Laozi

The ox went at its own pace, which was slow, and the man on its back did not hurry it. Ahead lay the Hangu Pass, the western gate of a dynasty he had decided was finished. The keeper of the pass came out to stop him. Not to arrest him: to ask him for something. The old archivist sat there in the dust with the animal shifting under him and agreed to write it all down before he went, and what he produced ran to roughly five thousand characters in two parts, on the Way and on its power. Then he crossed the line, and the record simply stops. Nobody knew where he had gone.

That much is Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE in the sixty-third chapter of his *Records of the Historian*, and the striking thing about it is how uncomfortable he sounds. His family name was Li, the historian says, his given name Er, and he was also called Dan. He kept the archives at the Zhou court. Confucius consulted him about ritual and came away full of praise. Then the account frays. Sima Qian lines up rival candidates for who the Old Master actually was, records that some say a certain Dan is Laozi and some say he is not, and concludes that in our times nobody knows whether it is so. A historian with the best library in the empire went looking for one man and came back with three, and said so.

The name itself refuses to settle. Most read *Laozi* as a title of respect, the Old Master, though some take Lao as a surname and read it as Master Lao, on the pattern of Master Kong for Confucius. Early texts, the *Zhuangzi* among them, call him Lao Dan and never Li Er, and *Dan* is generally understood to describe long ears, which Chinese physiognomy reads as a mark of great age and long life. A. C. Graham argued that the whole figure is a splice: an old story about Confucius meeting Lao Dan, current by the fourth century BCE, onto which a philosophical reputation and then a school were grafted. The Confucian *Records of Rites* has Confucius quoting Lao Dan four separate times, always on funerals and mourning. The oldest surviving copy of the book attached to his name, seventy-one bamboo slips pulled from a tomb at Guodian in 1993 and dated to about 300 BCE, holds only around 1,700 characters, two-fifths of the text as it now stands, in an order that matches nothing later.

Nobody knows if he existed.

What is beyond dispute is what happened to him afterwards, and it is the strangest career any Chinese thinker has had. By the second century CE the Han emperor Huan had built a shrine inside his own palace to the Yellow Emperor, Laozi and the Buddha together, and in 165 and 166 he sent offerings to Laozi’s supposed birthplace at Ku. The local magistrate Bian Shao wrote an inscription for the occasion describing Laozi as born from the formless before the beginning, moving in the source of primal simplicity, merging with the breath of chaos and running with the three lights from start to finish. A man who had allegedly filed documents for the Zhou was now older than the universe.

The clearest window into what ordinary devotees thought is a ragged Dunhuang manuscript of the *Scripture of the Transformations of Laozi*, compiled at the end of the Eastern Han. Its formula for him is brisk: cultivating inner essence when retreating, becoming a teacher of emperors when advancing. It counts seventeen human appearances. Under Fuxi he was called Wen Shuangzi. In the fifth year of a king’s reign he transformed himself into a woman’s womb, stayed there seventy-two years, and came out as Li Dan, took the style-name Boyang, and served as a junior official for seven hundred years before leaving Chu for the west, teaching Yin Xi at the pass. Under the Qin he was Jianshu Zi. Among the Hu he was Futujun. Under the Han he was the adept Wang Fangping, which was a convenient thing for Wang Fangping’s own followers to be saying at the time.

The womb detail metastasised. Later hagiography stretched the gestation to eighty-one years, had him delivered through his mother’s left side beneath a plum tree, born with white hair and a white beard and able to speak, pointing at the tree to give himself the surname Li. It is a birth story assembled centuries after the fact by people who needed the sage to have been a sage from the first breath, and it explains why he is never painted young.

The Hu appearance became a weapon. If Laozi went west through the pass and never came back, said Daoists from the Han onward, then he went on to India and became the Buddha, and Buddhism is a foreign edition of a Chinese original. In 166 the official Xiang Kai put the story in a memorial scolding Emperor Huan for keeping a shrine to the Buddha and a palace full of concubines at the same time: Laozi entered the land of the barbarians and became the Buddha, who would not sleep under the same mulberry tree three nights running in case he grew fond of it, and who looked at a goddess sent to tempt him and saw a leather sack full of blood. By the Western Jin the priest Wang Fu had worked the whole thing up into a full scripture, the *Huahu jing*, and Buddhists and Daoists spent the next thousand years arguing about who had taught whom.

