What evidence is there for Lao Tzu's existence? What evidence is there against Lao Tzu's existence?

[Bloodywarrior]

Just curious about the arguments of Lao Tzu existing or not.

[Marblehead]

There's really not a lot of evidence to prove that he really existed. I believe that no direct evidence has yet been found although there is some good secondary evidence (people writing about him after his death).

 

Could it all have been made up? Sure. Does that matter to me? No. For me he lived in spirit and in his name is the TTC and that's all that really matters.

[dawei]

Does that matter to me? No.

Yes, immaterial... kind of like Dao

[Cameron]

My main teacher is from the Maoshan branch of Tao and one really funny thing I remember him say last time I saw him " I am not interested in Lao Tzu. That's the scholarly approach."

 

LOL

[deci belle]

Good question, bloody! The only difference between LaoTzu and yourself is LaoTzu knew he didn't, whereas you don't.

[Encephalon]

50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion

 

This will definitely ruffle some feathers!

[Taomeow]

50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion

 

This will definitely ruffle some feathers!

 

If the intro at Amazon is representative of the book, my feathers are staying put. It goes:

 

" The Tao Te Ching was only created because Lao Tzu was thrown in jail by a disciple who didn't want to let him leave town without writing down his teachings? "Passover" celebrates God killing all firstborn Egyptian kids while Jewish homes were "passed over" by the angel of death? Shinto, a nature-loving, mellow religion, was transformed by the Japanese government into a nationalistic ideology promoting "holy" war?"

 

Oh boy.

 

Lao Tzu was thrown in jail? No, he was not. King Wen was. The author of the I Ching, not the author of Tao Te Ching. Whoever wrote this doesn't have his facts straight, looks like. Ignoring facts to prove a preconception, let me guess... scientific method?..

 

"Killing Egyptian kids while Jewish homes were passed over." Sounds like an anti-Israel Islamic press release. An ugly story without the beginning and the middle. Here's the beginning and the middle: Egyptians kept the whole of the Jewish people in slavery, Moses asked the pharaoh, "Let my people go," the pharaoh said, not on my watch, Moses said, I have power from my god, I can make you, the pharaoh said, bite me. Moses did. Slightly at first, just to show him. The pharaoh said, that didn't hurt me none. Moses said, let my people go or next time it will. And so on.

 

Shinto a mellow religion was transformed into a nationalistic ideology? Nah, it had to be dumped in favor of buddhism for that. Bushido code and all that. How on earth did a Japanese samurai warrior lose that in favor of shinto? Oh... on the street, as Marge Simpson would say. On the street in the author's mind.

 

Doesn't look promising...

[Encephalon]

If the intro at Amazon is representative of the book, my feathers are staying put. It goes:

 

" The Tao Te Ching was only created because Lao Tzu was thrown in jail by a disciple who didn't want to let him leave town without writing down his teachings? "Passover" celebrates God killing all firstborn Egyptian kids while Jewish homes were "passed over" by the angel of death? Shinto, a nature-loving, mellow religion, was transformed by the Japanese government into a nationalistic ideology promoting "holy" war?"

 

Oh boy.

 

Lao Tzu was thrown in jail? No, he was not. King Wen was. The author of the I Ching, not the author of Tao Te Ching. Whoever wrote this doesn't have his facts straight, looks like. Ignoring facts to prove a preconception, let me guess... scientific method?..

 

"Killing Egyptian kids while Jewish homes were passed over." Sounds like an anti-Israel Islamic press release. An ugly story without the beginning and the middle. Here's the beginning and the middle: Egyptians kept the whole of the Jewish people in slavery, Moses asked the pharaoh, "Let my people go," the pharaoh said, not on my watch, Moses said, I have power from my god, I can make you, the pharaoh said, bite me. Moses did. Slightly at first, just to show him. The pharaoh said, that didn't hurt me none. Moses said, let my people go or next time it will. And so on.

