Lao Zi, surnamed Li Minger, is called Bo Yang. At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, the year of birth and death is unknown (Hu Shi once speculated that Laozi was born in the early years of Zhou Lingwang in 570 BC), and he was from Chenguoku County in the Spring and Autumn Period of Zhou Dynasty (Kuxian, the name of ancient county, is generally considered by historians to be in Luyi County, Henan Province). China was an ancient thinker, philosopher, writer and historian, the founder and main representative of Taoist school.
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Lao Zi Dou Zhongliang was a thinker in the Spring and Autumn Period and the founder of Taoism. As a historian in charge of books in the Zhou Dynasty, Confucius once asked him for a gift and retired. I wrote Lao Zi. ?
Before leaving Hangu Pass, Lao Zi wrote a book of 5,000 words, also known as Tao Te Ching or Tao Te Ching. Tao Te Ching, The Book of Changes and The Analects of Confucius are considered to be the three most influential masterpieces in China. Tao Te Ching is divided into two volumes, ***8 1. The first 37 chapters are the first, and the last 38 chapters are the next. The ideological structure of the book is: Tao is the "body" of virtue, and virtue is the "use" of Tao. The full text is about five thousand words.
Tao Te Ching was later named. At first, this book was called Laozi, but it didn't have the name of Tao Te Ching. Its completion date was controversial in the past, but it is still uncertain. However, according to the date of "Laozi" on Guodian bamboo slips unearthed in 1993, it was written at least in the middle and early Warring States period. For the collation of Laozi on Chu bamboo slips, see Sixin Ding's Collation of Laozi on Guodian Chu bamboo slips.
Laozi used Tao to explain the evolution of all things in the universe, thinking that "Tao gives birth to one, two, two, three and three things" and "Tao" is "the fate of a husband is natural", so "man should be in the earth, the earth should be in the sky, the sky should be in the Tao, and the Tao should be natural".
In addition to the simple materialistic viewpoint, Laozi also contains a lot of simple dialectical viewpoints, such as that everything has two sides, and the "movement against Tao" can be transformed from opposition. In addition, there are a lot of people-oriented thoughts in the book: "Heaven has more than enough to make up for it, humanity is insufficient, and loss is not enough to serve it"; "People's hunger is as much as food tax"; "People die lightly, but they live on it"; "people are not afraid of death, why should they be afraid of death?" His theory had a far-reaching impact on the development of China's philosophy.
Baidu encyclopedia-Laozi