Life
Almost nothing can be said about Laozi as a person. The earliest biography, in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, already offers several incompatible accounts and admits as much — an archivist of the Zhou court, or a contemporary of Confucius, or somebody else entirely, who wrote five thousand characters at a border guard's request and rode west out of history on an ox.
The Daodejing itself is a compilation with layers, and modern scholarship treats it as the work of a tradition rather than of an author. That does not diminish it. What it contains — the Tao that cannot be named, the value of the yielding over the rigid, wu wei as action that does not force — is the philosophical stratum every later Taoist tradition builds on, including the one Mo Pai borrows its vocabulary from.
The relevant fact for this archive is what happened to him afterwards. In 142 CE Zhang Daoling reported a revelation from the deified Laozi and founded the first organised Taoist church on it. The philosopher had become a god, and the religion that followed is a different thing from the book — a distinction English loses by calling both of them Taoism. See Taoism.
