An old man was about to go through the pass.

The officer in charge of the pass was named Yin Xi. He stopped the old man and said: You are going off to live in hiding. Please, make the effort and write a book for me.

So the old man wrote one. Two parts, an upper and a lower, on the meaning of the Way and of virtue, a little over five thousand words.

When he had finished, he went through the pass. After that, no one knew where he went.

Of everything I wrote in his biography, this is the passage I set down with the most confidence, and the one I am least sure of. Confident, because the five thousand words the world recites are right in front of me. Unsure, because I cannot even tell my readers for certain who the man who wrote them was.

I. The Keeper of Books

I began his biography this way: Laozi was a man of Quren village, Li township, in the county of Ku in Chu. His surname was Li, his given name Er, his courtesy name Dan. He served as a scribe of the archive of the Zhou royal house.

Ku had once belonged to the state of Chen. When Chu destroyed Chen, it passed to Chu. That is why I wrote "Ku in Chu."

Dan is a word for long, broad ears. His given name meant "ear," his courtesy name "long-eared." The two belonged together.

The archive was where the Zhou royal house kept its records and texts. The king's documents, the books of ritual, the records of earlier reigns were all there. Laozi was the man who kept them.

Of all the things said about him, this is the most solid.

He guarded the Zhou kings' writings, and he did not like to be known himself. In his biography I wrote that he cultivated the Way and its virtue, and that his learning aimed at hiding himself and having no name.

A man whose teaching was to have no name spent his days guarding the names the Zhou court had written down.

II. Their Bones Have Rotted

In Lu there was a young man named Kong Qiu, who loved ritual.

Nangong Jingshu of Lu went to the ruler of Lu and asked: Let me go with Confucius to the Zhou capital. The ruler gave them one carriage, two horses and a servant boy.

Confucius went to the Zhou capital to ask about ritual. It is said that he met Laozi there.

I recorded this meeting in two different chapters, and the two record different words.

In Laozi's biography, Laozi said to Confucius:

The men you speak of, they and their bones have long since rotted away. Only their words remain. Besides, when a gentleman's time comes, he rides out in a carriage to serve. When it does not, he drifts like tumbleweed in the wind.

I have heard that a good merchant hides his goods so deep that his shop looks empty, and that a gentleman of great virtue looks like a fool.

Get rid of your pride and your many desires, your airs and your overreaching ambition. None of them does you any good. That is all I have to tell you.

Confucius had come to ask about the rites of old. The first thing Laozi told him was that the men who made those rites were bones, and rotted ones.

III. Words for the Road

In the Hereditary House of Confucius, I recorded the moment of parting.

As Confucius took his leave, Laozi saw him off and said: I have heard that the rich and noble send a man off with money, and the humane send him off with words. I am not rich or noble, so I will borrow the title of a humane man for once and send you off with a few words.

He said: The man who is clever and sees deeply, yet stands close to death, is the man who likes to judge others. The man who argues well and knows much, yet endangers himself, is the man who exposes other people's faults. A son should not treat himself as his own. Neither should a minister.

Confucius returned from Zhou to Lu, and his disciples slowly grew in number.

One of these speeches lands like a blow; the other sounds like an elder's parting advice. I could not make them into one conversation. By the time the reports reached me, they had already split into two streams, so I put each in its own place.

IV. The Dragon

After Confucius left, he said something to his disciples. I placed it in Laozi's biography.

He said: Birds, I know they can fly. Fish, I know they can swim. Beasts, I know they can run. What runs can be caught in a net. What swims can be caught on a line. What flies can be brought down by an arrow on a cord.

As for the dragon, that I cannot know. It rides the wind and clouds up into the sky.

Today I met Laozi. Is he not like the dragon?

For everything that can be caught, Confucius could say how to catch it. What he could not say how to catch, he called a dragon.

There is a dragon in Zhuang Zhou's book too.

Zhuang Zhou says that when Confucius came back from seeing Lao Dan, he did not speak for three days. A disciple asked: Master, when you saw Lao Dan, what advice did you give him? Confucius said: Only now have I seen a dragon. A dragon gathers together and becomes a body, spreads out and becomes a pattern, rides the vapors of the clouds and is nourished between yin and yang. My mouth fell open and I could not close it. What advice could I give Lao Dan?

Zhuang Zhou was a man of Meng who once served as a minor official at the lacquer gardens. His book runs to more than a hundred thousand words, most of it parables, and several pieces were written to mock the followers of Confucius and make plain the arts of Laozi. I said as much in Zhuang Zhou's biography.

