“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. AMES
Peking University
The Liezi is 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.

The Liezi we 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 the Laozi and Guo Xiang on the Zhuangzi. 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 gnomic Laozi and the philosophically complex, esoteric Zhuangzi. The three works, identified by the Tang emperor Xuanzong as Divine Classics, form the foundation of what might be termed “philosophical Daoism”.