He did it in one sitting, left and was never heard from again.įor what it's worth, I love Lao Zi, I love his Dao De Jing, and I am deeply grateful to that insistent guard.īefore you go any further I want to make sure that you understand that I neither speak nor read a word of Chinese and that I am now about to expound upon the meaning of an ancient Chinese text. At the western wall he was detained by a guard who recognized him and refused to let him pass until he wrote down his wisdom. All the same, I prefer the prevailing legend that Lao Zi was the Emperor's archivist until, disgusted with the way the world seemed to him to be going, he set out to leave the country. It has become fashionable in modern scholastic circles to say that someone simply compiled bits and pieces of ancient folk wisdom into the eighty-one short verses which make up the Dao De Jing and this may, indeed, be what happened. Lao Zi was, of course, Chinese, and amusing stories abound of his encounters with Confucius although no one has any idea if they could have been contemporaries. It derives from the legend that he was, from his birth (following a miraculous conception by a falling star and his mother's extended pregnancy), an old man. Literally the 'name' means 'The Old Boy,' so it's not really a name at all - just an epithet. Trouble is, he only may have written it and, for that matter, there only may have ever been such a person. The putative author of the Dao De Jing (or Daodejing, Tao Teh Ching, or Tao Te King, etc.). (or Laozi, Laotze, Lao Tze, Lao Tse, Laotzu,

Daoism in Brief: Lao Zi and the Dao De Jing

Dao de jing