Lao-tseu (Laozi)
Follow the Way (Dao) through non-action.
Lao-tseu (Laozi) (VIe s. av. J.-C. ? (tradition), China (State of Chu, according to tradition)) : daoism. At the bottom of all things there is a Way (Dao) that no word can contain. It acts without forcing, like water that flows downward and ends up wearing away stone. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 5 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Who wrote this book?
Nobody really knows. The only "biography" was written around 94 BC by the historian Sima Qian, four centuries after the supposed events: he says that Lao Dan, an archivist of the Zhou, left China to the west and left a book of "over five thousand characters" with the keeper of a pass. But Sima Qian himself gives other possible identities. Most scholars today think the text was gathered and reworked in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. The oldest known version (Guodian, c. 300 BC) contains only about two fifths of the text, in a different order. On this site, every excerpt of the book therefore carries the badge "authenticity disputed".
Why he matters
Together with Confucius' Analects, it is the founding text of Chinese thought, and one of the most translated books in the world. It fed philosophical Daoism (Zhuangzi), political thought (Han Fei comments on it), Chinese and Zen Buddhism, then, in the West, readers as different as Tolstoy and Heidegger.
How to read it here
The Chinese text is Wang Bi's (3rd c. AD), the basis of nearly all translations. The translations are Stanislas Julien's (1842) and James Legge's (1891): old, sometimes far from each other, which shows how much this short text lends itself to several readings. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts (before 168 BC) are used to show variants.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceNo creator God who wills and judges. The Dao is the impersonal origin of everything; it even seems prior to the "Lord on high" (Di) of ancient Chinese religion. Heaven and earth "do not act from any wish to be benevolent". Neither theism nor atheism: rather an impersonal principle.
Neither empiricist nor rationalist in the Western sense. Accumulated experience leads away from what matters ("the farther one goes, the less one knows"), and study adds every day while the Way takes away. Knowledge of the Dao comes from turning inward, not from observation: closer to intuition than to experience, but wary of reasoning.
The highest knowledge is to know that one does not know. The principle of everything escapes words: one can approach it, not lock it in a definition. But this is not radical doubt: the sage "knows" the Dao.
The text does not ask the question in these terms. It never opposes a soul to a body: everything is born from the Dao, and beings are harmonised by a "breath" (qi). Calling it materialist or dualist would force a Western question onto it.
Free will is not discussed. The text rather values being "so of itself" (ziran): beings and peoples that are not forced follow their own course.
Taught moral rules (humaneness, righteousness, ritual) come late: they appear when the great Way declines, and the beautiful is conceived only along with the ugly. But there is a deeper norm, the Way and its "highest virtue", which does not depend on conventions.
No revealed faith, but distrust of reasoning and disputation: "fine words are not sincere", the sage does not argue. One reaches the Way by emptying oneself, not by arguing.
There is an order to follow: every being "returns to its root", man takes his law from earth, earth from heaven, heaven from the Dao. Living well is attuning oneself to this natural course, not inventing one's own meaning.
The word "human nature" (xing) does not occur in the text. But the ideal is a return to the simplicity of the child, and the people, when not pushed into rivalry, "are transformed of themselves". Disorder comes mostly from the desires that power stirs up.
A hard reading. On one side, minimal power: fewer laws, fewer prohibitions, the best ruler is barely known. On the other, no individual rights, an ideal of small simple villages, and a sage who keeps the people "without knowledge and without desire". Some read anarchism into it, others a manual for the prince.
Neither a rule, nor a calculation of consequences, nor virtues cultivated by study: the person of "highest virtue" is unaware of their virtue. The good is to attune oneself spontaneously to the Way, like water.