A tomb at Guodian, in the Chinese province of Hubei, yielded some eight hundred bamboo slips in late 1993. The tomb is dated to about 300 BCE, and about two thousand of the characters on the slips match the book now known as the Tao Te Ching. They are the oldest physical trace of Laozi, the Old Master, to whom the book is ascribed. Of the man himself, no record from his own time survives.
The account everyone repeats was set down in the early first century BCE by Sima Qian, court historian of the Han dynasty. He tells of a native of the southern state of Chu, family name Li, given name Er, also called Dan (early texts name him Lao Dan, Old Dan), who kept the archives at the royal court of Zhou. In this account Confucius came to consult him about ritual and praised him afterwards. When the archivist saw the royal house of Zhou decline, he left for the west. At the frontier the keeper of the pass, Yin Xi, asked him to write down what he taught. He wrote a book in two parts, some five thousand characters on the Way and on virtue, and went on; nobody knew where. Sima Qian then names two other men who may have been Laozi, and does not decide among them. The tradition dates the life to the sixth century BCE and makes Laozi an older contemporary of Confucius.
Historians divide over what, if anything, stands behind Sima Qian's account. Some conclude that there was never a historical Laozi. A. C. Graham, the British sinologist, argued in 1986 that several legends had been joined, the oldest of them a story of Confucius meeting Lao Dan that was current by the fourth century BCE. Other scholars accept the tradition that Laozi was an older contemporary of Confucius. On the book there is more agreement: many date the bulk of it to the fourth century BCE, and D. C. Lau, who translated it in 1963, read it as an anthology by many hands. Two silk copies found at Mawangdui, in a tomb sealed in 168 BCE, give its two halves in the reverse of the order known today.
The book makes one central claim. The Tao (the Way) is the source of everything, cannot be named, and brings things about without forcing them. A person or a ruler should therefore practise wuwei, non-action, which does not mean doing nothing: it means giving up action driven by self-serving desire. Other teachers of the age, the followers of Confucius among them, offered rulers programmes of moral effort built on benevolence and righteousness. The Zhuangzi, a Daoist book of the late fourth century BCE, shows Lao Dan in seventeen passages, nine of them in conversation with Confucius. Where the text known today tells the reader to discard benevolence and righteousness, the Guodian slips say to cut off artifice and deceit. Some scholars conclude that the quarrel with the Confucians sharpened as the sayings were handed down.
The figure grew as the book spread. Empress Dowager Dou, the mother of the Han emperor Jing, was a devoted student of it, and later sources add that Jing, who reigned from 157 to 141 BCE, officially made it a classic. In the second century CE the Han emperor Huan built a palace at Laozi's traditional birthplace, and an inscription of about 166 CE presents Laozi as an embodiment of the Tao. The Celestial Masters, the first organised Daoist community, revered him as a deity. The Tang emperors, whose family name was Li, traced their descent from him. Wang Bi, a philosopher who died in 249 CE at about twenty-three, wrote one of the two commentaries through which the text reached later readers. By one count, some seven hundred commentaries have been written on it.