Chinese emperors claimed him as their biological ancestor, millions worship him as a god, and modern anarchists and libertarians both call him a founding father, yet historians are not sure Laozi ever lived. This episode reconstructs the elusive figure behind Taoism and the Tao Te Ching, from the meaning of his title (old master) and the names Li Er and Lao Dan to the fierce chronological debate that placed him as either a sixth-century BC contemporary of Confucius or a much later composite.

We examine the 1993 Guodian bamboo slips that swung scholarly opinion back, then walk through Sima Qian’s three conflicting biographies: the royal archivist who walked away from a collapsing Zhou court, Lao Laizi teaching his warrior son to bury the enemy dead, and the 80-year-old astrologer stopped at the border gate by the guard Yinxi. Finally we unpack the Tao and wu wei, and follow Laozi’s posthumous career as a virgin-born deity, Tang dynasty imperial ancestor, and modern political Rorschach test.

• Why linguistic analysis in the 1920s and 30s made scholars doubt the traditional dating
• Wu wei explained through a rip current and an athlete in the zone
• The myth of a 62-year gestation and a newborn with a long gray beard
• Titles like Great Sovereign of the Golden Palace for a man who warned against power
• How Murray Rothbard, anarcho-syndicalist writers, and Ursula K. Le Guin each read the same text