Lao Tzu

Laozi — 'Old Master' — is the name tradition gives to the author of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism. Whether he was a single historical person, as the historian Sima Qian recorded, or a composite figure remains a genuinely open scholarly question, and we say so plainly.

The text itself is real and remarkably stable: eighty-one brief chapters on effortless action, humility, and the limits of force, transmitted for well over two thousand years and among the most translated works in world literature.

RiseHush cites every Lao Tzu line by chapter of the Tao Te Ching, and excludes the large body of modern aphorisms wrongly attributed to him.