Did Daoism Have a Founder? Textual Issues of the Laozi

Abstract

This chapter discusses older scholarship and issues around the earliest text of Daoism. It reexamines A.C. Graham and D.C. Lau’s arguments about the Laozi’s dating, demonstrating the fallacy of their speculation, hypotheses, and argumentation. Comparing verse features of the Laozi with the Shijing and Chuci, Liu Xiaogan presents new statistical linguistic evidence that pertains to the possible dating of the classic, such as intensiveness of rhyming, mixed rhyming patterns, rhyming sharing patterns, repetition within and between chapters, sentence patterns, and interchangeable rhyming, which shows that the general features of the Laozi belong to an earlier period than some scholars have hypothesized. The author argues that there is more evidence to support a dating prior to the Zhuangzi than the other way round. He also proposes ways to improve the academic sophistication of textual studies.