So he left and rode on a water buffalo to the western border of the Chinese empire. Although he was dressed as a farmer, the border official recognised him and asked him to write down his wisdom. In reality, the Tao Te Ching is likely to be the compilation of the works of many authors over time. The 'Tao Te Ching'. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
His surname was Li, and his personal name was Er, and his style name was Dan. Sima Qian reports that Laozi was a historiographer in charge of the archives of Zhou. Moreover, Sima Qian tells us that Confucius had traveled to see Laozi to learn about the performance of rituals from him. On four occasions, Confucius Kongzi , Master Kong is reported to have responded to questions by appealing to answers given by Lao Dan.
The records even say that Confucius once assisted him in a burial service. According to the biography, during the course of their conversations Laozi told Confucius to give up his prideful ways and seeking of power. When Confucius returned to his disciples, he told them that he was overwhelmed by the commanding presence of Laozi, which was like that of a mighty dragon.
The biography goes on to say that Laozi cultivated the dao and its de. However, as the state of Zhou continued to decline, Laozi decided to leave China through the Western pass toward India and that upon his departure he gave to the keeper of the pass, one Yin Xi, a book divided into two parts, one on dao and one on de, and of 5, characters in length.
After that, no one knew what became of him. This is perhaps the most familiar of the traditions narrated by Sima Qian and it contains the core of most every subsequent biography or hagiography of Laozi of significance. However, the biography did not end here. Sima Qian went on to record what other sources said about Laozi. In the first biography, Sima Qian says some report that Laolaizi came from Chu, was a contemporary of Confucius, and he authored a work in fifteen sections which speaks of the practical uses of the Daoist teachings.
But Sima Qian leaves it undecided whether he thinks Laolaizi should be identified with Laozi, even if he does include this reference in the section on Laozi. Sima Qian adds another layer to the biography without commenting on the degree of confidence he has in its truthfulness, according to which it is said that Laozi lived years or even years, as a result of cultivating the dao and nurturing his longevity.
An additional tradition included in the first biography is that Dan, the historiographer of Zhou predicted in B. The point of this tradition is that Dan Lao Dan? But Sima Qian likewise refuses to identify Laozi with this Dan. Another movement in the evolution of the Laozi story was completed by about B. The association of Laozi with a text the DDJ that was becoming increasingly significant was important. The journey to the West component now also had a new force.
It explained why Laozi was not presently advising the Han rulers. He even tells us that when the Zhou kingdom began to decline, Laozi decided to leave China and head into the West. When he reached the mountain pass, the keeper of the pass Yin Xi insisted that he write down his teachings, so that the people would have them after he left. No one knows where he ended his life.
Since his biography located Laozi in a time period predating the Zhuangzi , and the passages in the Zhuangzi seemed to be about a person who lived in the time of Confucius and not to be simply a literary or traditional invention , then the inference was easy to make that Laozi was the founder of the Daoist school.
Laozi told him that he could come along, but only after he cultivated the dao. Laozi instructed Yin to study hard and await a summons which would be delivered to him in the marketplace in the city of Chengdu.
It makes the first apotheosis of Laozi into a deity. Accordingly, during this period of the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries, the elite at the imperial court divinized Laozi and regarded him as an embodiment or incarnation of the dao , a kind of cosmic emperor who knew how to bring things into perfect harmony and peace by acting in wu-wei.
The Daoist cosmological belief in the powers of beings who experienced unity with the dao to effect transformation of their bodies and powers for example, Huzi in Zhuangzi, ch. It tells how Laozi transformed into his own mother and gave birth to himself, taking quite literally comments in the DDJ where the dao is portrayed as the mother of all things DDJ, ch. The work associates Laozi with various manifestations or incarnations of the dao itself.
In this text there is a complete apotheosis of Laozi into a numinal divinity. Alone and without relation, he has existed since before heaven and earth. Living deeply hidden, he always returns to be. The final passage in this work is an address given by Laozi predicting his reappearance and promising liberation from trouble and the overthrow of the Han dynasty, an allusion that helps us fix the probable date of origin for the work.
The millennial cults of the second century believed Laozi was a messianic figure who appeared to their leaders and gave them instructions and revelations for example, the hagiography of Zhang Daoling, founder of the Celestial Master Zhengyi movement contained in the 5th century work, Taiping Guangji 8. The period of the Celestial Masters c. Laojun could manifest himself in any time of unrest and bring Great Peace taiping. Yet, the Celestial Masters never claimed that Laojun had done so in their day.
Instead of such a direct manifestation, the Celestial Masters practitioners taught that Laojun transmitted to them talismans, registers, and new scriptures in the form of texts to guide the creation of communities of heavenly peace.
