The History of Taoism

That uncertainty, far from undercutting the tradition, tells us something important about how Taoism understands itself. It has never been primarily about a founder or a fixed creed. It is about a way of seeing — and that way of seeing has proven remarkably durable, adapting across dynasties, absorbing and influencing neighboring traditions, crossing oceans, and finding new readers in contexts its earliest thinkers could never have imagined.

What follows is a readable account of how this philosophy developed over roughly two and a half millennia: where it came from, what happened to it, and how it arrived at the form most people encounter today.

The legendary origins

The traditional story of Taoism's birth is one of the great departure narratives in world literature. Laozi — whose name simply means "Old Master" or "Old Child," depending on how you read the characters — was, according to legend, a keeper of imperial archives in the Zhou dynasty court. Watching the kingdom slide into corruption and chaos, he decided to leave civilization behind. He packed his things, climbed onto a water buffalo, and headed west toward the mountains.

At the western gate of the kingdom, a gatekeeper named Yinxi stopped him. Yinxi recognized Laozi as a man of great wisdom and begged him not to leave without writing down what he knew. Laozi agreed. He sat and wrote the Tao Te Ching — eighty-one short chapters, roughly five thousand Chinese characters in total — handed the manuscript to Yinxi, and rode off into the desert. He was never heard from again.

The historical picture is considerably murkier. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tao Te Ching date to the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, found at sites like Guodian and Mawangdui. The text shows signs of having been compiled and edited over time rather than composed in a single sitting by a single author. The figure "Laozi" is mentioned in texts from the same period, but accounts of who he was and when he lived contradict each other so thoroughly that some scholars conclude the name was essentially a honorific attached to a body of wisdom rather than a specific biography. Sima Qian, China's first great historian, writing around 100 BCE, admitted he was not sure which of three possible figures was the real Laozi — and that was already three centuries after the text was supposed to have been written.

None of this diminishes the Tao Te Ching itself, which remains one of the most widely translated books in human history. But it does mean that Taoism, unlike many traditions, cannot be traced to a single historically verifiable moment of origin. It emerged, as the Tao itself does, gradually and from no single identifiable source.

Zhuangzi and the second wave

If Laozi is the enigmatic founder, Zhuangzi is the tradition's great wild mind. He was almost certainly a real person — a minor official who lived in the state of Song during the 4th century BCE — and the book that bears his name is one of the strangest and most compelling works in all of classical Chinese literature. Where the Tao Te Ching delivers its wisdom in compressed aphorisms, the Zhuangzi sprawls across fables, dialogues, parables, and satirical sketches that constantly undercut the reader's expectations.

Zhuangzi's recurring targets are the pompous, the over-earnest, and the over-certain — especially the Confucians, who appear in his pages frequently and rarely come off well. In one famous episode, Confucius himself shows up as a student of a Taoist sage, humbled and receptive. Zhuangzi had a particular gift for the philosophical thought experiment: his "butterfly dream" — in which he wonders whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man — remains one of the most elegant formulations of the problem of consciousness and reality ever written.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Tzu. Soon I awaked, and there lay Chuang Tzu on his bed. But between me as Chuang Tzu and me as a butterfly, there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called metempsychosis.

— Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, tr. Burton Watson

Zhuangzi also introduced a more anarchic and celebratory strain into Taoist thought. Where Laozi tends toward sage restraint and quiet withdrawal, Zhuangzi revels in the absurd, the unpredictable, and the physically immediate. His sages are cooks, craftsmen, and swimmers — people who have mastered their relationship with the physical world through practice rather than through doctrine. The Zhuangzi expanded what philosophical Taoism could be, and its influence on subsequent Chinese thought, art, and Chan (Zen) Buddhism is difficult to overstate.

Taoism meets Confucianism and Buddhism

Taoism did not develop in isolation. Throughout Chinese history, it existed in creative tension with the other two dominant traditions: Confucianism and Buddhism. The three are sometimes called the San Jiao — the "Three Teachings" — and their relationship over the centuries has been one of mutual influence, competition, and, eventually, a degree of synthesis that makes it difficult to separate them cleanly.

Confucianism and Taoism were already in dialogue by the time Zhuangzi was writing. The Confucian emphasis on ritual, social hierarchy, and moral cultivation through effort was almost the polar opposite of the Taoist emphasis on naturalness, spontaneity, and the limits of deliberate action. The two traditions argued productively about the nature of virtue, the role of the ruler, and the relationship between human beings and the natural order for centuries. They disagreed sharply, but they were arguing about the same questions, which kept both traditions sharp.

