Although Laozi left Kansai without knowing where he ended up, his book "Laozi" spread far and wide in the West in later generations. According to statistics from Western scholars, from 1816 to the present, more than 250 Western versions of the Tao Te Ching have been published, and now one or two new translations are published almost every year. According to statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, among the world's cultural classics that have been translated into foreign languages ??and have the largest circulation, the Tao Te Ching ranks second, second only to the Bible. Of course, when Westerners are obsessed with "Laozi", everyone gets what they need and what they love. For example, Von Blancheler's book "Laozi's Tao Te Ching: The Way of Virtue" said that Laozi is like the Christian God, with a spirit of fraternity and tolerance; the Protestant theologian Julius Greer listed " There are 80 similarities between the Tao Te Ching and the New Testament; French scholar Abel Remy said that the three Chinese characters "Jehovah" appear in the fourteenth chapter of "Laozi"; the German Savon Strau's The annotated version of "Laozi" reconstructs the structure of the five thousand words according to the strict logical system of German idealism; other German scholars use the model of Gestalt psychology to interpret "Laozi"; Frank Lloyd Wright From "Laozi" "Think of nothing and make use of what is there", we can derive the principle that space in architecture is as important as bricklayers; American Capra's "The Way of Physics" also pointed out that modern Western physics and There are similarities in the Eastern mysticism of Laozi. In addition, there are the metaphors of "female" and "mother" in "Laozi", which have also aroused the interest of Western feminist activists, people who practice qigong or judo, practitioners of traditional medicine, environmentalists, pacifists, Businessmen looking for business ideas from "Laozi" and postmodernists who want to dissolve modernity all claim to have found spiritual nourishment and source of inspiration from "Laozi". Even the Russian literary giant Tolstoy used his theory of "non-resistance to evil" to interpret the thought of inaction in "Laozi" and regarded Laozi as his own tune; while Yang Xingshun of the former Soviet Union believed that the "inaction" in "Laozi" It is not "nothing" but "nothing", that is, the poor and the proletarians. He described "Laozi" as a revolutionary manifesto. It can be seen that the book "Laozi" is indeed very influential in the West.

There are many reasons for the emergence of this enduring enthusiasm for Laozi and various views on Laozi in Western society. On the one hand, the silk scripts, "Laozi" A and B, unearthed from Han Tomb No. 3 in Mawangdui, Changsha in 1973, and the Chu tomb bamboo slips "Laozi" unearthed from an ancient tomb in Guodian Village, Jingmen, Hubei Province in 1993, undoubtedly greatly inspired It inspired Westerners’ enthusiasm for studying Laozi. On the other hand, the book "The Tao of Westerners - The Westernization of Taoism" by Clark, a contemporary British sinologist and philosopher, attributes the popularity of Taoism in the West to three changes in the way Westerners think: Hope for the past A better life, but to be liberated from the shackles of traditional religious dogmatic beliefs; to achieve a life of physical and mental integrity by overcoming the dualism of mind and body; to look at various contemporary ideological trends from a wider scope. What should not be ignored here is "Laozi" itself: firstly, "Laozi" is concise, profound and rich in philosophy. Although it only has "five thousand words" - this number of words is probably not enough for a philosophy teaching assistant today. However, it condenses a large amount of life wisdom and wise sayings of this oriental old man, and its poetic philosophical expressions often have obscure meanings, are exhaustive and endless, and also provide a broad space for future generations to interpret. , just like a casual cry of a cuckoo bird can always make the imaginative poet have endless reveries. Second, and most importantly, the spiritual characteristics of "Laozi" are against the alienation of civilization. Its concepts of natural inaction, eliminating the false and preserving the true, being content without fighting, and valuing the soft and keeping the female, etc., are more and more negative when civilization develops highly, so its negative problems become more and more obvious. In Western society, it will naturally be recognized by more and more people.

There is a huge difference between Laozi’s retreat to the West and Laozi’s popularity in the West, but one reason is the same, which is to oppose the alienation of civilization. It seems that thinkers in history often had different encounters with their thoughts. Rise and fall, everything depends on time and place.