Laozi: The Legendary Founder of Taoism

According to tradition, the great sage Laozi was keeper of the archives at the Zhou court — a librarian, in effect, who spent decades watching the wheels of history turn. One day, seeing that the dynasty was past saving and civilization had gone rotten at the root, he saddled his ox and headed west. He said nothing to anyone. He simply left.

At the Hangu Pass in the mountains, the gatekeeper Yinxi stopped him. The guard had seen a purple cloud drift over the mountains — a sign that a sage was approaching — and he would not let the old man pass until he had written down his teachings for posterity. So Laozi dismounted, sat, and composed the five thousand characters of the Tao Te Ching in a single sitting. Then he rode on into the wilderness and was never seen again.

Whether this is history or myth is an open question. But it is a beautiful one. And the answer, as we will see, matters less than you might think.

The Problem of the Historical Laozi

Unlike Confucius, who has a rich historical record — letters, anecdotes, a documented life with datable events — Laozi is nearly invisible to history. The first serious attempt to record his biography comes from Sima Qian's Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), written around 100 BCE. This is already several centuries after Laozi is supposed to have lived.

What Sima Qian offers is extraordinary for what it reveals about the uncertainty. Rather than presenting a single biography, he essentially throws up his hands and gives us three candidates. The first is Li Er, a keeper of royal archives from the state of Chu, who supposedly met Confucius and offered him some sharp advice. The second is a figure called Lao Laizi, also from Chu, who wrote a fifteen-chapter book on Taoist practice. The third is a royal astronomer named Dan, from the court of Zhou, who gave a famous prophecy about Qin's rise to power around 374 BCE.

Sima Qian then adds, almost casually, that he cannot be certain which of these, if any, is the real Laozi — or even whether "Laozi" was a single person at all.

Most contemporary scholars have gone further. The scholarly consensus today is that the Tao Te Ching was not composed by a single author at a single time but compiled gradually, probably between the fifth and third centuries BCE, drawing on older oral traditions. The text shows signs of multiple hands and multiple periods. What we call "Laozi" may be an editorial construction, a name given to a composite of wisdom traditions that needed a face.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

This is not a diminishment. If anything, it makes the Tao Te Ching more remarkable: not the product of a single brilliant moment, but the distillation of centuries of observation, refined by many minds.

What His Name Means

The name Laozi (老子) is itself a kind of compressed poem. The character lao (老) means old — old as in long-lived, old as in experienced, old as in the kind of knowing that only comes from having seen a great deal. The character zi (子) is a title of respect, used for Confucius (Kongzi), Zhuangzi, Mencius (Mengzi), and other masters of the classical period. It can be translated as "Master," giving us "Old Master" as the most common English rendering.

But zi can also mean child. And this second reading is not a mistake to be corrected — it is a deliberate ambiguity that goes to the heart of Laozi's teaching. The Tao Te Ching returns again and again to the image of the infant, the newborn, as a model for the sage. The infant does not strain, does not force, does not impose its will on the world. It cries when it needs to cry, sleeps when it needs to sleep, and gives itself to the moment without reservation. It is soft and yet survives. It does not know enough to be clever, which is precisely why it is wise.

So the name "Old Child" captures something the "Old Master" translation misses: the tradition's insistence that wisdom, properly understood, is a return to a quality we once had and lost. The sage is not someone who has accumulated knowledge. The sage is someone who has unlearned enough to recover what was always already there.

This connects to the concept of pu (樸), the uncarved block — the piece of wood before the craftsman has shaped it into anything. Before it becomes a table or a chair, it contains the potential for all tables and all chairs. Laozi — the Old Child, the keeper of beginnings — is associated with this quality of uncarved wholeness.

The Legend and Its Meaning

Even if we set aside the question of historical accuracy entirely, the legend of Laozi repays careful attention. It is not accidental in its details.

Consider the setting: Laozi works in the royal archive. He is surrounded by records, by history, by the official memory of civilization. He watches the Zhou dynasty from close range, from within the machinery of state, and what he sees convinces him that something has gone fundamentally wrong. The elaborate rituals, the hierarchies, the music and ceremonies meant to order society — all of it has become hollow. The form remains but the spirit has departed.

So he leaves. He does not write pamphlets, does not start a reform movement, does not petition the emperor. He simply withdraws. This act of withdrawal is itself a Taoist statement: sometimes the most radical response to a corrupt world is not engagement but departure. The Tao Te Ching will later articulate this in terms of the sage who governs without ruling, who teaches without speaking — but the legend enacts it first.

Then there is the detail of Yinxi, the gatekeeper. The Tao Te Ching is written not because Laozi wants to write it, but because he is asked. He writes it as a condition of being allowed to pass. In other words, the text that has shaped Chinese civilization for two and a half millennia was composed somewhat reluctantly, as a favor to a border guard. There is something appropriately deflating about this — a reminder that the text itself, for all its importance, is just words. The real teaching went west on an ox and left no forwarding address.