So the dragon in Zhuang Zhou's pages and the dragon in Confucius's mouth cannot be read as the same remark. Still, both dragons point at the same man, a rare point on which the two sides tell it the same way.

V. The Eclipse

There is another book in which Laozi looks nothing like Zhuang Zhou's.

It is a book of ritual handed down by Confucius's own school. Zengzi asked his teacher: If the funeral procession is already on the road and the sun is suddenly eclipsed, what should be done?

Confucius said: Once I was helping Lao Dan with a burial at a place called Xiangdang. The coffin was on its way, and halfway there the sun was eclipsed.

Lao Dan said: Qiu, stop the coffin and move it to the right side of the road. Everyone stop wailing and wait to see what happens.

When the sun came back, they went on. Lao Dan said: This is the rite.

After the burial, Confucius asked him: A coffin, once it has set out, cannot turn back. No one knows how long an eclipse will last. Would it not have been better to keep going?

Lao Dan said: When the lords go to court before the Son of Heaven, they set out after sunrise and stop to make offerings and rest before sunset. A grandee on a mission does the same. A coffin does not set out before dawn and does not stay out overnight. The only people who travel by starlight are criminals and those rushing to a parent's funeral. When the sun is eclipsed, how do you know it will not grow dark enough to see the stars? And a gentleman performing a rite does not put other people's dead in danger.

When Confucius had told the story, he added: This is what I heard from Lao Dan.

In that book, Confucius says more than once, "I heard it from Lao Dan": how the spirit tablets of the ancestral temples are to be stored when the Son of Heaven dies; whether a child who died young and is buried far away should have a coffin. These are the finest details of ritual.

The Lao Dan of Zhuang Zhou's book mocks humaneness and righteousness. The Lao Dan of the Confucians' own ritual book is the man Confucius consulted on funerals.

Both Lao Dans had spent time among the Zhou kings' books. He knew every detail of the rites, and he knew that the men who made them were rotted bones.

VI. Twelve Classics

Zhuang Zhou tells another story, and it lands right on that archive.

Confucius wanted to deposit his own books with the Zhou royal house in the west. Zilu suggested: I have heard that among the Zhou keepers of records there was one Lao Dan, who has left office and gone home. If you want to deposit your books, Master, why not try going through him?

Confucius went to see Lao Dan. Lao Dan would not agree.

So Confucius opened his twelve classics one after another and began to explain them.

Lao Dan cut him off midway: This is far too long. I only want to hear the gist.

Confucius said: The gist is humaneness and righteousness.

Lao Dan asked: Are humaneness and righteousness the nature of man?

Confucius said: They are. Without humaneness a gentleman is not complete; without righteousness he cannot live.

Lao Dan pressed on, and at last said: You hold up humaneness and righteousness in such a hurry, it is like beating a drum to look for a lost child. You are throwing human nature into disorder!

Elsewhere Zhuang Zhou says that at fifty-one Confucius had still not heard the Way, and went south to Pei to see Lao Dan. He said he had looked for it in rules and measures for five years, and in yin and yang for twelve, and had not found it. Lao Dan told him: Humaneness and righteousness are the inns of the former kings. You may stay one night, but you cannot live there.

These are all parables. I did not put them into the main text of my history.

But Zhuang Zhou sends Confucius to the Zhou house to deposit books, and the man he meets has already left the archive. The story is made up, but it is made up with great accuracy: in the end, that archive could not keep its keeper.

VII. Through the Pass

In the biography I wrote only one sentence: Laozi lived in Zhou for a long time, and when he saw that Zhou was in decline, he left.

How far Zhou had declined, what year he left, I did not write. I do not know.

He came to the pass.

The officer of the pass, Yin Xi, asked him to write a book. He wrote the upper and lower parts and then left, and no one knew how his life ended.

Which pass it was, I did not write either. Later some said it was the Hangu Pass in the west, others the San Pass farther west.

A man who had kept the Zhou court's writings for many years wrote his own book only as he was leaving, because someone asked, at a gate.

Of the Zhou kings' books, he took not a single roll.

VIII. Three Laozis

I could have ended the biography there. But I knew more than that, and I had to set it down as it was.

Some say Lao Laizi was also a man of Chu, wrote a book in fifteen parts on the uses of the Daoist way, and lived at the same time as Confucius.

Some say Laozi lived to more than a hundred and sixty; others say more than two hundred, because he cultivated the Way and nourished long life.

