Traditional author of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and, with Zhuangzi, one of the two foundational figures of the Taoist tradition; a figure whose historical existence is uncertain but whose attributed text is, after the Bible, the most translated book in the world and one of the central documents of Chinese and East Asian thought.
The conventional biography, compiled in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian in the 2nd century BCE, places Laozi — "the old master" — as an archivist of the Zhou court in the 6th century BCE, a contemporary of Confucius said to have given him cryptic instruction at their single meeting, and a recluse who, on leaving the corrupt court westward, was persuaded by a border guard to set down the eighty-one short chapters of the Daodejing. Modern scholarship treats this account as largely legendary and the text as a compilation from multiple hands and periods, reaching something like its received form by the 4th or 3rd century BCE; the 1973 Mawangdui manuscripts and 1993 Guodian bamboo-slip finds have pushed the earliest strata back and shown that the book's structure was fluid well into the Han.
The Daodejing is a book of roughly 5,000 Chinese characters in eighty-one short, often paradoxical chapters, written in a compressed poetic idiom that is consistently underdetermined — which is part of what has made it translatable into so many later traditions. Its principal terms are dao (the way; the generative order of the world, prior to and beyond articulation), de (virtue or inherent power), wu wei (non-action, or action that does not force), ziran (self-so, spontaneity), and pu (the uncarved block, the unworked state). Its political teaching is a sustained argument against Confucian ritualism and Legalist command: the sage-ruler governs least, cultivates emptiness, refuses accumulation, and allows the people to return to their natural capacities. Its ethical teaching rejects the accumulation of distinctions — good/bad, beautiful/ugly, noble/base — as the principal source of human trouble, and its cosmology treats reversal, weakness, and the feminine as generative in ways that the surface of things misses.
The book's reception is vast. In China it became, alongside the Confucian canon and the Buddhist sutras, one of the three pillars of the imperial literary culture, and the founding text of religious Taoism (which reads Laozi as a divinized figure). Outside China the Daodejing has entered Western literature through translations as varied as James Legge's Victorian scholarly version, Arthur Waley's The Way and Its Power (1934), D. C. Lau's standard Penguin edition, and the more interpretive renderings by Stephen Mitchell and, notably, Ursula Le Guin; Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965) is part of the same mid-century American reception.