all rephrased, in part, through a Daoist grammar.

The Old Master made a god

The figure that left through the pass did not stay a figure. Over the Han dynasty he ascended. By the mid-second century CE the sage had become a deity: under the Celestial Masters movement founded by Zhang Daoling, Laozi was revered as Taishang Laojun, the Supreme Venerable Sovereign, and in 166 CE the emperor Huan offered him sacrifice. The deified Old Master was understood as a cosmic power who had taken human form again and again to teach and to rescue, the personification of the Way descended into history. In the mature pantheon of religious Daoism he took his seat as one of the Three Pure Ones, the highest triad of the heavens — the Daode Tianzun, the Heavenly Worthy of the Way and Virtue, the divine author of the very book he had once dictated at a frontier gate.

This second life made possible one of the boldest polemics in the history of religions. As Daoists and Buddhists contended for imperial favor, Daoist apologists produced the Huahujing, the “Classic of the Conversion of the Barbarians.” Its argument was audacious in its economy: when Laozi rode west through the pass, he did not vanish. He continued on to India, and there he became — or instructed — the Buddha, so that Buddhism was merely Daoism in foreign dress, a derivative teaching for the western peoples. The thesis appears in a text attributed to Wang Fu around 300 CE and was expanded over centuries into a substantial scripture. It was inflammatory enough that Tang emperors ordered it suppressed, and surviving fragments turned up only at Dunhuang at the close of the Qing. The westward departure, once an image of disappearance, had been turned into a charter of conquest.

The figure was thus pulled in opposite directions at once: deepened into a god, weaponized into a polemic, and — in the same long centuries — extended into the arts of transformation, where the Way’s reversals underwrote the search for refinement and the longing for immortality, and where the laboratory language of alchemy drew on the same cosmology of yielding and return. Through all of it the early book stayed in circulation, recopied and re-commented, its paradoxes outlasting the empires that quarreled over them.

The Way goes west again

The book made a second westward journey, this time on paper. European readers met it through translation, and the translators left their fingerprints on the Old Master they delivered. The early Victorian renderings, Frederic Balfour’s among them and James Legge’s more enduringly, arrived freighted with the comparative-religion assumptions of their day, sometimes pressing the Way toward a near-monotheistic shape it does not hold in the Chinese. Legge’s version, published in 1891 in the Sacred Books of the East, is literal where it might be fluent, but it bundled the Daodejing together with the Zhuangzi and a cluster of devotional texts and so became the workhorse of the English-reading public for generations. Its first chapter — the Way that cannot be trodden, the name that cannot be named — is the doorway through which most English speakers first entered.

A sharper turn came with Arthur Waley’s The Way and Its Power in 1934, which set aside the medieval commentaries and tried to recover what the words might have meant to a Warring States audience, reading the text as a document of its own contentious age rather than as timeless mysticism. Between Legge’s missionary care and Waley’s historical eye, the Old Master became one of the most translated authors on earth, the Daodejing rivaling scripture in the number of versions it has spawned in the languages of the West. Some came through scholars; some through poets and seekers who never read a character of Chinese; some through the wider Western esoteric reception of Eastern wisdom, through channels the archivist of Zhou could not have imagined.

What survived every passage — through Han deification, through Tang polemic, through Victorian piety and modern philology — is the original gesture. A man who kept the records chose, in the end, to keep almost nothing. He set down five thousand characters about the source that cannot be named and the power of declining to force, and then he rode through the gate. The tradition of Daoism has spent two millennia trying to say what he meant, which is the one thing the book warns can never quite be said. The warden at the pass asked for a teaching and got a paradox; everyone since has been holding the same parcel, turning it over, never quite getting it open.

→ In the library: The Tao Teh King (Daodejing), trans. James Legge (1891) · The Texts of Tâoism, trans. James Legge (SBE 39 & 40) · Taoist Texts, trans. Frederic H. Balfour (1884)

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