Laozi
Eighty-one short poems plus commentary, originally written on bamboo strips and organized into two books called the Way Classic and the Virtue Classic, comprise the ancient Chinese text now called the Daodejing — “Way and Virtue Classic” — or the Laozi — “Old Masters.” The Daodejing is the second-most-translated text into English, after the Bible. It ostensibly concerns political theory, but fans have expanded its applications to disciplines as disparate as martial arts, medicine, and magic. Through comparisons to natural phenomena, it advocates a social and political approach to life centered on exerting as little effort as possible to achieve greatest efficacy, in accord with things’ true nature.
Few know for sure the true personae of the Old Masters who wrote it, for they obscure their identities as much as possible. Some say the Old Master was a court official, an archivist or astrologer perhaps, who wrote down his wisdom before riding a water buffalo into the west. Others call him an Incarnation of the Heavenly Lord of Way and Virtue, one of the Three Pure Ones who created the Universe. Laozi is happy to let these stories propagate, for their favorite Incarnation throughout the ages is actually a large number of grandmas, dressed however grandmas dress in China at the time, who constantly bicker amongst themselves.
Laozi’s Scions tend to be of humble birth, rarely male. They excel in positions which require subtlety: not president or king, but the power behind the throne, the campaign manager or chief of staff. Traditionally in China, many of Laozi’s Scions wound up in the Daoist priesthood based out of locations like Wudang Mountain. Laozi’s most notorious Scion is the White Eyebrow, a Shaolin monk whose research into Daoist black magic (apparently that’s a thing) got him expelled from the Monastery — and who subsequently betrayed Shaolin to the government, resulting in one of the temple’s many destructions.
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