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老子

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Text ID
KR5c0057
Date
-400–249
Dynasty
周

Lǎozǐ 老子

Master Lǎo / The Book of the Way and its Virtue

attributed to 老子 (Lǎozǐ, traditional 6th cent. BCE; received Wáng Bì-edition text 3rd cent. CE)

A bare-text edition of the Lǎozǐ 老子 / Dàodé jīng 道德經 — the foundational scripture of philosophical and religious Daoism — in eighty-one chapters, catalogued by Kanseki as the main text (zhèng wén 正文) extracted from Wáng Bì’s 王弼 (226–249 CE) commentary edition as transmitted in the Daozang (the Wáng Bì commentary is DZ 690 Dàodé zhēn jīng zhù 道德真經註). This entry is a parallel text-witness to KR5c0045 (the uncommentated Daozang bare text, DZ 664) and serves primarily as the linguistically-indexed text for digital-philological research purposes.

About the work

The Lǎozǐ / Dàodé jīng is a short (roughly 5,000 characters) text of concise, rhythmic, and often paradoxical maxims, organised in 81 chapters. The division into an upper Dào piān 道篇 (chs. 1–37) and a lower Dé piān 德篇 (chs. 38–81) is already present in the Wáng Bì received recension; the Mǎwángduī 馬王堆 silk manuscripts (168 BCE) preserve the inverse arrangement (Dé first, Dào second), demonstrating the fluidity of the book’s gross structure in the Hàn period.

The work develops an austere cosmological and ethical philosophy around the master-term dào 道 (“the Way”) — understood as the ineffable, non-substantial, generative ground of all particular things — and its complementary term dé 德 (“virtue”, or “the power of the Way manifest in particular things”). The political application of this cosmology is the doctrine of wú wéi 無為 (“non-action”, non-interfering rule), which the sage-ruler applies to govern by not governing; the ethical application is the distinctive Laozian vocabulary of pǔ 樸 (“uncarved simplicity”), xū 虛 (“emptiness”), jìng 靜 (“stillness”), róu 柔 (“softness”, “suppleness”), and bù zhēng 不爭 (“non-contention”). The famous opening formulation — dào kě dào, fēi héng dào; míng kě míng, fēi héng míng 道可道，非恒道；名可名，非恒名 (“Of the Way that can be spoken of, this is not the constant Way; of names that can be named, these are not constant names”) — establishes the book’s core epistemological claim: the ultimate Way lies beyond all linguistic representation.

Textual layers and recensions

The received text of the Lǎozǐ is the product of a long textual history now clarified by two twentieth-century archaeological discoveries:

  • The Guōdiàn 郭店 bamboo slips (tomb dated c. 300 BCE, excavated 1993) — the earliest surviving text of the Lǎozǐ, preserving about one-third of the received text (approximately 1,750 characters, drawn from 31 of the 81 chapters) in three distinct bamboo-slip sets. The Guōdiàn slips demonstrate that a substantial portion of the Lǎozǐ material was in circulation by the late fourth century BCE, in a form already close to the received text though not yet in the 81-chapter arrangement.
  • The Mǎwángduī 馬王堆 silk manuscripts (tomb dated 168 BCE, excavated 1973) — two nearly complete manuscripts (A/jiǎ 甲 and B/yǐ 乙) of the Lǎozǐ in the DéDào order, reflecting an arrangement antedating the received DàoDé order. The Mǎwángduī witnesses confirm that the canonical 81-chapter division is a Later-Hàn editorial intervention aligned with the Héshàng gōng 河上公 commentary tradition.
  • The Běi dà Hàn jiǎn 北大漢簡 manuscript (early Western Hàn, published 2012) — a third major witness, confirming the early-Hàn textual configuration.

The two dominant received recensions are:

  • The Héshàng gōng 河上公 edition (Eastern Hàn) — with moralising-religious commentary attributed to a legendary “Master of the River Bank” who is said to have received Hàn Wéndì 漢文帝 in his hut. This is the textual basis of most popular editions and the source of the canonical 81-chapter division.
  • The Wáng Bì 王弼 edition (Three Kingdoms, Wèi 魏) — with the philosophical commentary of Wáng Bì (226–249 CE), the young xuánxué 玄學 philosopher who died at age 23. Wáng Bì’s reading, developed alongside his Zhōuyì zhù 周易註, established the sophisticated běn mò 本末 (“root-branch”) reading of the Lǎozǐ that has been the philosophical touchstone of the text ever since. The Wáng Bì recension is the textual base of the present Kanseki KR5c0057 entry (per the catalog).

A note on the Kanseki base edition: the Kanseki per-file header indicates BASEEDITION tls (Thesaurus Linguae Sericae, Christoph Harbsmeier’s linguistic-research edition), not Wáng Bì. The TLS text uses the unabridged pre-Hàn-taboo forms (héng 恒 rather than cháng 常) throughout — reflecting the Mǎwángduī / Guōdiàn critical stratum — whereas the Wáng Bì received text consistently reads 常. The catalog’s “Wáng Bì zhù běn” designation is therefore a classificatory-traditional label rather than a faithful description of the displayed text.

Prefaces

No preface is transmitted with this bare-text edition. For the full Wáng Bì commentary and preface, see the parallel commentary edition DZ 690.

