Legendary Warring-States interlocutor of Lǎozǐ 老子, known only from Zhuāngzǐ 莊子 ch. 11 Zài yòu 在宥, where he is identified as a “worthy great officer of Zhōu” (周之賢大夫) who asks Lǎozǐ: “If we do not govern the empire, how can we mould the people’s minds?” Lǎozǐ’s famous reply — “Be careful not to disturb the people’s mind. The mind of man is rejected when forced down and exalted when raised up; in being thus driven up and down, its heat is like scorching fire and its cold like frozen ice; its swiftness is such that in the time of a glance and a nod it twice traverses the four seas; in repose it is deep like an abyss, in motion it is suspended like the heavens. Galloping and untethered — such is the mind of man! Of old the Yellow Emperor first vexed men’s minds with benevolence and righteousness; this descended to the Three Sovereigns, and the empire was greatly shaken; thence came joy and anger eyeing each other suspiciously, intelligence and folly cheating each other… when the empire reached chaos, the fault lay in the disturbance of men’s minds” — is one of the Zhuāngzǐ’s most pointed indictments of Confucian moral activism, and is read in Daoist hagiography as Lǎozǐ’s response to the decline of virtue, occasioned by Cuī Qú’s question.
In Daoist tradition Cuī Qú is counted as the seventh of the shízǐ 十子 (“Ten Masters”) of Lǎozǐ’s lineage and figures as such in Zhào Mèngfǔ’s 趙孟頫 Xuányuán shízǐ tú 玄元十子圖 (KR5a0164). The figure is purely literary, attested only in the Zhuāngzǐ. No CBDB record.