There is one more record. A hundred and twenty-nine years after Confucius died, Dan, the grand scribe of Zhou, went to see Duke Xian of Qin and said: Qin and Zhou were at first joined together. After five hundred years joined, they will part. Seventy years after they part, one who will be hegemon and king will appear.

Some say this Dan was Laozi; some say he was not. No one in the world knows whether it is so.

I recorded the grand scribe's words again in the Basic Annals of Zhou, the Basic Annals of Qin and the Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices, and the numbers in those places are not all the same. The Basic Annals of Qin put the meeting in the eleventh year of Duke Xian. A little over a hundred years later, Qin destroyed Zhou, and the nine cauldrons of Zhou went to Qin.

Three men, three accounts. I cut none of them, and I chose none of them for my readers.

In the end I wrote only one sentence: Laozi was a gentleman who lived in hiding.

IX. A Family Tree in Plain Sight

The strange thing is that this man, whose end no one knew, left descendants who are known perfectly well.

Laozi's son was named Zong. He became a general of Wei and was enfeoffed at Duangan. Zong's son was Zhu, Zhu's son was Gong, and Gong's great-great-grandson was Jia. Jia served under Emperor Wen of Han. Jia's son Jie became tutor to Liu Ang, King of Jiaoxi, and so the family settled in Qi.

A man vanished at a mountain pass. His family tree went on, generation by generation, right into our Han dynasty.

I copied that family tree as it stood and added not one word. Who Laozi really was, I cannot say. Who his descendants said they were, I recorded as they said it.

X. Looking Down on Each Other

At the end of the biography I wrote a heavy sentence: Those in the world who study Laozi look down on Confucian learning, and those who study Confucius look down on Laozi.

Confucius once said that those whose ways differ do not make plans together. Perhaps this is what he meant.

In my own time, that sentence was not a remark for the study.

Early in the Han, when Cao Can became chancellor of Qi, he gathered the elders and the scholars and asked how to settle the people. There were over a hundred Confucian scholars, each saying something different, and he could not decide. Then he heard that in Jiaoxi there was a Master Ge who was learned in the teachings of the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, and he sent rich gifts to invite him. Master Ge told him that the way to govern is to value clarity and stillness, and the people will settle of themselves. Cao Can gave up his main hall to house Master Ge. He governed Qi by the Huang-Lao method for nine years; Qi was at peace, and everyone called him a worthy chancellor.

Master Ge's learning had a lineage. I recorded it in the Biography of Yue Yi. The first teacher was called the Old Man by the River, and no one knows where he came from. He taught Anqi Sheng; Anqi Sheng taught Mao Xigong; Mao Xigong taught Yue Xiagong; Yue Xiagong taught Yue Chengong; and Yue Chengong taught Master Ge.

Then came Empress Dowager Dou. She loved the teachings of the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, and the emperor, the heir and the men of the Dou family all had no choice but to read them.

She summoned Yuan Gu, an erudite who taught the Odes, and asked him about the book of Laozi. Yuan Gu said: This is just the talk of ordinary households.

The empress dowager flew into a rage and said: Then where am I supposed to get the books for overseers of convicts?

She had Yuan Gu sent down into a pen to stab a wild boar. Emperor Jing knew she was angry, and also knew that Yuan Gu had only spoken plainly and committed no crime, so he gave him a sharp weapon. Yuan Gu went down into the pen and with one thrust struck the boar through the heart, and it dropped where it stood. The empress dowager fell silent. She had no grounds left to punish him.

When our present emperor had just come to the throne, Zhao Wan and Wang Zang, who had studied the Odes under Master Shen, wanted to build a Hall of Light. The grand empress dowager loved the words of Laozi and disliked Confucian learning. She seized on the two men's faults to rebuke the emperor. The Hall of Light was dropped, Zhao Wan and Wang Zang were sent to prison, and both later killed themselves.

In my time, men died over the two schools looking down on each other.

My father, who was grand scribe, had studied Daoist teachings under Master Huang. When he weighed the six schools, he said the Daoists make a man's spirit whole and move with every change, their teaching is brief and easy to hold, and they do little and achieve much. He said the Confucians are broadly learned but miss the essentials, and labor hard for little result.

I wrote about Laozi in that household and at that court.

So I put Laozi in the same biography as Zhuang Zhou, Shen Buhai and Han Fei. At the end I wrote: Zhuang Zhou spread the teaching of the Way and virtue wide, and in the end it too returns to the natural. Shen Buhai worked diligently and applied it to names and realities. Han Fei pulled the carpenter's line taut, cut close to the facts and made right and wrong clear, and at the extreme he became harsh and without mercy. All of them came from the meaning of the Way and virtue, and Laozi went deepest.

