Lao-tzu
Lao-tzu East AsiaThe ‘madman of Ch‘u’, the first of the ‘irresponsible hermits’, according to the Confucians, was Li Er (born 604 BC), but it has become usual in China to refer to the founder of Taoism as Lao-tzu, the Old Philosopher. Though he may have been keeper of the royal archives at Loyang, few details are known of his life. Lao-tzu was ‘a hidden wise man’, reluctant to found a school and gather a following.
According to legend, Lao-tzu simply decided to leave society. He would have vanished without trace had not the customs official on the border asked him to write a book before he retired from the world. So the sage wrote about ‘the proper way to live’. Then he went on. No one knows where he died. Later Taoist mythology was to claim of the final journey into the West that it allowed Lao-tzu to visit India as the Buddha. The reticence of both sages, their profound intimation of the way in which words limit what should really...
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