The Daoist Who Wasn't There pt. 1
~ Lao-tzu & his Crew ~
Part I clears the romantic fog around “the Daoists” and the myth of Lao-tzu and his imagined peers. It shows how Golden Age fantasies and allochronism distort the histories of qigong, taijiquan, medicine, and the so-called “Daoist arts.” This opening piece restores the old school “daoists” to real time and real culture ~ not timeless sages, but humans whose insights grew from the ground up.
When most people think of taijiquan, qigong, acupuncture, or many of the profound cosmological and conceptual frameworks that emerged from China’s rich cultural heritage, it’s often believed—or at least casually claimed—that “the Daoists” created all of these profound philosophical, spiritual, medical, and martial arts. And, as if that weren’t enough, the claim is usually packaged with the magic number “5,000 years ago,” as though the older the date, the more exalted one’s own practice becomes.
In one rendering of this fantasy, I imagine “Lao-tzu and his crew” just wu wei-ing in some misty mountain cave, churning out cultural masterpieces left and right:
an I Ching here, a Dao De Jing there, here a TCM, there a yin-yang; toss in a few “elements” — or is it phases, who’s keeping score? — then mix in some qigong, bagua, taiji, a Yellow Emperor, and oh yeah — The Art of War!
And what’s even wilder is that in many retellings all of this was kept secret for thousands of years until that person’s master’s master learned it deep in the Wudang Mountains from an immortal Daoist hermit. Or some version of that!
But here’s the funny part: pretty much none of that is true. Like, not even close.
Ok, maybe a few masters really did study with mountain hermits, but the part about “Lao-tzu and his crew,” or any of the ten-thousand variations spun from that silk, shows a huge gap in how most people think about these arts. I mean, most scholars are doubtful that Laozi (Lao-tzu) the person even existed, so there’s that. And the “5,000-year-old Taoist tradition” claims are so detached from historical reality that I can’t even begin to untangle them here— any more than I can untangle the
I Ching/Yijing origin-story mythologies (both of which I’ll take up in a separate essay). But the deeper question—the one that matters for anyone practicing today—is this: what did “the Daoists/daoists” actually contribute to China’s “rich cultural heritage” of philosophical, meditative, medical and martial arts? And what’s the difference between Daoist and daoist anyway? If we want to answer that honestly, we have to start with the word itself.
I write dao lowercase not out of modesty, but accuracy. In later centuries Dao became a cosmic principle— reified, personified, and often treated as a kind of supernatural force. The early natural philosophers of China meant something far more ordinary and far more radical: dao as the way things go, the “watercourse way,” the pattern of nature as it shows itself. In fact, the earliest written uses of the word appear in the Shijing (Book of Songs), where dao refers to literal paths and routes ~ and in the Shangshu (Book of Documents), where it also describes the guiding or channeling of water during flood-control, a meaning rooted in agrarian life.
Seen in this light, it becomes easier to understand something else: they never named themselves or founded lineages, because they understood the limits of naming and the dangers of worship. That’s why I write daoist (lowercase) for these early natural philosophers, and Daoist (capitalized) for the later religious traditions that built institutions, lineages, rituals, and cosmologies around the reified Dao. To honor that “lineage of no lineage,” I keep the word small, open, and grounded; it points not upward toward transcendence, but outward toward the living world. As the Laozi has it: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao.”
That distinction isn’t academic hairsplitting— it’s historical clarity. Because when we imagine those early natural philosophers as timeless sages floating above the mud of dynastic history, we commit what cultural anthropologists call allochronism: the refusal to let the past have a past.
As the professor of cultural studies, Paul Bowman, notes in the journal Martial Arts Studies:
“Anthropologists have termed this kind of attitude allochronism (Fabian 1983). Allochronism refers, ultimately, to imputing a timelessness to something, and thereby refusing to acknowledge that it has and is always within a history. History, in this sense, refers to a process of change, movement, modification, development, transformation, and even of huge tectonic shifts. Accordingly, allochronistic perspectives do not allow the object to have a history, in this sense of having developed and changed.”
