Laozi
6th-century BC semi-legendary Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism · Academics · Lived 579 BC to 500 BC · aged 79
Laozi is read about 2,392 times a day, in 156 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 28 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A philosopher who may never have existed, yet whose name anchors one of the world's enduring thought systems. The Tao Te Ching carries his signature, but scholarship now sees a composite text and a legend where tradition placed a sage who walked away from the Zhou court into the western wilderness.
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Photos 8
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Zhang Lu-Laozi Riding an Ox (cropped)
Baby Laozi Qingyanggong Chengdu
Behandel goede mensen goed - Lao-Tse
Biography of the Dragon-like Heavenly Sovereign and Emperor of High Virtue WDL4677
Birth of Laozi
Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary b29 224-0
Chen Hongshou Ochsenreiter
Confucius and Laozi, fresco from a Western Han tomb of Dongping County, Shandong province, ChinaIn their own words 10
, Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones into dust. Nothing but their words remain.
The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
In their orbit
About this person
Traditional accounts call him Li Er, born in the 6th century BC in the state of Chu during the Spring and Autumn period, and say he served as royal archivist for the Zhou court before meeting Confucius and vanishing westward. He's credited with writing the Tao Te Ching before that departure, and became the central figure of Taoism - venerated in its religious form as Taishang Laojun, one of the Three Pure Ones, and claimed as ancestor by the Li clans, including the Tang dynasty's ruling family. The text attributed to him, advocating harmony with nature and wu wei, influenced Zhuangzi and became a pillar of Chinese philosophy. Modern scholarship dates the received Tao Te Ching to the Warring States period and reads it as a composite work, leaving the historical Laozi uncertain and the legend intact.
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