A man who taught clarity and stillness ended up at the head of a line that produced men of penal law. I drew that line too, as it was.

Epilogue

The last sentence I gave him in the biography was: Li Er did nothing, and the people changed of themselves; he kept still, and the people set themselves right.

Those words are drawn from his own book. They are all the judgment I could give him.

I too am grand scribe. I too have gone through the old books in the stone chambers and metal caskets of the state archive. I know what it is like to keep a room full of writing: the words of the men before you are all there, and their bones have all rotted.

Laozi left his book at the pass, and went on.

My book is finished. The master copy will be stored away in a famous mountain, a second copy kept in the capital, to wait for those who come later.

No one knew where he went. What I could do was write down every account of him, and where I did not know, write plainly that I did not know.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Core sources: Shiji chapter 63, Biographies of Laozi and Han Fei, the Laozi section (from "Laozi was a man of Quren village, Li township, in Ku in Chu" to "Li Er did nothing and things changed of themselves; he was still and they set themselves right"), together with the sections on Zhuang Zhou, Shen Buhai and Han Fei and the Grand Historian's closing remarks; chapter 47, Hereditary House of Confucius, the passage on Nangong Jingshu asking to go to Zhou with Confucius and Laozi's parting words. Read in Wikisource transcriptions of the Shiji, with the Three Commentaries (Jijie, Suoyin, Zhengyi) read in the Wikisource Shiji sanjia zhu, chapters 63 and 47. No modern translation was copied. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷063 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記三家註/卷063 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷047 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記三家註/卷047

2. Cross-checks and later reception: Shiji chapter 4, Basic Annals of Zhou (King Lie year 2), chapter 5, Basic Annals of Qin (Duke Xian year 11), and chapter 28, Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices (three variant versions of Grand Scribe Dan's words to Duke Xian); chapter 54, Hereditary House of Chancellor Cao (Cao Can in Qi and Master Ge); chapter 80, Biography of Yue Yi, closing remarks (the lineage from the Old Man by the River to Master Ge); chapter 49, Hereditary Houses of the Consorts, entry on Empress Dowager Dou; chapter 121, Biographies of the Confucian Scholars, entries on Master Shen and Yuan Gu; chapter 130, the Grand Historian's Postface (Sima Tan studying Daoist teachings under Master Huang, his essay on the six schools, Sima Qian becoming grand scribe and going through the books of the stone chambers and metal caskets, the copy "stored in a famous mountain"); Book of Rites, "Questions of Zengzi" (the eclipse during a burial at Xiangdang, and the other passages beginning "I heard it from Lao Dan"); Zhuangzi, "The Way of Heaven" (Confucius depositing books with the Zhou house) and "The Turning of Heaven" (Confucius at fifty-one going south to Pei; three days without speaking). All read in Wikisource transcriptions. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷004 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷005 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷028 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷054 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷080 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷049 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷121 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷130 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/禮記/曾子問 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/莊子/天道 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/莊子/天運

3. Key sayings retold in plain language in the narrative are listed with their original Classical Chinese wording and exact sources in note 3 of the Chinese version.

