The Liezi 列子 - IAN JOHNSTON - 文宇宙｜Bookniverse

“In order to afford their readers optimal access to a text that has been poorly understood and unfairly denigrated over the years, in addition to their definitive English translation and their critical Chinese text, Ian Johnston and Wang Ping have provided us with the broadest interpretative context imaginable.”—ROGER T. AMESPeking UniversityTheLieziis a work attributed to the Daoist Lie Yukou, who, according to the traditional account, lived during the later part of the fifth and first part of the fourth centuries BCE. This places him between the first wave of philosophers of the pre-Han “Hundred Schools” (notably Lao Zi, Confucius, Mo Di, and Deng Xi) and the second wave, from mid-fourth to the end of the third centuries BCE. Thus, he may be said to have responded to the former and prefigured the latter.TheLieziwe have today is the recension by the Xuanxue (Dark Learning, third to fifth centuries CE) scholar Zhang Zhan and is accompanied by Zhang’s commentary, which is a philosophical work in its own right and comparable to the commentaries of Wang Bi on theLaoziand Guo Xiang on theZhuangzi. It is an engaging work, presenting profound philosophical ideas in a straightforward, down-to-earth, and sometimes humorous way, which makes it an admirable complement to the mystical and gnomicLaoziand the philosophically complex, esotericZhuangzi. The three works, identified by the Tang emperor Xuanzong as Divine Classics, form the foundation of what might be termed “philosophical Daoism”.