One work, very likely from the late 3 rd or early 4 th century C. According to the text, Laozi delivered these precepts after returning from India and finding the people in a state of corruption. A forthcoming translation is Minford The influence of the Laozi on Western thinkers is the subject of Clarke From nature lovers to management gurus, a growing audience is discovering that the Laozi has something to offer to them. The reception of the Laozi in modern Asia and the West falls outside the scope of this article; nevertheless, it is important to note that the Laozi should be regarded not only as a work of early Chinese philosophy, but also in a larger context as a classic of world literature with keen contemporary relevance.
The next three sections are intended for readers who are interested in the textual history and commentarial tradition of the Laozi , including the major manuscripts recovered through archaeological excavations or from the antiquities market.
They are important to understanding the Laozi , but one may go directly to section 5 on the main interpretive approaches to the text if one wishes to bypass them. The date of composition refers to the time when the Laozi reached more or less its final form; it does not rule out later interpolations or corruptions.
The traditional view, of course, is that the Laozi was written by Lao Dan in the sixth or early fifth century B. This seems unlikely, however, if it is assumed that the Laozi was written by a single author. As the archaeological evidence to be presented below will indicate, bodies of sayings attributed to Laozi were committed to writing probably from the second half of the fifth century B.
These collections grew, competed for attention, and gradually came to be consolidated during the fourth century B. By the middle of the third century B. It is possible, as A. Graham suggests, that the Laozi was ascribed to Lao Dan around B. It seems reasonable to suppose that Laozi, whether or not his real name was Li Er, attracted a following and that some of his sayings entered the world of Chinese philosophical discourse during the fifth century B.
A process of oral transmission may have preceded the appearance of these sayings in written form. It is conceivable that a succession of editors or compilers brought together diverse bodies of Laozi sayings, resulting in the mature Laozi.
According to Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks, the Laozi contains different layers of material spanning the period between and B. Although in this sense the Laozi may be regarded as a composite work, the product of many hands over a long period of time, it should not be assumed that the sayings that now inhabit the Laozi were put together at random. The language of the Laozi does provide some clues to its date of composition. Much of the text is rhymed. Focusing on rhyme patterns, Liu Xiaogan and concludes that the poetic structure of the Laozi is closer to that of the Shijing Classic of Poetry than that of the later Chuci Songs of Chu.
The dating of the Shijing and the Chuci is by no means precise, although generally the poems collected in the former should not be later than the early fifth century B. For this reason, Liu Xiaogan argues, the traditional view first articulated by Sima Qian should be upheld.
Both Liu and Baxter provide a concise analysis of the different theories of the date of the Laozi. Why is all this important? It may be argued that date and authorship are immaterial to and may detract from interpretation.
Issues of provenance are important, however, if context has any role to play in the production of meaning. There are different ways to date the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, but they do not affect the discussion here.
As the political conditions deteriorated, philosophers and strategists, who grew both in number and popularity as a social group or profession during this time, vied to convince the rulers of the various states of their program to bring order to the land. At the same time, perhaps with the increased displacement and disillusionment of the privileged elite, a stronger eremitic tradition also emerged.
If the bulk of the Laozi had originated from the fourth century, it might reflect some of these concerns. From this perspective, the origin of the Laozi is as much a hermeneutical issue as it is a historical one.
The discovery of two Laozi silk manuscripts at Mawangdui, near Changsha, Hunan province in marks an important milestone in modern Laozi research. The Hunan Provincial Museum website also provides useful information. Before this find, access to the Laozi was mainly through the received text of Wang Bi — C. There are other manuscript versions, but by and large they play a secondary role in the history of the classic. But first, a note on the title and structure of the Daodejing. According to the Shiji Later sources added that it was Emperor Jing who established the text officially as a classic.
However, the title Daodejing appears not to have been widely used until later, toward the close of the Han era. Most versions exceed five thousand characters by about five to ten percent, but it is interesting to note that numerological considerations later became an integral part of the history of the work.
This claim cannot be verified, but a number of Laozi manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang contain 4, characters. The current Daodejing is divided into two parts pian and 81 chapters or sections zhang.
Part one, comprising chapters 1—37, has come to be known as the Daojing Classic of Dao , while chapters 38—81 make up the Dejing Classic of Virtue. In this context, it is easy to appreciate the tremendous interest occasioned by the discovery of the Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts.
The two manuscripts contain all the chapters that are found in the current Laozi , although the chapters follow a different order in a few places. For example, in both manuscripts, the sections that appear as chapters 80 and 81 in the current Laozi come immediately after a section that corresponds to chapter 66 of the present text.
