Laozi

Laozi — "the Old Master" — is the name under which the Tao Te Ching has come down to us. According to the historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC), whose account is the earliest we have, Laozi's family name was Li and his given name Er; he kept the archives at the court of Zhou, and Confucius once visited him to ask about ritual. Seeing the decline of Zhou, he set out for the west. At the frontier pass the keeper of the gate asked him to set down his teaching, and he wrote a book in two parts, on the Way and on Virtue, of some five thousand characters. Then he went on, and "no one knows where he ended his days".

Sima Qian himself recorded other traditions, and modern scholars think that the book gathers sayings from more than one hand. But for more than two thousand years the name of Laozi has stood for its teaching. Revered as the founder of philosophical Taoism, and later honoured as a deity in the Taoist religion, Laozi is, with Confucius, the most influential thinker of ancient China.