According to legend, thousands of years ago, before Alexander the Great, before Julius Caesar, before Socrates, Buddha, or Jesus, there lived a great philosopher known in the ancient world as Lao Tzu.

A very important person at the time, it is believed that Lao Tzu was advisor to the Emperor, royal librarian, and elder teacher of the young philosopher, Confucius.

As the legend goes, one day when Lao Tzu was old and disillusioned with civilization, he left the confines of the Zhou Dynasty, where he lived and worked.

Wanting only solitude in nature, he went off into the Chungnan Mountains toward Tibet. As he was leaving the West Gate of the Empire, an officer on duty there begged him to create a book of his wisdom before he left. In response to this request, he produced two volumes, one labeled Tao, the other labeled Te, and then he disappeared into the mountains.

His two-volume book, the Tao Te Ching, laid a foundation that was built upon by philosophers in Asia for the next two millennia.

He was to the East what Socrates and Plato were to the West.

Unfortunately, we actually know very little about the man we call Lao Tzu. The only reason why we know as much as we do about Lao Tzu is probably because of his well known protégé, Confucius.

No one is sure exactly who Lao Tzu was or where he came from. Scholars still argue about his identity.

The name Lao Tzu is really just a nickname, meaning old boy, or old philosopher. Reportedly, Lao Tzu was a man named Lao Tan who lived approximately from 604 to 531 BC. But, it has also been suggested that Lao Tzu was another man named Li Erh.

No one can be certain, though. There are no records that survived, except for his book and reports of meetings that he had with the famous philosopher, Confucius.

It is widely believed that this person, Lao Tzu, was the royal librarian of the Zhou Dynasty which was one of the greatest and oldest of Chinese Dynasties, lasting 900 years, from 1122 to 221 BC.

We know that he lived during the lifetime of Confucius (551-479 BC), and that Lao Tzu was much older than Confucius.

We know this because it is written that the young Confucius went to the great Zhou library to study philosophy under the tutelage of Lao Tzu.

When Confucius went to the Royal Library at the capital of Zhou, he was a young scholar interested in learning all he could from Lao Tzu and the great library. We don’t know exactly what happened at his initial visit, but it is recorded that Lao Tzu was critical of the young Confucius.

Lao Tzu chastised him for his preoccupation with knowledge, humanism, and justice. This must have been puzzling to the young Confucius, eager to learn all he could of these things.

Lao Tzu told the young Confucius that the writings in the library were like footprints, and that one should not mistake the print for the foot.

As the royal librarian of a Dynasty that lasted for 900 years, Lao Tzu would have had at his disposal many hundreds of years worth of knowledge from the Zhou Dynasty alone.

The library may also have contained works from most if not all of the Shang Dynasty, which preceded it for another 600 years.

Perhaps even greater than the famous ancient library of Alexandria, the library of Lao Tzu may have contained as much as 1500 years worth of knowledge.

This made him in charge of one of the oldest libraries in the ancient world.

The Library of the Zhou Dynasty was probably more like a museum than a modern library. It likely consisted of scriptures and scrolls to be sure, but it probably also contained relics with inscriptions on bone and jade. These may have spanned the entire history of their civilization.

Some items might well date back to the early Bronze Age and before.

Exactly all that was contained in the library we may never know since it was eventually destroyed in the siege of the Zhou capitol.

But, the one legacy of Lao Tzu that has been preserved and passed down to us today was his book, the Tao Te Ching. Originally written Te Tao Ching, the title roughly means Passages on The Way of.

The legend only says that the book was passed down from this philosopher known as Lao Tzu, approximately in the 6th century BC, but it is not clear whether or not he personally wrote it. It may have been an original work, or it might have been a collection of verses from different authors, or a combination of both.

Most experts agree there was probably no single author that wrote all of the 81 separate passages and poems of Tao Te Ching. One reason is that the different poems contain a variety of different writing styles.

Also, some poems mean basically the same as others but they are written in slightly different ways, as though different authors were giving their version of a common theme.

To make it even more confusing, the oldest versions were not broken into numbered passages, but rather they were written as one long 5000 word tome.

The passages, assembled in two volumes, appear to be grouped in some vague order.

There are a few poems about warfare clumped together, and then there are a few passages about desire and greed clumped together, and so on. It makes sense that Lao Tzu, being a librarian, would edit a collection of ancient wisdom from all the thousands of scrolls and artifacts in the library.

So, the Tao Te Ching could well have been an anthology on the Way of Virtue, written by a variety of authors, and could have dated back hundreds and maybe even thousands of years prior to the life of Lao Tzu.

If this scenario is true, and Lao Tzu transcribed these verses from an ancient collection of scrolls and relics, in the vast, dusty vaults of the Zhou library, then it is anybody’s guess when or who might have first written them down.

Some of these texts may have been known and passed down through oral tradition long before being written down.

Some may have been written in early pictographs and then translated into Chinese characters by Lao Tzu. Some of the rhyming verses may have been passed down in the form of songs from ancient times, possibly from as far back as the late Neolithic, before the advent of written language.

Some of them might have been created in the form of shamanic chants, which were then written down on sacred relics and then stored in the library for hundreds of years, until Lao Tzu found them.

This fits with the short rhyming style of many of the verses.

Knowing exactly when these verses were first conceived is important.

There have been over 150 English translations of the Tao Te Ching, and each is slightly different from the others. The verses are very enigmatic and it’s hard to be certain of their meaning.

