ABSTRACT The present monograph is devoted to one of the most complex and understudied problems in the history of ancient thought — the origin of Daoism as a philosophical system. At the center of the study lies a question that at first glance appears resolved by tradition: how did there arise in ancient China a teaching that succeeded in expressing the ultimate idea of the nameless source of the world, non-violent action, naturalness, inner force, hidden order, and return to the primary ground? For a long time, Daoism was viewed predominantly as an autochthonous product of Chinese civilization: as the result of the internal development of archaic ritual, mantic practices, natural philosophy, ancestor worship, and Zhou intellectual tradition. This model retains considerable explanatory power, since Daoism indeed took shape in the Chinese language, Chinese writing, Chinese cultural milieu, and in dialogue with other currents of ancient Chinese thought. However, it does not resolve the principal question: why does the early Daoist corpus exhibit such a sharp philosophical rupture with preceding forms of ritual, social, and moral thinking? The monograph proposes to view this rupture not as a sudden insight, nor as a simple metaphorization of familiar Chinese words, nor as a direct borrowing of a ready-made external teaching, but as the result of a prolonged cultural synthesis. In this synthesis, the local Chinese tradition functioned not as a passive recipient, but as a powerful civilizational medium of transformation: it received external impulses, transformed them through its own writing, ritual, mythopoetics, political thought, and philosophical reflection, and then incorporated them into its own system so deeply that they were later perceived as entirely internal. The study is constructed on the principle of gradual disclosure. It does not begin with the ready-made philosophy of Laozi, but moves from earlier sacral and ritual forms to the later conceptual synthesis. This order allows Daoism to be seen not as an isolated intellectual event, but as the culmination of a complex history in which the sign, ritual action, sacral speech, image, written form, and philosophical category gradually form a unified semantic network. The methodological foundation of the work is verificational analysis. It combines historical phonology, paleography, comparative linguistics, archaeology, religious history, ritual studies, comparative mythology, and textual reading of ancient monuments. Special attention is devoted to the fact that ancient Chinese writing functioned in a multilingual and multidialectal milieu, where the same sign could maintain its graphic form while being realized phonetically in different ways. Therefore, the study proceeds not from the search for isolated phonetic resemblances, but from the verification of systemic correspondences: semantic, phonetic, ritual, paleographic, and historical-cultural. The principal intrigue of the monograph lies in the possibility that the familiar history of Daoism may prove to be only the upper layer of a deeper Eurasian drama. Behind the laconic formulas of the Daodejing, behind the apparent simplicity of the images of water, emptiness, softness, silence, and non-action, there may be concealed a centuries-long history of contacts, transfers, forgotten ritual practices, reinterpreted words, and philosophical crystallization. The Chinese tradition did not merely preserve these elements — it transformed them into one of the most subtle and paradoxical systems of ancient thought. The work does not aim to deny the Chinese character of Daoism. On the contrary, it shows that it was precisely Chinese civilization that shaped these heterogeneous sacral and conceptual strata into the form we recognize as Daoism. The external impulse here does not diminish the originality of the tradition, but helps to understand the depth of its creative reworking. Daoism appears neither as a closed autochthonous line nor as an imported doctrine, but as a philosophical synthesis that arose at the intersection of ancient Chinese written culture, ritual memory, and the broad Eurasian space. The monograph is addressed to Sinologists, Iranists, historians of religion, specialists in comparative mythology, researchers of ancient cultural contacts, philosophers, and all readers interested in the history of the emergence of great ideas. Its task is not to provide a simple explanation, but to open a new field of inquiry in which Daoism appears as the result of a complex movement: from ritual to sign, from sign to concept, from concept to metaphysics.
Taymuraz Kokoyti (Sun,) studied this question.