The most sweemingly reliable account of him which has come down to the present is that by Szu Ma-chien, or Sze-ma-thsien, in the Shi-chi, and this is very brief and unsatisfactory. He was mysterious both in his birth and his death, and through all his life he seems to have courted obscurity. It was not until the Han dynasty, when the teachings of Laozi, Zhuangzi, and others were seen to share certain insights centering on the concept of Dao, that they were classified together under the rubric of philosophical “Daoism” (daojia)."Īlthough the majority takes “Laozi” to mean “Old Master,” some scholars believe that “Lao” is a surname. During the first half of the third century, Lao Dan was recognized as a great thinker in his own right and as the founder of a distinct “Laoist” school of thought. The earliest strand revolved around the meeting of Confucius with Lao Dan and was current by the fourth century B.C.E. Graham (1986) argues that the story of Laozi reflects a conflation of different legends. According to some modern scholars, Laozi is entirely legendary there was never an historical Laozi. Confucius and Mencius, for instance, stand out as real personages who actually played a part in China's history while all we can gather from the short life of Lao Tzu, a part of which reads like an interpolation by another hand, is that he was a more or less legendary individual, whose very existence at the date usually assigned to him, 7th and 6th centuries BC, is altogether doubtful. Of the life of Lao-tzu very little is known. One author, indeed, has even gone the length of saying that Lao-tzu was made out of space or vacuity. The life of Lao-tzu, like the book which he wrote, are enveloped in mystery and one might almost be excused for doubting whether such a person ever actually existed. There are stories, but some of them are inconsistent. Very little is known about the historic Lao-Tzu, who created Taoism.
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