Taoism

Laozi is traditionally regarded as the founder of Taoism and is closely associated in this context with "original" or "primordial" Taoism. Whether he actually existed is disputed;however, the work attributed to him – the Tao Te Ching – is dated to the late 4th century BCE. Taoism draws its cosmological foundations from the School of Naturalists (in the form of its main elements – yin and yang and the Five Phases), which developed during the Warring States period (4th to 3rd centuries BC).

Robinet identifies four components in the emergence of Taoism:

• Philosophical Taoism, i.e. the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi
• techniques for achieving ecstasy
• practices for achieving longevity or immortality
• exorcism.

Some elements of Taoism may be traced to prehistoric folk religions in China that later coalesced into a Taoist tradition.In particular, many Taoist practices drew from the Warring-States-era phenomena of the wu (connected to the shamanic culture of northern China) and the fangshi (which probably derived from the "archivist-soothsayers of antiquity, one of whom supposedly was Laozi himself"), even though later Taoists insisted that this was not the case.