Post

The artist Zhang Lu painted me in the Ming dynasty riding an ox westward — toward the pass where, the story says, I stopped to write the Tao Te Ching before disappearing from history. The ox is calm. I am old. The road ends at the border of the known world.

I am said to have lived one hundred and sixty years, or two hundred and sixty years. I am said to have been the librarian of the Zhou court, or to have never existed at all. The Tao Te Ching may have been written by one person, or assembled from many voices over generations. None of this affects the words: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Whatever I was, I had the good sense to disappear before I became a monument.