It’s this habit of “imputing timelessness to something” that still clouds how we talk about qigong, taijiquan, and the other so-called “Daoist arts.” Practices that in truth have evolved from many different sources, through millennia of experiment, synthesis, and exchange, are all too often imagined as pristine relics— immune to dynastic upheaval, untouched by bureaucracy, trade, or pedagogy. The breathing practices (zheng qi 正氣), “guiding & stretching” (daoyin 導引), the moral & medical philosophies— dao, de, qi, ziran, wuwei, yinyang, wuxing, etc ~ all of them were products of living cultures that adapted with each change in circumstance. To pretend otherwise is to lift them out of history and write them into legend, as if the arts themselves were frozen above the flux they were meant to study.
And in doing so, we not only strip them of their humanity, we steal the work of others ~ the physicians, naturalists, and other masters (zi 子) of the Hundred Schools whose discoveries were later folded into the mythic brocade of “Daoist” lore. The moment we strip them of history, we strip them of a life lived…and thus, we strip them of dao itself ~ for the character dao 道, after all, carries the “step” radical, meaning “to walk, to travel.” To dao is to move along a way, to enact a course; it is life in motion, not myth embalmed.
I see it everywhere: slick advertisements promising “ancient Daoist secrets” for everything under the sun (including some very unethical medical claims!), Western teachers claiming unbroken lineages back to Laozi; martial-arts manuals treating centuries of evolution as a single revelation; and the slow religious “woo-woo-Orientalism” of practices that evolved from mostly naturalistic and secular traditions. Meaning gets lifted out of context and relocated in a kind of devotional nostalgia. The “ancient arts” are presented as if conceived whole and sealed in amber for millennia — when in truth they were woven and rewoven by generations of thinkers, healers, warriors, bureaucrats, monks, and merchants.
The paradox is that allochronism feels like reverence but functions as erasure. It isn’t that we forget the past; we deny it the right to have changed.
Once that distortion takes hold, Golden Age thinking follows naturally. If the past was frozen, it must have been perfect.
The taijiquan historian Douglas Wile skewers this mindset with his characteristic bite:
“Golden age thinking confounds the very notion of progress. Is the Ptolemaic system superior to the Copernican, is monarchy superior to democracy, candles to electric lights, smoke signals to cell phones, the naked eye to electron microscopes, the humoral theory to the germ theory? […] Would you rather have your appendicitis treated by Hippocrates or your local general surgeon?”
It’s a brilliant dismantling. The comparison sounds absurd because it is. Yet this logic permeates the “classical arts” culture: the conviction that wisdom peaked long ago, that progress equals corruption, and that our task is to recover rather than to understand.
Wile exposes the theological undertone of it all. Once taijiquan (or qigong for that matter) is labeled “Daoist,” he writes, “it raises the practice from mere self-defense to high culture art; it makes it uniquely a product of Chinese culture. The Daoist origins thesis focuses on a singular act of creation by an enlightened individual; the evolutionary thesis is a collective project, historically and culturally contingent. Once taijiquan has been sacralized as a Daoist creation, it is just a short step to frame it as a religion."
This is how lineage becomes liturgy. Masters become apostles. “Classics” become scripture. What began as embodied practice becomes a metaphysical commodity, traded through generations with the same weight as divine truth.
Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker bring the scalpel of medical history to this same illusion as it appears in “Traditional” Chinese medicine. “Those active in living traditions of medicine,” they write, “have often imagined a long empirical tradition stretching back to a golden age in pre-history […] In contrast, new research is more concerned in teasing out more complex dynamics between continuity and change as traditions constantly reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant, appropriate, and effective.”
