The Tao Te Ching ("Classic of the Way and its Power") is the foundational scripture of philosophical and religious Daoism, a compact work of about eighty-one short, poetic chapters on the Dao, the ineffable source and pattern of all things, and on wu wei, effortless or non-coercive action, teaching yielding, simplicity, humility and harmony with the natural course. Tradition ascribes it to Laozi ("the Old Master"), a sage said to have been an archivist and an older contemporary of Confucius who wrote the book in a single sitting before departing the civilised world through a mountain pass. Most scholars regard Laozi as legendary, or at least unrecoverable, and the text as a composite, assembled from a stream of sayings over the fourth to third centuries BCE rather than authored at one moment.
The excavated Guodian bamboo-strip manuscripts, dated to roughly 300 BCE and recovered from a Hubei tomb in 1993, preserve only a partial, differently ordered version of the text, while the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, from a tomb sealed around 168 BCE and recovered in 1973, present the two main sections in reversed order relative to the now-standard arrangement, evidence the received eighty-one-chapter text is one editorial stabilisation among several earlier forms. The traditional attribution to a sage named Laozi, who supposedly served as a royal archivist and departed westward through the Hangu Pass after dictating the book to a border guard, appears in Sima Qian's Han-dynasty Records of the Grand Historian, but Sima Qian himself records conflicting accounts of who this figure was, so uncertainty about Laozi's identity is not a modern invention.