Laozi and the Tao Te Ching
9 Popular Claims, Checked

The Daodejing, often written Tao Te Ching, is a short book: its earliest biography says it ran to “over five thousand words”. Its supposed author, Laozi, has become a name that almost any calm-sounding sentence can be attached to. Here are nine claims, checked against the Chinese text on Chinese Wikisource, James Legge’s public-domain English translation of 1891, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. English after a Chinese line is our translation unless it is marked as Legge’s.

1. “Laozi was a sage of the 6th century BC who wrote the Tao Te Ching”

Disputed That is the tradition, and the evidence for it is thin. The earliest biography, in the historian Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Historian), gives him a name, Li Er, and a job as an archivist of the Zhou court. It says he wrote a book “in two parts, on the meaning of the Way and virtue, over five thousand words” before leaving through a border pass. Then it hedges three times with “或曰”, “some say”, and ends one passage: “世莫知其然否”, “no one in the world knows whether this is so” (our translations).

Scholars still disagree. The philosopher Alan Chan, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, reports that “According to some modern scholars, however, Laozi is entirely legendary; there was never a historical Laozi”, and that “Few scholars outside China today would subscribe fully to the Shiji report.” His own view is that he finds “little reason not to accept the traditional claim that Laozi was a senior contemporary of Confucius”, but he adds that the question “no doubt will continue to attract and divide scholarly opinion.” On the book, the evidence leans more clearly. The traditional view, Chan writes, is that it was written by Lao Dan in the sixth or early fifth century B.C.E., and “This seems unlikely, however, if it is assumed that the Laozi was written by a single author.” He writes that it may be regarded, as D. C. Lau suggests, as “the product of many hands over a long period of time”. The name itself is best taken, he writes, to mean “Old (lao) Master (zi)”.

2. “The oldest copies match the book we read today”

Partly true Much of the wording survives, but not the book in the shape we read it. Two archaeological finds changed what we know. In 1973, two silk manuscripts of the text were found at Mawangdui, in Hunan province, in a tomb “sealed in 168 B.C.E.”; both begin with the second half of the book as we now read it. In late 1993, a tomb at Guodian, in Hubei province, dated “around 300 B.C.E.”, yielded bamboo slips of which “about 2,000 characters, match the Laozi”. According to Chan, “they remain the oldest extant Laozi texts to date.” He writes that the two Mawangdui manuscripts “contain all the chapters that are found in the current Laozi, although the chapters follow a different order in a few places”, and that the Guodian material is “On the whole … consistent with the received text, although the placement or sequence of the chapters is different and there are numerous variants or archaic characters.” Some variants matter: where chapter 19 now says “Cut off benevolence (ren), discard rightness (yi)”, the Guodian “A” text says “cut off artificiality, discard deceit.”

The picture that emerges is of a text that grew over time. Chan writes that sayings “attributed to Laozi were committed to writing probably from the second half of the fifth century B.C.E.”, and that “By the middle of the third century B.C.E., the Laozi probably had reached a relatively stable form.” Even “The division into 81 chapters reflects numerological interest”, and the title Daodejing “appears not to have been widely used until later”.

3. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

True, with two things lost in translation. It is in chapter 64. In the received Chinese text: “千里之行，始於足下” — literally, “a journey of a thousand li begins beneath the feet” (our translation). “Miles” is not in the Chinese, which counts in li, and “a single step” is James Legge’s English: “the journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step.”

The line is the third of three images about big things growing from small ones: “The tree which fills the arms grew from the tiniest sprout; the tower of nine storeys rose from a (small) heap of earth”. The chapter’s opening paragraph ends with its point, in Legge’s words: “Action should be taken before a thing has made its appearance; order should be secured before disorder has begun.” It is advice about dealing with things while they are small, not a motivational poster about starting.

The older manuscripts are not all the same here. Chan notes that the Guodian slips “give two different versions of what is now part of chapter 64”, and in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, as collated by the editors on Chinese Wikisource, the line reads “百仞之高”, “a height of a hundred ren” (our translation), where the later text has the journey. The two manuscripts themselves write the second character differently, so this is an editors’ reading.