His powers were never the usual divine equipment. He does not fight, and no myth gives him a weapon. What he has is duration and repetition: he can enter a body, teach a dynasty, and step out again, and he does it seventeen times or twelve or thirteen depending on which biography is counting. In the more extravagant scriptures his body is the cosmos outright, his head the peak of Kunlun, his spleen the Purple Sublimity Palace among the stars. He transmits the alchemical books of Great Clarity down to Zhang Daoling and the Celestial Masters, and the elixir of the immortals is brewed under his authority.

The limits are institutional, which is a peculiar kind of weakness for a god to have. In 570 the Buddhist polemicist Zhen Luan submitted a treatise called *Laughing at the Dao*, in which he took the doctrine of Laozi’s cosmic body, laid it against the Daoists’ own map of the heavens, and pointed out with some relish that since the Purple Sublimity Palace sits far above Mount Kunlun, their supreme deity was upside down. He was not wrong about the contradiction. Laozi’s address kept changing: the earliest Celestial Master texts house him on Kunlun, later scriptures move him to the Heaven of Great Clarity, and when the Three Pure Ones finally hardened into a fixed trinity somewhere between the late Tang and the early Song, Great Clarity turned out to be the lowest of the three. He had been promoted into third place. Some scholars reading the Han evidence go further and argue that in his own century he was never the chief god at all, only an unusually important immortal, and that officials like Bian Shao were flattering an imperial enthusiasm rather than reporting a widespread cult.

None of it slowed him down. The Tang imperial house, surnamed Li, claimed him as their ancestor. In 733 the emperor Xuanzong ordered every official to keep a copy of the *Daodejing* at home and put it on the civil service examination list. Some seven hundred commentaries were written on the five thousand characters, and by the fourteenth century one Daoist master reckoned the count had passed three thousand. In much of Asia his birthday is still kept on the fifteenth day of the second lunar month, which is a fairly confident date for a man whose own biographer could not establish that he lived.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Laozi?

Laozi was a Chinese sage traditionally identified as an archivist at the Zhou court in the sixth century BCE and the author of the *Daodejing*. Sima Qian’s *Records of the Historian* gives his family name as Li and his given name as Er, and says he was also called Dan. The same biography admits that its author could not establish which of several candidates was really the Old Master.

Did Laozi actually exist?

There is no settled answer, and the earliest surviving biography already says so. Sima Qian offered rival identifications around 100 BCE and concluded that nobody in his day knew which was correct. Scholars since have argued that the figure is a composite of several legends, and the oldest excavated copy of his book, the Guodian bamboo slips of about 300 BCE, contains only two-fifths of the received text.

Why is Laozi worshipped as a god?

Laozi was deified during the Han dynasty, when he came to be understood as the Dao itself taking human form. Emperor Huan sacrificed to him in 165 and 166 CE and kept a shrine to him in the palace, and the inscription written for those offerings describes him as existing before the universe. He is venerated as Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao, and eventually as one of the Three Pure Ones.

What is the story of Laozi and the ox at the pass?

Disillusioned with the decline of the Zhou, Laozi travelled west and was stopped at the Hangu Pass by its keeper, Yin Xi, who asked him to record his teaching before leaving. The result was the roughly five-thousand-character *Daodejing*, in two parts. Sima Qian’s account ends there, saying that Laozi departed and no one knew where he had gone; the dark ox he rides in later paintings is a devotional addition, not part of the earliest telling.

What does “Laozi converting the barbarians” mean?

It is the claim that after Laozi passed westward out of China he travelled on to India and became the Buddha, making Buddhism a foreign version of a Chinese teaching. The idea circulated by the mid-second century CE, appears in Xiang Kai’s memorial of 166, and was written up as a full scripture, the *Huahu jing*, by the Jin-dynasty priest Wang Fu. It was polemic rather than tradition, and Buddhists disputed it for centuries.

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