Buddhism arrived in China from India during the first century CE, and its encounter with Taoism produced some of the most interesting intellectual cross-pollination in world religious history. Early Chinese translators used Taoist vocabulary to render Buddhist concepts — the Sanskrit word "dharma," for example, was initially translated using the character for Tao. This was more than a linguistic convenience; it reflected a genuine resonance between Buddhist ideas about impermanence and the Taoist understanding of the Tao as constant flux. Out of this encounter, over several centuries, grew Chan (Zen) Buddhism — a tradition that looks distinctly Buddhist in its forms but breathes with a distinctly Taoist sensibility.

The rise of religious Taoism

The philosophical Taoism of the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi was always a relatively elite tradition — read and discussed by educated officials, scholars, and artists. But beginning in the 2nd century CE, something different emerged: organized religious Taoism, with its own clergy, rituals, sacred texts, and cosmology.

The Celestial Masters movement, founded by Zhang Daoling around 142 CE after a claimed revelation from Laozi himself, established the first Taoist church. It offered healing rituals, confessional practices, and communal worship to ordinary people. This was Taoism as a lived religion, not just a philosophical stance, and it spread rapidly. Other movements followed over the centuries — the Supreme Clarity (Shangqing) school, the Numinous Treasure (Lingbao) school, and eventually the Complete Reality (Quanzhen) school of the Song and Jin dynasties, which integrated elements of Buddhism and Confucianism and remains one of the major living Taoist traditions today.

Religious Taoism developed an elaborate cosmology of deities, immortals, and spiritual bureaucracies that looks quite unlike the spare philosophy of the early texts. It also developed sophisticated practices for cultivating longevity and spiritual transformation — including what would become Chinese medicine, internal martial arts, and various forms of meditation and breath work. The philosophical and religious streams fed each other, even as scholars and practitioners distinguished between them. Understanding that "Taoism" covers both is essential to understanding what the tradition actually is.

Taoism in the modern world

Taoism's arrival in the Western imagination is largely a 20th-century story, and it came through a handful of key translators and interpreters. Alan Watts, a British-American philosopher who had already helped introduce Zen Buddhism to Western audiences, turned his attention to Taoism in the 1970s. His book Tao: The Watercourse Way, published posthumously in 1975, remains one of the clearest and most sympathetic introductions ever written. Watts had a gift for making Asian philosophy feel immediately relevant rather than exotic, and his version of Taoism — playful, earthy, and genuinely engaged with Western philosophy — reached an enormous audience.

Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh, published in 1982, took a different approach: using A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh characters as illustrations of Taoist principles. It was a runaway bestseller, and it introduced Taoism to a generation of readers who might never have picked up a translation of the Tao Te Ching. Its influence on popular understanding of Taoism is hard to overstate, even if scholars sometimes wince at the simplifications involved. Hoff understood something true: that the best illustration of Taoist naturalness is often not a sage on a mountain but something ordinary and unassuming, doing exactly what it is without pretension.

Today, Taoist influence is everywhere in global culture, often unrecognized. The philosophical foundations of Tai Chi and many forms of kung fu are explicitly Taoist. Traditional Chinese medicine — acupuncture, herbal practice, the concept of qi — draws directly on Taoist cosmology. Feng shui, however commercialized, is rooted in Taoist ideas about the flow of energy through spaces. Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics like wabi-sabi, and even certain strands of modern mindfulness practice carry deep Taoist DNA.

Why the history matters

Reading the Tao Te Ching without any historical context is still worthwhile — the text speaks across centuries with remarkable directness. But knowing something about where it came from deepens the reading in ways that matter. When Laozi writes about yielding to rulers, he is writing from within a specific political crisis. When Zhuangzi mocks the Confucians, he is responding to living arguments that were shaping how people thought about governance, education, and the good life.

The history also helps explain why there is no single "orthodox" Taoism. The tradition has always been a conversation rather than a creed — between Laozi and Zhuangzi, between philosophers and priests, between Chinese and Indian ideas, between ancient texts and contemporary readers. That openness is not a weakness. It is what has allowed Taoism to remain alive and relevant across an extraordinary span of time and geography.

When you encounter a Taoist idea that feels surprisingly modern — the case for effortless action at work, the wisdom of yielding in conflict, the argument that complexity often comes from adding when you should subtract — you are not imagining things. Those ideas were worked out by people who were dealing with recognizable human problems: overwork, anxiety, political chaos, the difficulty of living well in a complicated society. The 2,500 years between them and us has changed almost everything about the surface of human life and nothing fundamental about the problems underneath.