Laozi
traditionally 6th century BCE; text c. 4th century BCE, China
Daoism
The way that can be spoken is not the constant way.
“The dao that can be spoken of is not the constant dao.”
The life
There may not have been a Laozi. The name means simply 'Old Master'. The traditional biography, recorded by the historian Sima Qian some four centuries after the supposed events, has him as an archivist at the Zhou court who met Confucius and rebuked him for his ambition, then, despairing of the age, rode west on an ox and was stopped at a mountain pass by a guard who refused to let him leave without writing down his teaching. He produced five thousand characters and vanished.
Sima Qian himself offers three candidates and admits he does not know. Modern scholarship generally treats the Daodejing as an accumulated text, assembled over time from an oral tradition of aphorisms, with the earliest manuscripts, found at Guodian in 1993, dating to around 300 BCE and differing substantially from the received version.
What shaped the ideas
The Warring States period was the same crisis Confucius faced, intensified: larger armies, more total war, and rulers hiring philosophers as consultants on how to survive. The Daodejing reads in part as advice to a ruler, which is easy to miss: much of it concerns how to govern a large state, and its recommendation is consistently to do less.
It also reads as a direct reply to the Confucians. Where they proposed cultivating virtue and codifying ritual, the Daodejing argues that a society which needs to preach benevolence has already lost the thing benevolence names, and that most intervention produces the opposite of its aim.
Core arguments
- 01
Wu wei
Non-coercive action accomplishes what forcing cannot.
Water yields to everything and wears through stone. Forcing produces resistance; working along the grain of a situation produces results without struggle. Applied to government: the more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. Govern a large state as you would cook a small fish: by not poking at it.
- 02
Reversal
Things turn into their opposites, so the apparently weak position is often the strong one.
The hardest thing in the world is overcome by the softest. What is fully grown begins to age; what is rigid breaks. A strategy that maximises one quality is therefore self-defeating, and the durable position is the low, yielding, unfinished one: the valley rather than the peak.
- 03
The uncarved block
Cultivation is loss; the goal is to return rather than to acquire.
A block of wood carved into a vessel has gained one use and lost every other. Every specialisation (of a person, a society, a language) forecloses possibilities. So the Daoist project is subtraction: shed the labels, ambitions and distinctions society trains in, and return to something closer to the original condition.
- 04
The limits of language
The dao cannot be stated, and the text says so in its first line.
Naming carves the world into categories, and every category is a convention imposed on something continuous. A name for the whole would be a category containing everything, which is no category at all. The text therefore proceeds by image, paradox and negation, and readers who want propositions are meant to be frustrated.
Commonly got wrong
- Wu wei is not doing nothing. It is action without forcing: the cook who carves along the joints, the swimmer who goes with the current.
- The text is not a book of gentle spirituality. Large parts of it are hard-headed advice to a ruler on how to hold a state, including some distinctly cold passages about keeping people simple.
- Daoism and Confucianism are not simply opposed. Most educated Chinese held both, Confucian in office and Daoist at home, and did not experience a contradiction.
- The Laozi of the biography almost certainly did not exist. Treating the text as one person's considered system misreads what kind of document it is.
Works
Daodejing c. 4th century BCE
Eighty-one short chapters, about five thousand characters. Among the most translated books there is.
Guodian manuscripts c. 300 BCE
Bamboo slips excavated in 1993, containing about a third of the received text in a different order.
Mawangdui silk texts c. 200 BCE
Two near-complete versions with the De and Dao sections reversed.
Heshang Gong and Wang Bi commentaries 2nd and 3rd centuries CE
The lenses through which almost everyone has actually read it.
Any good translation, read twice, slowly. Ursula Le Guin's rendering is not the most scholarly and is the most likely to make you understand why anyone cared.
Why they still get taught
One of the two poles of Chinese thought, the philosophical root of a major religion, and the standing argument that intervention is frequently the problem: a claim that turns up in ecology, management and political theory wherever the Daodejing itself does not.
Chapters
- Wu Wei and the Uncarved Block · The Other Half of the World