 

Shinto a mellow religion was transformed into a nationalistic ideology? Nah, it had to be dumped in favor of buddhism for that. Bushido code and all that. How on earth did a Japanese samurai warrior lose that in favor of shinto? Oh... on the street, as Marge Simpson would say. On the street in the author's mind.

 

Doesn't look promising...

 

Looks like they got ruffled to me! And you didn't even read the book!

I didn't either, but I did read "On the Warrior's Path: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology" by the same author, Daniele Bolelli, and that was a good read.

[Marblehead]

Ignoring facts to prove a preconception, let me guess... scientific method?..

 

No Dear. That's called bull shit.

[Taomeow]

No Dear. That's called bull shit.

Yes, but that's when they don't have letters after their names, tenures to maintain and sabbaticals to enjoy, reputations to uphold, grants to win, mastodon superiors to please, peer reviews of work to weather by peers who have tenures and sabbaticals and reputations and grants and superiors to ruffle not,

 

THAT's when they call whatever they apply" the scientific method," don't they?..

[Taomeow]

Looks like they got ruffled to me!

 

If you call instant contempt ruffled feathers... but why would you?.. Because an opponent is easier to take down after ascribing an emotional reaction to him/her? This may be true, but in my world, lack of respect for the author's factual accuracy and interpreting honesty is not a strong emotion unless... well, in any event, not in this case.

[Marblehead]

THAT's when they call whatever they apply" the scientific method," don't they?..

 

Hehehe. No, I don't call it that. I still call it bull shit.

[Birch]

Yes, but that's when they don't have letters after their names, tenures to maintain and sabbaticals to enjoy, reputations to uphold, grants to win, mastodon superiors to please, peer reviews of work to weather by peers who have tenures and sabbaticals and reputations and grants and superiors to ruffle not,

 

THAT's when they call whatever they apply" the scientific method," don't they?..

That would be about right.

 

---waits for whining noises and selective examples to flow in-----

 

However, what this guy is saying is IMO in defence of decent science

[doc benway]

My main teacher is from the Maoshan branch of Tao and one really funny thing I remember him say last time I saw him " I am not interested in Lao Tzu. That's the scholarly approach."

 

LOL

That's my teacher's position as well.

He tends to tell me that I'm welcome to waste my time reading or I can practice and actually understand.

[Taomeow]

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." -- Bokonon

[Cameron]

I personally enjoy reading Taoist or Buddhist stuff. But my intention when I read that stuff isn't scholarly. It would just be to help chop off my head!

[Cameron]

Also, since are specifically talking about Lao Tzu in this thread let's talk about Lao Tzu.

 

What I love the most is when high level practitioners give their feedback or understadning about it. Whether he actually existed or not doesn't matter to me so much.

 

Like when BK Frantzis, Ken Cohen, Michael Winn, Master Chen from Wudang etc speaks about Lao Tzu and what they get out of it that is super interesting and fun to me.

 

By the same token I don't think it's really that important if Shakyamuni Buddha existed or not.

 

Call it the practitioners view vs. the religious view or whatever(I prefer to not even make the distinctions) but when a Zen Master gives me their understanding of Buddhist text that is personally more relevent to me then some intellectal boob.

 

ps. No diss of intellectual boobs they are cool too.

[Alethaeia]

ps. No diss of intellectual boobs they are cool too.

round royal rubles, bright bubbly bosoms, heaving heaps of heaven

ah yes, to touch, to taste, to tap the divine flow of life giving liquid

when not so muddled and muzzled, the mammarian musings are a fine delicacy, quite a treat indeed

/dao of derailment

^______^

 

 

as for laotze, he is very much alive in 'spirit' whatever that means to you

the wisdom of the tao is undeniable, except perhaps to an intellectual boob

so many of us are too lost in our heads to see the living wisdom of those words

but that's the work - to liberate all beings from such boob-dom

Edited December 5, 2011 by Alethaeia

[mewtwo]

yes lao tzu existed the aliens told me about him. see when his mother gazed upon the falling star it was really an alien craft and an alien empregnated his mother and the boy became lao tzu.

