Laozi (Lao Tzu)

c. 571 - c. 471 BCE · Chinese (legendary keeper of the Zhou archives; State of Chu) · Daoist philosophy, Chinese philosophy, metaphysics, political philosophy, mysticism

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

Legend has it that Laozi, the "Old Master," kept the royal archives of the declining Zhou court, watched the dynasty rot, and finally rode west out of civilization altogether. At the Hangu Pass a border guard recognized the sage and begged him to leave something behind; the five thousand characters he reportedly set down before vanishing became the Daodejing, one of the most translated books ever written. Whether one man wrote it or many hands assembled it over the Warring States centuries, no other text has shaped China so quietly.

Topics Laozi (Lao Tzu) addresses

• the Dao as ineffable cosmic generative principle
• wu wei — non-coercive action
• ziran — the so-of-itself
• de — virtue or inner potency
• pu — the uncarved block
• fan — reversal as the movement of the Dao
• wu and you — non-being and being
• the nameless and the named
• xuan — the mysterious dark
• the valley spirit and the mysterious female
• the soft overcomes the hard
• water as image of the Dao
• the sage-ruler and non-action governance
• the small-state ideal
• the anti-Confucian critique of ren and yi
• reversal of opposites
• the female and the feminine in Daoist thought
• cosmogony in the Daodejing
• mysticism in the Daodejing
• cultivation of the self
• language and the ineffable
• the first chapter and its interpretation
• politics and statecraft in the Daodejing
• the Guodian bamboo slips

Converse with Laozi (Lao Tzu) on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Laozi (Lao Tzu)'s own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.