The Hundred and Eighty Precepts of Lord Lao are among the earliest Taoist codes, associated with the Celestial Master tradition and circulating by the fourth or fifth century. Most of the rules are what one would expect — prohibitions on killing, theft, deception, drunkenness, abusing official position, and on charging the poor for ritual services. The striking cluster is ecological, and it is genuinely in the text rather than read back into it: precepts forbid draining marshes and ponds, setting fire to uncultivated land and mountain forests, felling trees without cause, disturbing birds and animals in their breeding season, and wantonly picking plants or flowers. Scholars including those associated with the Daoist Ecology projects have made much of these, and the reasonable caution is that they were formulated within a cosmology about not disrupting resonance rather than as conservation policy in the modern sense. That said, they say what they say, and they are fifteen hundred years old.