4. “Wu wei means doing nothing”

Myth Wuwei, usually translated “non-action”, is central to the book, but it is not idleness. Chapter 37 says: “道常無為，而無不為”, “The Way constantly does not act, and yet nothing is left undone” (our translation). Legge renders it: “The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”

Chan puts it plainly: “Wuwei does not mean total inaction.” He notes that “some translators have opted for ‘non-assertive action,’ ‘non-coercive action’ or ‘effortless action,’” and that in the Laozi the idea “seems to be used more broadly as a contrast against any form of action driven by self-serving desire”. The book also addresses rulers: it “condemns aggressive measures such as war (ch. 30), cruel punishment (ch. 74), and heavy taxation (ch. 75)”. Chan also notes that naturalness and wuwei “are open to interpretation.”

5. “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be”

Myth as a Laozi quote. It is not in Legge’s complete translation, which we searched in full for “let go”, “become what” and “might be”. A site that checks fake Laozi quotes says “This is NOT a quote from Tao Te Ching” and that the line is “very loosely based on the first lines of chapter 22”. That chapter, in Legge’s translation, begins: “The partial becomes complete; the crooked, straight; the empty, full; the worn out, new.”

6. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished”

Unverified No passage in Legge’s complete translation says this in any recognisable form, and we could not find where the line comes from. Two chapters come near the idea. Chapter 37 says the Tao “does nothing … and so there is nothing which it does not do”. Chapter 73, in Legge’s words, says “It is the way of Heaven not to strive, and yet it skilfully overcomes” and “Its demonstrations are quiet, and yet its plans are skilful and effective”. Both are relatives in thought, not a source for the wording.

7. “If you are depressed you are living in the past”

Myth as a Laozi quote. It is not in Legge’s complete translation. The same site reports that “The first appearance of the quote on Facebook, already accrediting it to Lao Tzu, is from December 19, 2009.”

8. “The butterfly dream is a Laozi story”

Myth It is from the Zhuangzi, a different book by a different thinker. The philosopher Chad Hansen, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, describes Zhuangzi as a figure of the “late 4th century BC” and the book as “a compilation of his and others’ writings”. In chapter 2, Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly and on waking cannot tell whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

Retellings often stop there. The story itself ends with a qualification, in Legge’s translation: “But between Kâu and a butterfly there must be a difference. This is a case of what is called the Transformation of Things.” Hansen reads it as an illustration of “mild skepticism”.

9. “Laozi founded Taoism”

Partly true He is its central figure, but “founder” is too simple. Chan writes: “In many popular accounts, Laozi is described as the ‘founder’ or ‘father’ of ‘Daoism.’ This begs a number of questions and therefore should not be taken uncritically”. Chan reports the view that only in the Han dynasty were Laozi, Zhuangzi and others “classified together under the rubric of a distinct Daoist school of thought.”

Daoism is also a living religion. Chan writes that Daoism “encompasses both a philosophical tradition and an organized religion”, that “The two are deeply intertwined”, and that “In religious Daoism, Laozi is revered as a supreme deity.” Scholars disagree about how useful the split between “philosophy” and “religion” is. In the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry “Religious Daoism”, Fabrizio Pregadio quotes the scholar Kristofer Schipper: “It has become a sinological dogma to distinguish between the so-called Taoist school (Daojia)” and the Daoist religion, a distinction that, Schipper adds, “The successive Daozang [Daoist Canons] never made”.

Our reading

The Daodejing itself is stranger and more political than the quotes it gets credited with. It speaks to rulers about war and taxes, its most famous line is about catching problems early, and its central idea is not doing nothing but not forcing things. Several of the sayings shared under its name are not in it. A good test for any “Laozi quote”: ask for the chapter number, then read the chapter.

Sources

• Daodejing (received text with Wang Bi’s commentary), Shiji chapter 63, Zhuangzi chapter 2, and the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, Chinese texts on Chinese Wikisource.
• James Legge, trans., The Tao Teh King (1891), Project Gutenberg; and The Texts of Taoism, Sacred Books of the East vol. 39 (1891), Internet Sacred Text Archive.
• Alan Chan, “Laozi”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2025).
• Chad Hansen, “Zhuangzi”, and Fabrizio Pregadio, “Religious Daoism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• “Fake Lao Tzu Quotes”, taoistic.com (its verdicts are quoted in sections 5 and 7; the checks themselves rest on the Chinese text).

Checked September 2026.

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