By knowing who wrote these passages and when, we get a clue as to their true meaning.

For instance, what kind of culture did these people have? What conflicts did they face? There are certain themes repeated over and over again in these passages. Why were these themes so important?

Often, it appears that the verses are just riddles. What were they trying to say, and why were they written so cryptically?

Even though the Tao Te Ching might have been a collection of works that spanned hundreds of years by various different authors, the book clearly does represent a single, over-arching theme.

The verses primarily deal with the Tao, which in Chinese means a path or way.

According to Lao Tzu’s text, this philosophy of the Way was considered vastly ancient. Lao Tzu stated that the ancients who practiced the Tao predated the Emperors.

If taken literally, this would mean that the philosophy of Taoism was known and practiced in the Stone Age, what we call the late Neolithic period, more than 4000 years ago.

According to legend, the first to discover the Way was the first Emperor of China, the fabled Yellow Emperor, Huang Di. The Yellow Emperor met one of these ancient Taoists in the Chungnan Mountains, nearly 5000 years ago.

The Emperor asked for the secret to immortality. The Taoist told him:

”If you want to live forever, don’t exhaust your body or it’s vitality. Your eyes should see nothing. Your ears should hear nothing. Your mind should know nothing. Let your spirit take care of your body, and your body will last forever. Concentrate on the inside. Ignore the outside. Knowledge will only harm you.”

Chuang Tzu

The problem with this story is the problem with understanding Taoism in general. This story was actually written well over a hundred years after the death of Lao Tzu, by a writer named Chuang Tzu. His writing contains some themes that are similar to Lao Tzu, and some that are different. And, this is the real problem in understanding the Tao of Lao Tzu.

Most of the books and stories that we use to understand the philosophy of the ancients were written hundreds and even thousands of years later, by people living in a different cultural climate, with a different zeitgeist, and a different collection of concerns and attitudes.

So how do we know that they correctly interpreted the original meaning?

If Lao Tzu was right, and the ancients of whom he spoke lived before the first Dynasty, then they must have had a very different perspective on life. The meaning of the verses might be very different than previously thought. After all, the mind-set of someone singing a shamanic chant in a Neolithic village 5000 years ago is probably not the same mind-set of an urban priest living in the 6th Century AD.

Unfortunately, it is these later writings that we have always used to try to understand the Taoist riddles of Lao Tzu.

Many people don’t realize that it was over 600 years after the death of Lao Tzu before the very first Taoist religion was established in China, in the first century AD.

Prior to that, Taoism was something only associated with the ancients. Then, for the last 2000 years, Lao Tzu’s writing has been interpreted in light of this new Taoist religion.

In other words, Taoism is a 2000 year old religion, created by people in order to live like their ancient ancestors, who lived thousands of years before them.

Did you ever play a game called gossip? It’s a common kid’s game, also called telephone.

The idea is that you get a circle of friends. One person whispers a secret to the person sitting next to them, then that person whispers the secret to the person sitting on the other side of them, and so on, around the room, until everyone has heard the secret.

By the time the secret gets around the room it has completely changed, often in comical ways. That’s what’s so fun about the game is seeing just how mutilated and mutated a single message can get when it is reproduced ten times;

Each generation looses something. Well, that’s one way of looking at the history of Taoism. Each generation has interpreted and reinterpreted the Tao, based on the scholarly wisdom of the previous generations, over and over again, for hundreds of generations.

If Taoism is a social construct that evolved over time, then it’s very difficult for us to know about the Tao of the ancients.

Obscured by thousands of years, and thousands of books written by people immersed in the mindset of their own age, the original meaning of the Tao Te Ching is separated from us by thousands of years of culture that colours our perceptions, thoughts, and ideas.

Just think, the ancient Taoists were as ancient to Lao Tzu, as he is to us! We study a philosopher who lived 2500 years ago, and he wrote of ancients who lived as much as 2500 years before him.

So, this one book represents a thread of thought that dates back more than 5000 years.

Who knows what form or meaning the Tao held for the ancients who practiced it?

Deconstructing the Tao

The purpose of this course is to provide an alternative approach to understanding the Tao of Lao Tzu.

Perhaps we can deconstruct this Tao of the ancients by looking at the history and archaeology of the actual ancient people who lived before the Bronze Age. Then, we can look for connections between what we know about the ancient peoples of prehistory and what Lao Tzu said about the mythical “ancients” of the Tao.

If we do find a connection, then it proves that Lao Tzu’s verses were, in fact, based upon some actual ancient beliefs, as he said they were.

This may also help us to better understand the cultural context that existed when the Tao was first conceived. And, this may tell us how the idea of the Tao evolved over time up to the 6th Century BC, when Lao Tzu wrote his book.

Archaeologists know a good deal about the people of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.

There are many archaeological sites and artifacts from that period, which have been exhaustively studied. We know about their settlements, their art, their pottery, their burials, and their buildings, but we know very little about their religious or spiritual beliefs.

So, looking for a connection to the philosophy of Lao Tzu’s “ancients” is a bit of a long shot since we don’t know much about the philosophy of the actual ancient people of prehistory.

But, if we are successful, the reward is nothing less than a significant step forward in the study of both early Taoism and Neolithic shamanism.

The text of Lao Tzu may be the missing link, if you will, between the social construct of Taoism as it has evolved over time, and it’s origins in the people of prehistory.