Laozi — the sage, the text, and the deity — appears across the depth-psychology-adjacent corpus of Daoism scholarship in three overlapping registers that must be carefully distinguished. First, Laozi names a historical or semi-historical figure: the reputed author of the Daode Jing, identified with Lao Dan, whose historicity most modern scholars regard as irrecoverable. Second, Laozi names the canonical text itself — the Daode Jing or Laozi — a classic of approximately eighty-one chapters whose manuscript tradition, dating, and hermeneutical openness have generated hundreds of commentaries across Chinese, Japanese, and Western traditions, making it arguably the most translated work in world literature after the Bible. Third, and most consequential for depth-psychological readers, Laozi names a divine personification of the Dao itself: a cosmic being who undergoes successive ‘transformations,’ appears to initiates throughout history, transmits sacred revelation, and stands at the root of all religious teaching including Buddhism. These three registers — philological, philosophical, and theophanic — generate the central tensions in the corpus: whether the text reflects unified mystical vision or anthology, whether its author lived or not, and whether the ‘divine Laozi’ represents a secondary mythologization or an original soteriological claim. Watson’s Zhuangzi and Kohn’s Daoism Handbook together frame the full range of these tensions.