According to tradition, Laozi was a scholar who looked after archives in the royal court. Other historians say he was a court astrologer.
He is said to have lived around the same time as Confucius. According to one story, Laozi’s mother conceived him when she saw a shooting star.
She was pregnant with him for 62 years before he was born while she stood against a plum tree (reminiscent of the birth of the Buddha…). It was said that when he was born he was already a fully grown man with a beard and long earlobes.
It was also said that when he was 160 years old (!), Laozi had become bored of spending his time at court. So he went west to live as a hermit (following the Daoist ideal).
When he got to the western border of China, he met a border guard there who asked him to write down his knowledge about the Dao for the sake of Chinese society before he left the world. So he wrote the Daodejing at that time.