This edition of the Nüwa is about Daoist master Lie Yukou (Liezi), who famously rode the wind. It’s also about the text that takes his name, the Liezi, otherwise known as the Authentic Scripture of the Rushing Void.
Just a quick note, it might be a good idea to read the Nüwa on the Substack app or website — the formatting and graphics seem better than on email. You’ll also be able to find other writers you like via my recommended authors and the discover function.
A Personal Encounter with Liezi
When I was eighteen I travelled from Moscow to China along the Trans-Mongolian Railway. We spent countless hours trapped in a third-class soviet railway carriage, crossing empty tundra. Feeling generally filthy, I picked up a book on qigong and learnt a simple version of the Eight Silk Brocades. Over the following months in which I travelled through northern China, I practised this set and felt my health and general wellbeing increase dramatically.
I travelled to Wudang Mountain to learn qigong in person, and spent a month at a martial arts school near Purple Cloud Temple, an important Daoist temple about halfway up the mountain. Purple Cloud Temple is an imposing structure and a demonstration of imperial power and patronage. It’s linked with two famous emperors. Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty first had the temple built in the 12th century, whilst the structure that exists today was completed in 1412, and sponsored by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Wudang Mountain is one of the four sacred Daoist peaks and, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by Daoist culture. In the evenings, the monks and nuns from Purple Cloud Temple would come out and wander the mountain chatting, playing pipes, singing, and practising basic forms of body cultivation. During this time, I first read the Laozi, Zhuangzi and, what I believed to be the third text of Daoism, the Liezi. In fact, the identity and place of the Liezi within Daoism is far more complex.
The History of the Liezi and its Place Within Daoism
According to received Daoist history, the Laozi, Zhuangzi and Liezi are all eponymously titled texts written by single authors during the early Warring States period (475-221 BCE). In all three cases, the truth is far more complex. In the case of the Liezi, it centres around the teaching of a figure called Liezi, otherwise known as Lie Yukou, who also appears throughout the Zhuangzi. He probably existed, and there’s even a slim chance that the text named after him was built around a core set of his writings. However, there’s also overwhelming evidence that the majority of the text was composed far later, in the 4th century CE. As such, the Liezi is not an accurate reflection of the earliest forms of Daoism that flourished during the Warring States. Instead, it comes from a later Daoist movement called Mysterious Learning (Xuanxue). You might have heard of Mysterious Learning because one of its followers, Wang Bi, composed the most historically influential commentary on the Laozi.
Mysterious Learning was a literati movement. It didn’t engage in methods of inner cultivation and instead interpreted texts such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi as making purely philosophical propositions. These ideas chimed with later Confucian elites, Western missionaries and early sinologists, who developed the idea that Warring States Daoism was a purely philosophical movement that later descended into religious superstition. The Liezi was held in high regard by these people who saw it as an example of early, unsullied philosophical Daoism. Therefore, it received a disproportionate amount of attention, whilst large swathes of the later Daoist tradition received virtually no attention at all. Fortunately, over the past thirty years or so, this situation has begun to change and the inaccurate philosophical-religious paradigm is no longer widely used.
Nevertheless, I’m still very fond of the Liezi. It’s a text that is easy to love and I’d recommend it to anyone that finds the Laozi off-putting and the Zhuangzi incomprehensible. It’s mostly composed of beautiful stories and parables that are widely found in children’s books in China. Eva Wong sums it up nicely in the introduction to her translation of the text — “whilst the Laozi talks at us and the Zhuangzi talks to himself, Liezi speaks to us.”
Lie Yukou’s Path of Inner cultivation
This piece is an idea that Louis Komjathy recently shared, and I’m also indebted to him for these translations. Liezi shows up twice in the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi, in chapter one and chapter seven. Louis suggested that, from a Daoist contemplative perspective, we can chart Liezi’s path of inner cultivation through these two chapters before reading his own text, the Liezi, as a record of his career as a fully realised teacher and elder within the Daoist community.
In chapter one of the Zhuangzi, we are introduced to Liezi as a highly skilled practitioner, but one who has not yet come to rest fully in the formless and the boundless.
“Liezi could ride the wind and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around. If he had only mounted on the alignment of heaven and earth, ridden the changes of the Six Qi, and thus wandered through the Boundless, then what would he have had to depend on?”
In chapter seven of the Zhuangzi, we again encounter Liezi who is studying with Huzi (Gourd Master). Liezi meets a shaman who terrifies the local populace with his predictions of life and death and is deeply impressed with him. Huzi tells Liezi to bring the shaman to see Huzi, and to try and ascertain his future through physiognomy. Over the course of four meetings, Huzi expresses increasingly deep contemplative states. At the fourth meeting, the shaman flees in terror.
“After this, Liezi concluded that he had never really begun to learn anything. He went home and for three years did not go out. He replaced his wife at the stove, fed the pigs as though he were feeding people, and showed no preferences in the things he did. He got rid of the carving and polishing and returned to un-hewn simplicity, letting his body stand alone, clod-like. In the midst of entanglement, he remained sealed, and in this oneness ended his life.”
At the start of his own text, we find Liezi as a teacher and elder with his own circle of students. Seeing as he is about to move to a different state, his disciples ask him to give them some parting advice. Liezi chuckles, and offers them some advice from a teacher of his who features in the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi, called Bohun Wuren:
There are the born and the unborn, the changing and the unchanging. The unborn can birth the born; the unchanging can change the changing. The born cannot not be born; the changing cannot not change. This results in constant birth and constant change. Considering constant birth and constant change, there is no time without birth and no time without change. This simply means yin yang and the four seasons. The unborn is close by and alone, while the unchanging goes forth and returns. Going forth and returning, its boundaries are endless; close by and alone, the Dao is boundless. The Huangdi Shu (lit. ‘Book of the Yellow Emperor’, here referring to the Laozi) says:
The Valley Spirit does not die; It is called the Mysterious Female. The gateway to the Mysterious Female Is called the root of heaven and earth. Continous and uninterrupted, it seems to exist. Applying this does not require effort.
Therefore, that which births things is not born and that which changes things does not change.
Liezi Rides the Wind
A famous guqin piece.
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This was new to me. Thank you.. i know a little of classical pieces and stories but this has sparked my interest anew.
Thank you for putting Leizi into a helpful context. Eva Wong’s translation of the Leizi seems quite good, although admittedly I know nothing of Classical Chinese.
The translations from the Zhuangzi by Louis Komjathy are amazingly clear, thank you again, I will follow this up!