Sage of the Empty Hub
A half-hidden name on a short book of paradoxes, about emptiness, water and yielding, shaped by copyists, commentators and translators.
Attributed author of the Daodejing
Lao Tzu, also written Laozi or Lao-tzu, may have been one person, several, or a name the tradition gave to a book. The book is real: some five thousand characters of compressed verse about the Way, its power, emptiness, water and ruling without forcing. Start with chapter 11, where a wheel turns because of the empty space at its hub. Then follow the text through bamboo slips, silk, commentary, worship and translation.
The first surviving biography of Laozi was written by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC) in the Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian, completed early in the first century BC. It begins with confident detail. Laozi came from Quren village in Ku county, in the southern state of Chu; his surname was Li, his personal name Er and his courtesy name Dan; he served as an archivist of the Zhou royal records. He cultivated the Way and its virtue, Sima Qian writes, and his learning aimed at self-concealment and namelessness.
Then the account begins to hedge. Some say Lao Laizi, also a man of Chu, wrote a book in fifteen sections on the uses of Daoist teaching. Some say Laozi lived more than 160 years, others more than 200. A Zhou grand historian named Dan met Duke Xian of Qin 129 years after Confucius died: some say Dan was Laozi, some say not, and no one, Sima Qian concludes, knows whether it is so. He calls Laozi a hidden gentleman and lists descendants, beginning with a son, Zong, a general of Wei. The earlier Zhuangzi already names Laozi and identifies him with Lao Dan, but modern scholars still dispute whether Lao is even a surname; Fung Yu-lan argued that Sima Qian had merged two different men. The Shiji’s own uncertainty is the honest place to begin.
Shiji, chapter 63: the biography of LaoziThe earliest surviving biography opens with confident detail and then marks its own doubts with repeated “some say.” Henricks’s Guodian volume reprints this biography in an appendix, with his commentary.Read the originalTwo scenes in the Shiji became the core of the legend. Confucius travels to Zhou to ask Laozi about ritual. Laozi tells him to set aside his proud airs and many desires, his showy manner and excessive ambition, because none of them benefits him. Afterwards Confucius tells his students that he understands how birds fly, fish swim and animals run, and how each can be caught with an arrow, a line or a net. But he cannot know how a dragon rides wind and cloud into the sky. Having met Laozi, he says, he has seen something like the dragon.
Sima Qian also records the rivalry around such stories: followers of Laozi belittled Confucian learning, and Confucians belittled Laozi. In the second scene Laozi, seeing the decline of Zhou, leaves. At the pass its keeper, Yin Xi, asks him to write a book before he withdraws. Laozi writes one in two parts, of more than five thousand characters, then departs; no one knows where he ended. The Shiji names neither the pass nor a direction nor an ox. Those details belong to later retellings like the one Zhang Lu (1464–1538) painted for the Ming scroll on this card. It is an imaginative image of the tradition, made perhaps two thousand years after the journey it depicts.
The Tao Teh King — volunteer readingThe whole book in about an hour and a half, read in Legge’s 1891 English. Piotrowski is the reader; the recording was catalogued in 2006.Listen freeWhoever made it, the book works by compression. Chapter 11 sets three ordinary objects in parallel. Thirty spokes share one hub: where it is empty, the cart has its use. Clay is shaped into a vessel: where it is empty, the vessel has its use. Doors and windows are cut to make a room: where it is empty, the room has its use. Each clause turns on the same Chinese phrase, 當其無, roughly “where it is empty,” before the last line turns the pattern into a principle: what is present provides benefit; what is absent provides use.
James Legge’s 1891 English shows how much a translator must supply: “The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends.” The axle is not in the Chinese line; his parentheses mark the addition. Chapter 8 works the same way with water. “The highest excellence is like (that of) water,” Legge writes: it benefits all things without striving and settles in the low places people dislike, and so it is near the Way. Chapter 78 returns to it: nothing is softer or weaker than water, yet nothing surpasses it against the hard and strong. A humble image carries an argument about action, power and government. D. C. Lau’s translation is a convenient modern edition for comparing these chapters.
Two excavations changed what “the Laozi” could mean. In 1993 a tomb at Guodian, in Hubei, yielded about 800 bamboo slips; the tomb is dated to around 300 BC. Three groups of slips carry Laozi material, about 2,000 characters in all, and their sequence differs from the received book: the second group runs through what are now chapters 59, 48, 20, 13, 41, 52, 45 and 54. Robert Henricks’s translation sets each Guodian line beside the later versions. His publisher presents the find as evidence that the text grew through several authors and editors over centuries; some received chapters are absent and others incomplete.
At Mawangdui, near Changsha, archaeologists in 1973 found two silk copies, known as A and B, in a tomb sealed in 168 BC; copy A was probably made before 195 BC. Both begin with the De section, the received chapters 38–81, and only then give the Dao section. Henricks accordingly called his translation Te-Tao Ching, and the jacket of the Rider edition prints 老子德道經 in that order. The silk section shown below appears to open the Dao half: lines resembling the received chapters 1–7 can be made out among its columns. The manuscripts show a text that was still being arranged as well as copied.
The Laozi most readers meet descends from editions joined to commentaries. Wang Bi, who lived only from 226 to 249 and was a leading figure in the Xuanxue thought of his time, wrote a commentary that follows each section of the book. Heshang Gong’s commentary, attributed to a legendary teacher of a Han emperor but probably written later, became the other pillar of the received text. The familiar shape of two parts in eighty-one chapters, Dao chapters 1–37 and De chapters 38–81, was not universal until about the Tang, when Emperor Xuanzong helped standardise it. Versions with 64, 68 or 72 chapters also circulated.