 

LOL i crake myself up sometimes. but in reality i think lao tzu might of existed or might not of does it really matter? are his words more or less true if he did or did not exist?

 

Thanks

[Patrick Brown]

Good question, bloody! The only difference between LaoTzu and yourself is LaoTzu knew he didn't, whereas you don't.

 

HAHAHA! Love it!

 

Yes there is a way in which we don't exist but even though the ego gets us into all kinds of scrapes what would we do without him/her?

Edited December 5, 2011 by Patrick Brown

[Birch]

I was going to say I like being an intellectual with boobs

[Patrick Brown]

I was going to say I like being an intellectual with boobs

 

Are you suggesting that the Buddha, Lao Tze and Jesus all had boobs? Hmm that may be true but I'm not sure they were intellectuals!

 

 

[Taomeow]

I was going to say I like being an intellectual with boobs

 

I would take it further and say I'm an intellectual because of the boobs. I distinctly remember that before I had them, I wasn't one. Post hoc sed non propter hoc might apply though, as an intellectual with or without boobs but with some formal logic schooling might argue.

 

To return to Laozi's et al existence proof:

 

I think I mentioned a friend of a friend who collects information about Burned Libraries. You all heard about the Great Library at Alexandria whose burning put an end to all the information of all the wisdom of ages accumulated therein; a much older and bigger one (forget its name) existed in China and was likewise put to the torch; but then big ones, smaller ones, great and rare and noteworthy private collections, etc., were also being burned from time to time all the time for a couple thousand years, and that's what this friend of a friend has to show: ashes where information used to be. His current collection lists about 100,000 Burned Libraries and is growing as his research goes further.

 

That's your proof IMO of any and all instances of the "absence of proof" regarding historic figures proving nothing. The same is true for the "presence of proof," because burned libraries were substituted by libraries containing proof of whatever the burning party wanted proved, nothing else. I've heard compelling proof that Shakespeare didn't exist, that "Shakespeare" was the name chosen for a corporation manufacturing "Shakespeare's works" and that as many as six authors at one time worked on some of the plays it produced. I've heard compelling proof that "Mozart" is the same deal. And many others. They did exist, it's just that they didn't do what the corporation says they did, it was about focusing the idea of creativity on a brand name chosen for the purpose, because that's the best way to sell. I've heard Alexander Dumas wrote about 1 in 10 books ascribed to him. I've heard Stephen King is a similar corporation.

 

Laozi, on the other hand... who knows. I've read the best of Laozi's ideas in the Yuandao that predates him. Whether he was regurgitating earlier sources, didn't exist at all, or existed (as some assert) in the form of an entity free of the constraints of time and going back and forth as the spirit moved him, I don't know. Someone existed who wanted to say what Laozi said. To understand the message is to understand who. And I have my suspicions... and so did Confucius (who existed, was long-lived, married, and picky about his food to the extent that his wife went down in history as one of the first Chinese women to divorce a husband, in an era when it was almost unthinkable, because there was no pleasing him no matter what she cooked) who believed Laozi existed because he met him, but didn't think Laozi was a man.

[Marblehead]

Hehehe. I'm going to stay out of this discussion for the time being.

 

But I do like intellectuals with boobs. Well, actually, I just like boobs. (On women, of course.)

[Birch]

Great post TaoMeow!

 

The publishing house presenting itself as a single author is well-known, as is the record company producing "many" artists but all the same stuff. The trendy approach is to talk about a star producer who puts his mark on everything from music to earphones to software. I don't know what the "produced" artists think about what I'd call artistic tyranny. But I guess between getting aired and paid or not...

 

Same went for that dog Rin-Tin-Tin. Multiple dogs over multiple movies.