Laozi老子

Style & Daoist names

Li Er, Lao Dan, Supreme Venerable Sovereign (Laojun), Supreme Mysterious Primordial Emperor, Celestial Worthy of the Dao and Virtue

Period

Spring and Autumn period

Dates

c. 571 BCE — ?

Role

Founder of the Daoist philosophical schoolFounder of the Daoist religion

Birthplace

Ku county, State of Chu (present-day Luyi, Henan; alternatively Guoyang, Anhui)

Places of activity

Louguantai (Louguan Terrace)

Life

Laozi, surnamed Li, given name Er, styled Dan, was a thinker of the late Spring and Autumn period, traditionally said to have served as archivist of the Zhou royal library. The 'Biographies of Laozi and Han Fei' in the Records of the Grand Historian records that Confucius once asked Laozi about ritual propriety, and that Laozi, seeing the decline of the Zhou, later traveled west and passed through the Hangu Pass, where, at the request of the pass-keeper Yin Xi, he wrote a work in two parts of some five thousand characters expounding the meaning of the Dao and De, and then departed, his end unknown. His work, the Daodejing (the Laozi), takes the Dao as the origin of all things and advocates naturalness, non-action, softness and weakness, and non-contention; it is the foundational text of Daoist philosophy and also the fundamental scripture of the later Daoist religion. The discovery of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts in 1973 and the Guodian bamboo slips in 1993 proved that its text was already circulating by the mid-Warring States period. From the Eastern Han onward Laozi was deified as the 'Supreme Venerable Sovereign' (Taishang Laojun), becoming one of the highest deities of Daoism; the Li imperial house of the Tang dynasty venerated him as their ancestral founder and posthumously honored him as the 'Supreme Mysterious-Primordial Emperor.' The identity of Laozi and the date of the text's composition remain subjects of scholarly debate to this day.

Contributions & Influence

• Proposed a philosophical system taking the Dao as the origin of the cosmos
• Established such core Daoist concepts as 'governing through non-action' and 'the Dao follows what is natural'
• The Daodejing became the fundamental scripture of Daoism, the subject of unceasing commentary through the ages
• Venerated as Taishang Laojun, the founding lord of Daoism, and one of the Three Pure Ones

Works

• Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)

Legends

According to legend, Laozi's mother carried him for eighty-one years before his birth, and he was born already white-haired, hence the name 'Old Master' (Laozi); a purple cloud drifted from the east as he passed through the pass; he is said to have traveled west and converted the barbarians, becoming the Buddha (as told in the Scripture of Laozi's Conversion of the Barbarians, a product of later Buddhist-Daoist polemics); later tradition also holds that he was an incarnation of Taishang Laojun descending through the ages to serve as teacher to emperors. All of the above belong to religious legend.