Even “Wang Bi’s text” is a reconstruction. Alan Chan’s survey for the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the text transmitted with his commentary was altered over time, largely under the influence of the Heshang Gong version, so it may not be exactly what Wang Bi read. Richard John Lynn’s translation lets an English reader see the book and the commentary together, which is how Chinese readers long encountered it.
By the second century AD Laozi was becoming a god. The Han emperor Huan had a palace built at Laozi’s traditional birthplace and authorised veneration and sacrifice, and an inscription of about 166 presents Laozi as divine. The Way of the Celestial Masters, the first organised Daoist movement, traced its founding to a new revelation from Laozi. Its followers called him Laojun or Taishang Laojun, Lord Lao or the Most High Lord Lao; in this view Laozi personifies the Dao itself, and the archivist Lao Dan was one of his manifestations.
The journey through the pass grew too. The Huahu jing, the Classic of the Conversion of the Barbarians, compiled around 300, claimed that Laozi went on to India and became the Buddha; Tang emperors later prohibited its circulation. The Tang ruling house shared Laozi’s surname, Li, and treated him as the dynasty’s ancestor and protector. Outside Quanzhou, a figure of Laozi more than five metres high was carved from a single rock on Mount Qingyuan during the Song dynasty. The archivist of the Shiji had become a presence in landscape, ritual and state.
LaoziA clear account of Laozi as legend, book and deity: the Shiji biography, the Han and Celestial Master cults, the conversion-of-the-barbarians legend and the excavated manuscripts.Read the articleThe earliest European version James Legge could describe was a Latin manuscript that Matthew Raper presented to the Royal Society in London on 10 January 1788. Legge judged that “the version as a whole is of little value,” because its makers wanted to show that the mysteries of the Trinity had been known in ancient China. Stanislas Julien published a complete French translation in 1842, and Dr. Chalmers, as Legge calls him, a complete English one in 1868. Legge’s own appeared in Oxford in 1891, in The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Tâoism. His preface admits years of drafts and dissatisfaction before he published.
Twentieth-century readers met many Laozis. Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy quoted Lao Tzu repeatedly and told readers to “consult and compare” several translations. D. C. Lau’s Penguin translation appeared in 1963. Stephen Mitchell’s 1988 “new English version” was, in his own account, made from Paul Carus’s literal version and dozens of other translations, sometimes paraphrasing and interpreting. Ursula K. Le Guin, who did not read Chinese, used the same Carus edition of 1898, with its characters, transliterations and translations, and added chapters slowly over decades. Her 1997 Shambhala version credits the collaboration of the Chinese scholar J. P. Seaton. She wanted readers to stop picturing the sage only as “an ancient person with a beard.”
1891 translation · Project Gutenberg ebook 216
A free, complete route through all eighty-one chapters. Begin with chapter 11, the wheel, the vessel and the room; then read 8 and 78 on water. Legge’s parentheses show the words he had to add to make the English cohere.Read free textLaozi · Project Gutenberg ebook 7337 · Chinese
The eighty-one chapters in Chinese characters. Chapter 11 begins 三十輻共一轂; chapter 8 begins 上善若水. A useful companion for seeing how much each translation must unfold.Read free textSima Qian · early first century BC · Chinese text on Wikisource
The earliest surviving biography opens with confident detail and then marks its own doubts with repeated “some say.” Henricks’s Guodian volume reprints this biography in an appendix, with his commentary.Read the originalRobert G. Henricks, translator · 2000 hardcover; 2005 Columbia University Press paperback · ISBN 9780231118170
The first English translation of the bamboo-slip Laozi, set line by line against the Mawangdui and Wang Bi versions, with notes on missing and incomplete chapters and a different chapter order. No publisher jacket image was available.View publisher editionJames Legge, translator · Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891 · Internet Archive scan
The original printed volumes: Legge’s introduction, the Tâo Teh King and the Zhuangzi translations, digitised from the University of Toronto’s copy.Browse the 1891 volumesJames Legge · dated Oxford, 20 December 1890 · Standard Ebooks
A translator’s short history of earlier European versions, from a Latin manuscript given to the Royal Society in 1788 to Julien’s complete French translation of 1842.Read the preface1988 HarperCollins “new English version” · the translator’s own account
Mitchell says he worked from Paul Carus’s literal version and consulted dozens of translations, sometimes literal and sometimes paraphrasing and interpreting. Read it as a clear statement of what an interpretive version is.Read his noteinterview with Brenda Peterson · Embrace the Moon
Le Guin explains that she did not know Chinese, used the Carus edition as her touchstone, worked on the poems from her twenties, and why she avoided making the sage “an ancient person with a beard.”Read the interviewAlan Chan · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · revised 2025
The fullest free scholarly survey: the Shiji and its problems, Guodian and Mawangdui, the Wang Bi and Heshang Gong commentaries, and the philosophy of dao, de and naturalness.Read the articleRonnie Littlejohn · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A clear account of Laozi as legend, book and deity: the Shiji biography, the Han and Celestial Master cults, the conversion-of-the-barbarians legend and the excavated manuscripts.Read the article
Alan WattsWatts’s last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way, written with the collaboration of Al Chung-liang Huang, is one twentieth-century reading of the Daoist tradition this book began.
Aldous HuxleyThe Perennial Philosophy quotes Lao Tzu throughout and advises readers to compare several translations, a good instinct for this book.
AristotleA near-contemporary contrast: a corpus that survives largely as working notes and drafts, some of it possibly assembled by later editors.