That line — “constantly reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant, appropriate, and effective” — should be tattooed on the hand of anyone claiming to “preserve” an ancient tradition. Continuity has always meant adaptation. Transmission has always been translation. The “real thing” is not the unchanging thing; it’s the thing that can keep responding.
Golden Age thinking, then, isn’t just a bad story— it’s a psychological defense. It protects us from the uncertainty of living culture. It gives authority without responsibility and reverence without research. But it also dulls our ability to see the dao (way) as it moves through time ~ not as a monument to the past but as the pattern of change itself.
What this leaves us with is a clearer view of the landscape itself. The early thinkers we now call “daoists” were not standing outside history dispensing timeless revelations; they were participants in it ~ shaped by the same pressures, uncertainties, and problems that shaped everyone else. Their insights were part of a broader cultural conversation, not the charter of a single tradition. Once we let that reality sink in, the question shifts from trying to locate a pure origin to understanding how these practices actually lived, moved, and changed across time.
When viewed from that angle, the whole conversation around “what the daoists/Daoists created” looks very different. Early thinkers weren’t designing a single, unified system; they were responding to the conditions of their world— political crisis, social upheaval, ecological change, and moral exhaustion. Their insights grew out of lived experience, not out of a quest to found a religion or codify a lineage (and while some scholars, like Michael Puett, read certain texts as aiming at forms of self-divinization, that interpretive tangle deserves its own treatment elsewhere). Whatever practices they shaped were grounded in this world: observation, conduct, breath, attention, and the challenge of aligning oneself with the shifting patterns of life.
This is why freezing everything under the banner of “the Daoists” distorts more than it explains. It collapses millennia of experimentation, debate, and divergence into a single mythic lineage, and then reads the present through that fantasy. It turns a complex cultural history into a brand. And from there it becomes all too easy to project whatever we want—vitalist metaphysics, miracle stories, invented genealogies—onto people who lived and thought in ways far more grounded and diverse than our tidy categories allow.
Seen in this light, the question isn’t whether “the Daoists” invented qigong, meditation, medicine, martial arts, or even neigong. What matters is which threads of inquiry they actually fed, how those threads later forked into philosophical, religious, symbolic, and practical forms, and how much of what we now call “Daoist” once belonged to a wider shared culture. The value isn’t in attributing everything to a single group, but in understanding how different lineages, ideas, and practices interacted and evolved over time ~ so that when we practice today, we have some honest sense of what we’re grounded in and what we’re actually cultivating.
And this is where I begin to find my footing in all this noise. If we want to make sense of these arts today ~ whatever mix of yangsheng (nourishing life), meditation, movement, or internal practices we happen to follow ~ we have to be clear about the histories we’re inheriting. Part I has been about clearing away the romantic fog: the invented lineages, the Golden Age fantasies, the idea that all roads lead back to a handful of ancient sages. In Part II, we turn toward the distinction that helps everything come into focus: the difference between the early natural-philosophical thread and the later religious ones. Without that clarity, we mistake symbols for systems, myths for methods, and lose sight of the very practices we’re trying to understand.
For as the prophet Bob Marley sang:
“If you know your history, Then you would know where you coming from. Then you wouldn't have to ask me, Who the heck do I think I am.”
— “Buffalo Soldier”, Confrontation (1983)
Bibliography
Bowman, Paul. “On Knowing Your Lineage” Chinese Martial Arts Studies (2015)
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.
Columbia University Press, 1983.
Douglas Wile. “Fighting Words: Four New Document Finds Reignite Old Debates in Taijiquan Historiography.” Martial Arts Studies 4 (2017)
Lo, Vivienne, and Christopher Cullen (eds.) Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts. Routledge, 2005.
* Michael Puett has advanced a sharply different interpretation of the Neiye and related early materials, arguing that certain passages advocate not naturalism but self-divinization—an adept’s attempt to appropriate the power of the cosmic ancestor through reversal of the generative process. See Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), esp. pp. 115–118, 167