DidDaoismHaveaFounderTextual.PDF

Chapter 2 Did Daoism Have a Founder? Textual Issues of the Laozi Xiaogan Liu Was there a founder of Daoism? If we are concerned with Daoism as a tradition of thought or philosophy, our question must address the historical position of the Laozi 老子 (or Lau-tze), which later came to be known by the title Daodejing 道 德經 (or Tao-te-ching; Eng., The Classic of the Way and Its Virtue). This text was circulated, cited, discussed, and transmitted for centuries before the earliest religious movements, which worshipped Laozi as a kind of god and immortal, emerged at the end of the second century CE.1 So was there an originator of Daoist thought? This seems a simple enough question, but the answer becomes complicated if we want to get at historical truth. Traditionally, people believed that a person known as Laozi was the ?rst Daoist thinker, based on an account in the earliest of?cial history, the Historical Record (Shiji 史記,Sima1975). This earliest wisdom, however, fell into doubt and underwent serious scrutiny in the twentieth century. Many alternative and competing hypotheses about Laozi and the key text that bears his name have emerged. Some scholars, especially Westerners, do not believe there was a speci?c person named Laozi; they have argued that the text that bears this name had no single initiator and was created by many anonymous authors from different ancient states across the Chinese heartland over hundreds of years (Moeller 2006: 1–3; Graham 1990; Kohn and LaFargue 1998). This may be quite true for the much later Daoist scriptures, but the Laozi is different. It contains nothing about divine revelation, and is instead a brief text of groundbreaking thought organized in a roughly coherent 1See Chap. 20: “Daoism from Philosophy to Religion.” X. Liu () Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR e-mail: liuxiaogan@ ? Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 25 X. Liu (