"Laozi", also known as "The Tao Te Ching", is an ancient book from the pre-Qin period, and it is said that it was written by the thinker Laozi in the late Spring and Autumn Period. "Laozi" is the representative classic of Taoist school during the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period, and it is also a classic respected by Taoism. In the Tang Dynasty, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty ordered people to translate the "Tao De Jing" into Sanskrit; during the time of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, this sutra was revered as "The Book of Morals".

"Lao Zi speaks of moral meaning, writes the upper and lower chapters", according to the silk book, the first chapter is "De" and the second chapter is "Tao"; the Tongxing version is "Tao" at the top, and "De" at the bottom. The first and second chapters are divided into chapters in each edition. The method of dividing the eighty-one chapters of the common book is the earliest from Liu Xiang's "Seven Lue", "Lao Zi He Shang Gong Zhangju", 37 chapters of Dao Jing, and 44 chapters of German Classics. Yan Zun's "Lao Zi Zhigui" is divided into 40 chapters of the German Classics and 32 chapters of the Taoist Classics. The Mawangdui Silk Book and Guodian Chu Bamboo Slips have chapter symbols, but they have not formed the current "Eighty-One Chapter" pattern. The simplified version of the Peking University Han Dynasty is the forty-four chapters of the German classics and the thirty-three chapters of the Taoist classics.

"Tao De Jing" takes the philosophical meanings of "Tao" and "Virtue" as the outline, discussing the principles of self-cultivation, governance, military use, and health preservation, and most of them are based on politics. It had a profound impact. The most widely used commentaries in later generations are Wang Bi's "Lao Zi Daode Jing Zhu" and He Shang Gong's "Lao Zi Zhang Ju".