Laozi and the Way of the Daodejing

Traditional accounts, most influentially the biography in Sima Qian's Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian, compiled c. 94 BCE), identify Laozi ("Old Master") with Li Er or Lao Dan, an archivist at the Zhou royal court said to have been an older contemporary of Confucius, who reputedly dictated the Daodejing (also called the Laozi) to a border guard before departing China forever. Modern scholarship treats this biography with considerable skepticism: the text shows signs of composite authorship and gradual compilation, likely assembled from originally independent sayings and verses over the course of the fourth and third centuries BCE, and many specialists doubt that a single historical author named Laozi existed at all in the form later tradition describes. The 1993 discovery of bamboo-slip manuscripts at Guodian, containing a shorter, partial version of the text datable to roughly 300 BCE, confirmed that portions of the Daodejing circulated independently before being assembled into the roughly five-thousand-character, two-part (Dao and De) text known today.