The Philosophy of Lao Tzu and Letting Go of Comparison for Sleep

To think about this, let us walk in imagination only out toward the edge of a town at dusk.

There is a path that follows a river as the light goes and the sounds of the town, the traffic and the conversation, and the clatter of someone closing a shop for the night fall away behind us as we move.

This landscape is ours.

It is a frame for thinking, a place to set our thoughts down and look at them.

It is not a scene from anyone's actual biography.

It is simply a useful kind of quiet, and we will bring with us a very old book.

It is called the Tao Te Ching, which translates roughly as the classic of the way and its virtue.

Though even that translation is the subject of considerable scholarly debate.

Traditionally, the book is tied to a figure called Lao Tzu, which means something like old master, and the story that has grown up around him is a good one.

He was, the legend says, an archivist in the Zhou court who grew tired of the dynasty's decline and decided to leave civilization entirely.

At the Western Pass, a gatekeeper recognized him and asked him to write down his teachings before he disappeared.

He produced the eighty-one short chapters of the Tao Te Ching, handed them over, and walked into the mountains never to be seen again.

It is a beautiful story.

It may also be entirely fictional.

Whether Lao Tzu ever lived as one specific person is a genuine and unsettled question in the history of Chinese philosophy.

The historian Sima Qian, writing in the first century BCE, already could not sort out the competing traditions about the old master's identity, and modern scholarship has only deepened the uncertainty.

The text itself shows signs of being a composite, a work assembled from multiple voices and traditions and gradually stabilized over the course of the fourth and third centuries before the Common Era.

Manuscript discoveries have confirmed this fluidity.

In 1973, two silk copies of the text were found in a tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE, and their chapter order and wording differed meaningfully from the received version.

Then in 1993, bamboo strips excavated from a tomb at Guodian, dated to roughly 300 BCE, contained portions of the text that were different still, shorter and arranged in yet another way.

So we are not dealing with a single author's polished manifesto.

We are dealing with something more like a tradition's collected wisdom, shaped and reshaped over centuries, attributed to a figure who may be composite or legendary, or perhaps a real person around whom later material accreted like sediment around a stone in a stream.

None of this diminishes the text.

If anything, it makes the text more interesting because it means the ideas were compelling enough to be carried, argued over, edited, and preserved by many hands across many generations.

What survived is what resonated, and what the text has almost nothing to say about is being the best.