One scholar, in fact, has adopted the title Dedaojing Te-Tao ching for his translation of the Mawangdui Laozi Henricks It seems unlikely that the Mawangdui arrangement stems simply from scribal idiosyncrasy or happenstance—e.
This raises important questions for interpretation. The division into 81 chapters reflects numerological interest and is associated particularly with the Heshanggong version, which also carries chapter titles.
It was not universally accepted until much later, perhaps the Tang period, when the text was standardized under the patronage of Emperor Xuanzong r. Traditional sources report that some versions were divided into 64, 68, or 72 chapters; and some did not have chapter divisions Henricks The earlier Guodian texts see below are not divided into two parts, but in many places they employ a black square mark to indicate the end of a section.
The sections or chapters so marked generally agree with the division in the present Laozi. Thus, although the chapter formation may be relatively late, some attempt at chapter division seems evident from an early stage of the textual history of the Daodejing.
Until about two decades ago, the Mawangdui manuscripts held the pride of place as the oldest extant manuscripts of the Laozi. In late , the excavation of a tomb identified as M1 in Guodian, Jingmen city, Hubei province, yielded among other things some bamboo slips, of which are inscribed, containing over 13, Chinese characters. Some of these, amounting to about 2, characters, match the Laozi see Allan and Williams , and Henricks The tomb is located near the old capital of the state of Chu and is dated around B.
Robbers entered the tomb before it was excavated, although the extent of the damage is uncertain. The bamboo texts, written in a Chu script, have been transcribed into standard Chinese and published under the title Guodian Chumu zhujian Beijing: Wenwu, , which on the basis of the size and shape of the slips, calligraphy, and other factors divides the Laozi material into three groups.
Group A contains thirty-nine bamboo slips, which correspond in whole or in part to the following chapters of the present text: 19, 66, 46, 30, 15, 64, 37, 63, 2, 32, 25, 5, 16, 64, 56, 57, 55, 44, 40 and 9. Groups B and C are smaller, with eighteen chs.
There is one important clue, however. Ding , 7—9. Taking into account all the available evidence, it seems likely that different collections of sayings attributed to Laozi expanded and gained currency during the fourth century B. They would have been derived from earlier, oral or written sources. During the third century B. Even more recently, the growing family of Laozi texts welcomed another new arrival.
In January , Peking University accepted a gift of a sizeable collection of inscribed bamboo slips, said to have been retrieved from overseas. Among them, we find a nearly complete version of the Laozi. Although the published material to date did not mention any carbon dating of the slips, the consensus among the scholars who have worked with them is that they date to the Western Han dynasty.
The Beida Laozi agrees with the Mawangdui manuscripts in another important respect; that is, Part 1 also corresponds to chapters 38—81 of the current chapter version, or the Dejing , and Part 2, chapters 1—37, or Daojing.
Like the Mawangdui manuscripts, the Beida Laozi also records the number of characters at the end of each part. In terms of wording, the Beida Laozi agrees with the Mawangdui manuscripts in many instances, although in some places it agrees rather with that of the received text. However, the Beida text agrees with the standard version at the beginning of Chapter 2, as opposed to the shorter formulation found in the Guodian and Mawangdui versions. What is equally significant is that the sequence or order of the chapters is exactly the same as that in the received Laozi.
The difference lies in the division of some of the chapters. Chapters 17—19 of the received text form one chapter in the Beida Laozi. The same is true for chapters 6—7, 32—33 and 78— However, the current chapter 64 appears as two chapters in the Beida slips.
Altogether there are 77 chapters. Each chapter is clearly marked, with a round dot at the start, and each chapter starts on a separate bamboo slip. The Beida Laozi is almost intact in its entirety, missing only some 60 characters when compared with the received text. While it offers fresh glimpses into the development of the text, it does not provide any significant new insight into the meaning of the Laozi. A series of articles on the Peking University bamboo slips were published in the journal Wenwu , no.
The Beida Laozi was published in December and launched in February Although the majority of scholars accept the authenticity of the find, a notable critic is Xing Wen, who argues strongly that it is a forgery Xing ; for a critical discussion in English, see Foster In summary, two approaches to the making of the Laozi warrant consideration, for they bear directly on interpretation.
Some of these sayings were preserved in the Guodian bamboo texts. On this view, the Laozi underwent substantial change and grew into a longer and more complex work during the third century B.
The Mawangdui manuscripts were based on this mature version of the Laozi ; the original emphasis on politics, however, can still be detected in the placement of the Dejing before the Daojing. Later versions reversed this order and in so doing subsumed politics under a broader philosophical vision of Dao as the beginning and end of all beings.
