 Many scholars have treated the Mawang Dui discovery as proving the Laozi stems from such authoritarian forerunners of this cult. The arguments are inconclusive, necessarily so since the Laozi’s emergence remains so obscure. In the definitional texts, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, the epistemic grounds are arguably more skeptical and perspectival than dogmatic. There is little unambiguous appeal to direct mystical experience or insight. In these texts, hypothetical exemplars of such authoritative, superlative knowledge of dao are typically described as being both incomprehensible and irrelevant to us and our practical questions. In any case, the ambiguous style of both texts comports poorly with the implicit authoritarianism of the religious movement and it is very hard to show how philosophically the use of breathing techniques, meditation, proto-yogic practices or hallucinogens could vouchsafe such supernatural epistemic achievements. They do nothing to explain or justify the sophisticated philosophical understanding of dao we can find in these texts. 