Laozi
| Religion in NetHack |
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In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, Laozi is the neutral god of the Monk pantheon.
Description
Laozi is a neutral god of holy holiness, and his minions consist of naiads, oreads, air elementals, fire elementals, lightning paraelementals, earth elementals, water elementals, and Light Archons.
Origin
Laozi (/ˈlaʊdzə/, Chinese: 老子), also romanized as Lao Tzu among various other ways, was a semi-legendary ancient Chinese philosopher and the author of the Tao Te Ching, one of the two foundational texts of Taoism. Laozi is a central figure in Chinese culture as the founder of Taoism, being claimed and revered as the ancestor of the Tang dynasty (7th–10th century AD). The Tao Te Ching had a profound influence on Chinese religious movements and on subsequent Chinese philosophers, who annotated, commended, and criticized the texts extensively. Modern scholarship generally regards his biographical details as invented, and consider the Tao Te Ching to be the result of a collaboration between multiple authors.
Laozi is a Chinese honorific typically translated as "the Old Master", and traditional accounts from some sects of Taoism, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, and Chinese folk religion claim that he was born as Li Er in the state of Chu during China's Spring and Autumn period in the 6th century BC - there, he served as the royal archivist for the Zhou court at Wangcheng (in modern Luoyang), met and impressed Confucius on one occasion, and composed the Tao Te Ching in a single session before retiring into the western wilderness to become an immortal hermit.
In 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, Laozi's realm is located in the Tushita Palace on the highest of the thirty-three heavenly realms. The Monkey King Sun Wukong stumbles upon the realm while in a drunken stupor, having stolen and drunk heavenly wine from the Peach Festival; while inside the palace, the Monkey King consumes Laozi's pills of immortality from his laboratory. He is then captured in the mouth of Lord Erlang’s loyal hound, and Laozi arrives to push him into the Eight-Trigram Furnace, ordering the Daoist and page boy in charge of the furnace to stoke a strong flame in order to separate the elixir and burn out Sun Wukong's immortality - upon checking the furnace 49 days later, however, Laozi finds that Sun Wukong is not only alive, but the furnace's heat gave him a steel-hard body and fiery golden eyes that could see far into the distance and through any disguise.
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