As distinguished from a linear evolutionary model, what is suggested here is that there were different collections of sayings attributed to Laozi, overlapping to some extent but each with its own emphases and predilections, inhabiting a particular interpretive context.
Although some key chapters in the current Laozi that deal with the nature of Dao e. This seems to argue against the suggestion that the Laozi , and for that matter ancient Chinese philosophical works in general, were not interested or lacked the ability to engage in abstract philosophic thinking, an assumption that sometimes appears to underlie evolutionary approaches to the development of Chinese philosophy.
The Guodian and Mawangdui finds are extremely valuable. They are syntactically clearer than the received text in some instances, thanks to the larger number of grammatical particles they employ. Nevertheless, they cannot resolve all the controversies and uncertainties surrounding the Laozi. In my view, the nature of Dao and the application of Daoist insight to ethics and governance probably formed the twin foci in collections of Laozi sayings from the start. They were then developed in several ways—e.
The demand for textual uniformity rose when the Laozi gained recognition, and consequently the different textual traditions eventually gave way to the received text of the Laozi. As mentioned, the current Laozi on which most reprints, studies and translations are based is the version that comes down to us along with the commentaries by Wang Bi and Heshanggong.
Three points need to be made in this regard. First, technically there are multiple versions of the Wang Bi and Heshanggong Laozi —over thirty Heshanggong versions are extant—but the differences are on the whole minor.
Second, the Wang Bi and Heshanggong versions are not the same, but they are sufficiently similar to be classified as belonging to the same line of textual transmission. Third, the Wang Bi and Heshanggong versions that we see today have suffered change.
Prior to the invention of printing, when each manuscript had to be copied by hand, editorial changes and scribal errors are to be expected. Boltz and Wagner have examined this question in some detail. The Sibu beiyao and Sibu congkan are large-scale reproductions of traditional Chinese texts published in the early twentieth century.
The former contains the Wang Bi version and commentary, together with a colophon by the Song scholar Chao Yuezhi — , a second note by Xiong Ke ca. The Heshanggong version preserved in the Sibu congkan series is taken from the library of the famous bibliophile Qu Yong fl. Older extant Heshanggong versions include two incomplete Tang versions and fragments found in Dunhuang. Reportedly, this version was recovered from a tomb in C. There are some differences, but these two can be regarded as having stemmed from the same textual tradition.
Manuscript fragments discovered in the Dunhuang caves form another important source in Laozi research. Among them are several Heshanggong fragments especially S. It is signed and dated at the end, bearing the name of the third-century scholar and diviner Suo Dan, who is said to have made the copy, written in ink on paper, in C.
While manuscript versions inform textual criticism of the Laozi , stone inscriptions provide further collaborating support. Over twenty steles, mainly of Tang and Song origins, are available to textual critics, although some are in poor condition Yan Students of the Laozi today can work with several Chinese and Japanese studies that make use of a large number of manuscript versions and stone inscriptions notably Ma , Jiang , Zhu , and Shima Boltz offers an excellent introduction to the manuscript traditions of the Laozi.
Lou and Lynn A major contribution to Laozi studies in Chinese is Liu Xiaogan , which compares the Guodian, Mawangdui, Fu Yi, Wang Bi, and Heshanggong versions of the Laozi and provides detailed textual and interpretive analysis for each chapter. In an article in English, Liu sets out some of his main findings. Commentaries to the Laozi offer an invaluable guide to interpretation and are important also for their own contributions to Chinese philosophy and religion. Two chapters in the current Hanfeizi chs.
Queen Nevertheless, Laozi learning began to flourish from the Han period. Some mention will also be made of later developments in the history of the Daodejing. Lao Tzu 6th century B. He is considered the father of Chinese Taoism. Lao Tzu purportedly was an older contemporary of the great philosopher Confucius B.
Lao Tzu is said to have founded a philosophical school known as the Tao Chia School of the Tao , whose teaching centered on the vague and indefinable concept of tao, usually translated "way. By the 4th century B. The main source of information on Lao Tzu's life is a biography written by the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien B.
By this time a number of traditions about the founder of Chinese Taoism were circulating, and Ssu-ma Ch'ien himself was unsure of their authenticity. The biography in fact contains an account of not one, but three, men called Lao Tzu. Li Erh served as historian in charge of the official archives in the Chinese imperial capital of Loyang. He was a contemporary of Confucius and is reported to have granted an interview to the Confucian master when he came to Loyang seeking information on the Chou ritual.
He is designated as a contemporary of Confucius and is attributed with a chapter book expounding the teachings of the Taoist school.
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