Laozi

Laozi, “the Old Master”, is the figure traditionally credited with the Daodejing. The earliest biography, in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian of around 100 BCE, identifies him as Li Er, a keeper of archives at the Zhou court and an older contemporary of Confucius, who is said to have visited him and compared him to a dragon. Seeing the decline of Zhou, he left for the west, and at the frontier pass the keeper asked him to write down his teaching. He wrote a book of some five thousand characters, and was never seen again.

Sima Qian himself records other identifications and admits uncertainty. Most modern scholars doubt that the Daodejing is the work of one author, and regard it as a compilation of sayings that reached its present form of eighty-one short chapters by the third century BCE. Bamboo slips found at Guodian, in a tomb dated to around 300 BCE, contain parts of the text, and silk manuscripts from Mawangdui, buried in 168 BCE, contain the whole.

In the religious Daoism that developed from the second century CE, Laozi was revered as a deity, Lord Lao the Most High, and as a manifestation of the Dao itself. The Daodejing is among the most translated books in the world.