4. Dates and variant accounts: (1) The sources disagree on when Confucius went to Zhou to ask about ritual. The Hereditary House of Confucius places it after Confucius was seventeen and Meng Xizi's deathbed instruction, and before "the twentieth year of Duke Zhao of Lu, when Confucius was about thirty"; the Zhuangzi has him go south to Pei to see Lao Dan at fifty-one. The Suoyin already notes that the Hereditary House mixes this with the Zhuangzi and that the words "are not those of a seventeen-year-old"; the Zhengyi says the visit was under King Jing of Zhou, when Confucius was about thirty. The narrative gives no year; the map uses the broad span of the sixth century BCE (Confucius was born in 551 BCE, so fifty-one falls in 501 BCE, also within it). (2) Laozi's words to Confucius are entirely different in the biography and in the Hereditary House; sections II and III tell them separately and do not merge them into one conversation. (3) The eclipse at Xiangdang in the Book of Rites is undated; no year is calculated. (4) The Zhuangzi stories are parables, and the narrative says so ("Zhuang Zhou says," "These are all parables"). "The Way of Heaven" says Lao Dan had "left office and gone home," which does not match the Shiji's "lived in Zhou for a long time... then left"; section VI presents it as a made-up story. (5) The Shiji does not name the pass. The Suoyin cites Li You's inscription for the Hangu Pass and Cui Hao's view that Yin Xi commanded the San Pass; the Zhengyi cites the Baopuzi for the San Pass and notes "some say Hangu." The narrative only says "later some said" and maps neither. The purple vapor over the pass and Laozi riding a black ox come from the Liexian zhuan, quoted in the Jijie and Suoyin and later than the Grand Historian; they are not used. (6) Lao Laizi, the age of 160 or 200, and Grand Scribe Dan follow the biography's own "some say" and "perhaps"; the narrative chooses none. For "129 years after Confucius died" the Jijie quotes Xu Guang: "actually 119 years." The grand scribe's numbers differ among the biography, the Basic Annals of Zhou, the Basic Annals of Qin and the Feng and Shan treatise ("seventy" versus "seventeen"), and the order of joining and parting is reversed; the Suoyin thinks the meaning is not in conflict. The narrative only says the numbers "are not all the same." Duke Xian's eleventh year equals King Lie of Zhou's second year, usually converted to 374 BCE. (7) The Zhengyi's quotations from immortal-cult texts about Laozi's looks and his mother carrying him for eighty-one years are later legends and are not used. (8) The family line follows the biography; the Jijie takes Duangan to be a town of Wei. (9) Cao Can's "nine years" in Qi follows his Hereditary House; the year he gathered the scholars and invited Master Ge is not separately dated in the text, and the narrative gives none. (10) The Yuan Gu episode is under Emperor Jing; the Zhao Wan and Wang Zang episode follows the Biographies of the Confucian Scholars, "when the present emperor had just come to the throne," with no year given. (11) "My father" is Sima Tan, per the Postface; his words on the six schools are abridged.

5. Boundaries of fact and narrative: All speech and judgments come from the sources above; the plain-language retelling is contemporary editorial paraphrase. No weather, scenery, inner thoughts or invented dialogue has been added. Lao Dan's reply in section VI is abridged from "May I ask what humaneness and righteousness are" to "you are throwing human nature into disorder," keeping only the drum simile and the last sentence. Sentences such as "A man whose teaching was to have no name spent his days guarding the names...", "The first thing Laozi told him was that the men who made those rites were bones...", "For everything that can be caught...", "both dragons point at the same man...", "Both Lao Dans had spent time among the Zhou kings' books...", "The story is made up, but it is made up with great accuracy...", "Of the Zhou kings' books, he took not a single roll," "A man who taught clarity and stillness ended up at the head of a line...", "In my time, men died over the two schools looking down on each other," and the lines of the epilogue are editorial connections and comments, not statements in the sources. "The king's documents, the books of ritual, the records of earlier reigns" is a general gloss on "archive" and "book chamber"; the sources list no holdings. "Where am I supposed to get the books for overseers of convicts?" renders Empress Dowager Dou's "安得司空城旦書乎"; sikong chengdan were Qin-Han convict laborers, and the line is usually read as a sneer that Confucian books are like penal statutes; the gloss is kept brief. Empress Dowager Dou was grand empress dowager in the first years of Emperor Wu; the two titles in section X follow the Hereditary Houses of the Consorts and the Biographies of the Confucian Scholars respectively. Confucius between Chen and Cai and the meeting with Nanzi were told in nos. 26 and 27 of this series and are not repeated. First-person lines such as "I recorded," "I could not make them into one conversation" and "I do not know" describe the arrangement of the Shiji through the historian's voice; they are not Sima Qian's own words.

6. Map: two points. (1) The Zhou capital (present-day Luoyang area, Henan), linked to the sixth century BCE (Confucius going to Zhou to ask about ritual, per the Hereditary House of Confucius and the biography of Laozi), using the OpenStreetMap area reference for Luoyang (34.6197, 112.4477); it represents the Luoyang area only, not the exact site of the Eastern Zhou royal city or the archive. (2) Ku county (present-day Luyi area, Henan), Laozi's home, using the OpenStreetMap area reference for Luyi County (33.8908, 115.3806); placing Ku in the Luyi area follows the Kuodi zhi as quoted in the Zhengyi ("Ku county lies within Guyang county of Bozhou... now Zhenyuan county of Bozhou") and the common identification, and it represents the area only, not Li township or Quren village. The sources give no year for Laozi living in Ku, so this point carries no date. The pass (Hangu or San, undetermined), Pei, Xiangdang, Duangan, Jiaoxi and the place where Grand Scribe Dan met Duke Xian are not mapped and are listed as unresolved places.

7. Rights: The ancient texts are in the public domain. The Chinese and English texts are original contemporary narratives.