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 56

The deliberate retreat from power is also thematically central. Laozi refuses the role that might seem natural for someone of his wisdom and learning: he does not stay to advise the court, does not write a manual for kings, does not try to save the empire. He knows — or the legend wants us to understand — that the empire cannot be saved by that kind of effort. The Tao cannot be forced, and civilization that has lost its way cannot be corrected from within by clever management. Sometimes the most honest response is to acknowledge the limit of what effort can achieve.

Laozi and Confucius

The contrast between Laozi and Confucius is one of the great structuring oppositions in Chinese intellectual history. They are near-contemporaries — or at least the traditions they represent are — and the differences between them illuminate what is most distinctive about each.

Confucius looked to the past. Specifically, he looked to the early Zhou dynasty as a golden age, a time when rulers were virtuous and social rituals were properly observed. His project was essentially conservative: to recover what had been lost by re-establishing the li (ritual propriety) that gave society its shape. Music, ceremony, proper forms of address, the correct performance of one's social role — these were not mere formalities for Confucius but the very substance of a good society.

Laozi, or the tradition bearing his name, took an almost opposite view. Ritual, for the Tao Te Ching, is not the solution but a symptom of the disease. Chapter 38 states this directly: when the Tao is lost, virtue arises; when virtue is lost, benevolence arises; when benevolence is lost, righteousness arises; when righteousness is lost, ritual arises. Ritual is the last stage of a long decline, the husk of genuine moral life once the living core has been hollowed out.

The Shiji records a reported conversation between Laozi and Confucius that has become famous. Confucius comes to Laozi to ask about ritual and the rites. Laozi's response is, by some readings, gently devastating. He tells Confucius that the men who established those rites are long dead, their bones rotted in the ground. All that remains are their words — and words can be deceptive. He advises Confucius to abandon his cleverness and ambition, suggesting that they are what make him visible to others and therefore vulnerable to harm.

Confucius reportedly left shaken, describing Laozi to his disciples as something like a dragon — an entity that cannot be captured or understood by ordinary means.

What this conversation encodes is the essential difference: Confucius trusts language, tradition, and human institutions to carry wisdom forward. Laozi is suspicious of all three. Not nihilistically — the Tao Te Ching is not a book of despair — but with a kind of clear-eyed recognition that the map is not the territory, and the ritual is not the virtue, and the word is not the thing.

Laozi in Later Tradition

What happened to Laozi after the ox and the mountain pass is, historically speaking, nothing — because there was no single historical Laozi to continue. But in the imagination of Chinese civilization, the story did not end at the border crossing.

By the Han dynasty, Laozi had begun his transformation into a divine figure. In religious Taoism (Daojiao), as distinct from philosophical Taoism (Daojia), he eventually became identified with Taishang Laojun — the Supreme Old Lord, one of the Three Pure Ones, the highest deities of the Taoist pantheon. The philosopher became a cosmic figure who had existed before heaven and earth, who had appeared in many forms across countless ages, who had taught the Yellow Emperor and other legendary rulers of antiquity.

This deification might seem to take us very far from the actual text of the Tao Te Ching, which is sceptical of the kind of elaborate ritual and hierarchical structure that religious Taoism developed. But it reflects something real about how ideas and their originators function in living traditions: the founding figure becomes a vessel for the tradition's ongoing self-understanding, growing with it over time.

In Chinese art and poetry, Laozi riding his ox became one of the most enduring images in the entire tradition — a figure of serene departure, of wisdom carrying itself lightly into the unknown. The image recurs in painting across a thousand years. It means something: the ideal of the sage who has finished his business with the world, who has set down what needed to be set down and now moves on without attachment.

In philosophy, Laozi's influence extends far beyond Taoism proper. Neo-Confucian thinkers engaged seriously with the Tao Te Ching. Chan (Zen) Buddhism absorbed many of its themes. In the twentieth century, Western philosophers from Heidegger to Wittgenstein were read alongside Laozi to productive effect — not because the comparisons are always exact, but because the questions Laozi raises about language, reality, and the limits of rational knowledge are perennial ones.

What We Can Take from Laozi Today

The question of whether Laozi existed as a single historical individual has occupied scholars for decades and will probably never be definitively resolved. But it matters less than it might seem to, for a simple reason: the ideas in the Tao Te Ching are either true or they are not, regardless of who wrote them. The value of yielding over forcing, the danger of excessive cleverness, the way that water — soft and shapeless — outlasts stone: these are not propositions that stand or fall on the biography of their author.

There is something appropriately Taoist about this. A tradition that begins with the claim that the Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao is not going to place its credibility in the existence of a provable founder. The teaching points, as it always points, beyond itself.

What we can take from the figure of Laozi — historical or legendary — is the image of a certain kind of mind. A mind that has seen enough to be sceptical of civilization's pretensions. A mind that trusts the natural over the artificial, the soft over the hard, the yielding over the insistent. A mind that prefers silence to speech when speech is unnecessary, and action without striving when action is called for. A mind, finally, that knows when to get on the ox and go.

That image is worth keeping, whatever the name we attach to it.