As with the founders of all religions and belief systems, it is almost impossible to separate the man from the myth. Accounts of Lao Tzu’s birth are a case in point. Some accounts say he was brought to Earth by a shooting star. An even more fabulous story contends that his mother, a countrywoman named Li Shi, was going to wash clothes one day when she found a yellow plum floating down the river. The girl fished the fist-sized plum out of the water with a branch and because she felt hot and thirsty, ate it immediately. To her surprise, and no doubt to the surprise of anyone she had to explain it to, the young girl fell pregnant after eating the plum.
This, however, was no ordinary pregnancy. Li Shi carried the child for a full 81 years until one day in the first month of spring a full eight decades after consuming the fateful plum, the sky suddenly was lit up with sheet after sheet of lightning and thunder rent the still spring air. With the clouds fantastically darkening overhead, Li Shi collapsed in pain under a plum tree, and soon after the insistent wailing of a new born baby told her that her 81-year-long pregnancy was at an end. Bolts of lightning rained down from the Heavens to herald the new arrival and it is said nine black dragons caused immense quantities of rain to fall upon the Earth in order to bathe and clean the baby. Legend says that these dragons became the nine divine wells that remained on Earth to mark the spot where the divine Lao Tzu entered the world of men. This, of course, was no ordinary new-born babe. Legend has it that he was born already an old man with white hair and a beard and so his mother gave him the name, Lao Tzu, “Old Sun” (as Tzu can also mean son in Chinese).
One does not, of course, have to take such stories as literal truth. Many commentators have pointed out the symbolism of the story: the yellow plum—yellow is closely associated with Taoism; Taoism holds that “one bears two, two bears three, and three bears all things on Earth,” and so three is seen as a most powerful number, three to the power of four gives you eighty-one, the number of years Lao Tzu is said to have lived in his mother’s belly. As with Christianity and indeed all other religious beliefs there is an ocean of symbolic and metaphorical meaning hidden in seemingly outlandish legends.
When Lao Tzu was born, it was the fifteenth day of the second Chinese lunar month. Every year, on this day, strains of music and drumbeats accompany the chanting of scriptures echo loudly into the skies above Taoist temples everywhere; devoted Taoist disciples dress in formal regalia to celebrate the birthday of their founding father.
A young Chinese Taoist named Zhou Shuangliu has visited almost all the Taoist holy lands of China since he left his hometown in Guizhou ten years ago. The first thing he does on arrival at a new place is to collect the local versions of the Tao Te Ching. To date he has amassed almost 500 versions. This project stems from the young Taoist’s worship of Lao Tzu, a reverence that has led him to choose this special life. His dream is to found a “Tao Te Ching College” in his hometown Guizhou, and to introduce the long standing Taoist culture to Chinese as well as to foreigners from all over the world who are interested in this great cultural legacy.
Today, when pious men and women prostrate themselves at the feet of the Superior Old God, praying for well-being and happiness, some do not realise he was once a man of flesh and blood and that the religious scriptures the Taoist disciples are chanting are from the Tao Te Ching, the book that Lao Tzu handed down as his great legacy. The existence of this great book is the firmest evidence that a man called Lao Tzu did indeed once exist. One bears two, two bears three, and three bears all the things of the world; the Land imitates the Heavens, the Heavens bears the Tao, and the Tao is Nature….
Indeed, it is true that all founders of the world’s great religions were real men, Sakyamuni, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ being three of the most notable examples. They were all effectively deified by their followers after their death. After his death, Lao Tzu became known as the Superior Old God, but as the human founder of the Taoist school, people seldom were aware of his real name and the events of his very much human life.