Abstract

The Lǎozǐ is, with the Yìjīng 易經 and the Lúnyǔ 論語, one of the three most culturally consequential books of pre-imperial China. Traditional biography (Shǐjì 史記 63) assigns its composition to Lǎo Dān 老聃 (zì Bóyáng 伯陽, míng Lǐ Ěr 李耳), a librarian at the Zhōu 周 royal archives who left the kingdom through the Hángǔ Pass 函谷關 at the end of the Spring-and-Autumn period and composed the text at the request of the passkeeper Yǐn Xǐ 尹喜. Modern philological consensus — developed by D. C. Lau, A. C. Graham, William Boltz, Michael LaFargue, Harold Roth, Robert Henricks, and others — treats this biography as legendary and places the composition of the oldest textual stratum in the fourth century BCE. The received text then developed through several redactional stages, reaching its received 81-chapter form by the Later Hàn and stabilising in the Wáng Bì and Héshàng gōng recensions of the Eastern Hàn / Three Kingdoms period.

The work was given the canonical title Dàodé zhēn jīng 道德真經 by Táng Xuánzōng 唐玄宗 in 742, as part of the same programme that canonised the Zhuāngzǐ (KR5c0051), Lièzǐ (KR5c0049), and Kàngcāngzǐ (KR5c0050). Simultaneously Lǎozǐ himself was formally enfeoffed by the Táng as the founding imperial ancestor (since the Táng ruling house took Lǐ 李 as its surname and claimed Lǎozǐ as a remote progenitor), and the Lǎozǐ was given a permanent place as an examination text in the state-sponsored Daoist institutes (Chóngxuán xué 崇玄學).

Per the project’s dating rule — applying the “layered / received-recension bracket” convention — the frontmatter gives a composition window of c. 400 BCE to 249 CE, covering the span from the oldest Guōdiàn-stratum material through Wáng Bì’s death, which fixed the received recension. Dynasty 周 reflects the pre-imperial origin of the core text.

Translations and research

The Lǎozǐ has been more extensively translated than any other Chinese text, with several hundred English translations alone. Representative scholarly editions and translations include:

  • Lau, D. C. Tao Te Ching. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963; 2nd rev. ed. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001. Standard scholarly English translation.
  • Henricks, Robert G. Lao-tzu: Te-tao ching. A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts. New York: Ballantine, 1989. The first major English translation based on the Mǎwángduī manuscripts.
  • Henricks, Robert G. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Guōdiàn-based translation.
  • Ivanhoe, P. J. The Daodejing of Laozi. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. Contemporary philosophical translation.
  • Mair, Victor H. Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way. New York: Bantam, 1990. Mǎwángduī-based.
  • Chan, Alan K. L. Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and the Ho-shang Kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Authoritative study of the two major received commentaries.
  • Boltz, William G. “Lao tzu Tao te ching.” In Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, 269–92. Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993. Foundational textual-history survey.
  • Lou Yulie 樓宇烈. Wáng Bì jí jiào shì 王弼集校釋. Běijīng: Zhōnghuá, 1980. Standard critical edition of Wáng Bì’s complete works including his Lǎozǐ zhù.
  • Chén Gǔyìng 陳鼓應. Lǎozǐ jīn zhù jīn yì jí píng jiè 老子今註今譯及評介. Taipei: Shāngwù, 1970 (rev. 2009). Standard modern Chinese critical edition with modern-Chinese paraphrase.
  • LaFargue, Michael. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. For the stratigraphic-philological approach to the text.
  • Graham, A. C. “The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan.” In Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature, 111–24. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. For the historical-biographical question.
  • Seidel, Anna. La divinisation de Lao tseu dans le Taoïsme des Han. Paris: EFEO, 1969. Foundational study of the Daoist deification of Lǎozǐ.
  • Schipper, Kristofer. Entry on Dàodé jīng in Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 1:58–59.

Other points of interest

The distinctive textual feature of the Kanseki KR5c0057 display — the consistent use of 恒 rather than 常 — reflects the Mǎwángduī / Guōdiàn pre-Hàn-taboo form. In Hàn times, because 恒 was part of the personal name of Hàn Wéndì 漢文帝 (Liú Héng 劉恒, r. 180–157 BCE), a formal taboo required the substitution of 常 in written texts. The received Wáng Bì edition preserves the post-taboo 常 throughout, making the Kanseki display text (with 恒 preserved) philologically closer to the pre-Hàn stratum than to the catalog-named Wáng Bì edition.

The cultural influence of the Lǎozǐ on Chinese and East Asian civilisation is incalculable. Alongside the Lúnyǔ and the Yìjīng, the Lǎozǐ is one of the three definitively canonical pre-imperial texts. It is the foundational scripture of both philosophical Daoism (dào jiā 道家) and religious Daoism (dào jiào 道教); it shaped the development of Chán 禪 Buddhism in ways still being unfolded by modern comparative philosophy; it profoundly influenced Sòng Neo-Confucian metaphysics (especially that of Zhū Xī 朱熹); and its axiomatic formulations — dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào 道可道，非常道; wú wéi ér wú bù wéi 無為而無不為 (“act without action and nothing will be left undone”); shàng shàn ruò shuǐ 上善若水 (“the highest goodness is like water”) — have entered the universal philosophical vocabulary.

In the Daoist religious tradition, Lǎozǐ himself is the supreme deity in his Dào-embodied form, as Tài shàng Lǎo jūn 太上老君 — the eternally self-manifesting Most-High Lord. Táng, Sòng, and Yuán hagiography traces 81 incarnations of Lǎozǐ across the ages; the Lǎozǐ huà hú jīng 老子化胡經 tradition (Lǎozǐ’s conversion of the barbarians, preserved fragmentarily in several Daozang texts) makes Lǎozǐ the originator of Buddhism through his westward migration — a polemical Daoist claim contested by Buddhists from the fourth century onwards.

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