Lie Yukou

History

Historical evidence for Lie Yukou as a philosopher of the Hundred Schools of Thought during the Warring States period is scarce. This lack of evidence may be attributed to the burning of books and burying of scholars that occurred under Qin Shi Huang. Some scholars, however, propose that the Zhuangzi invented Lie Yukou as a Daoist exemplar. Frederic H. Balfour, a translator of Taoist texts, referred to Liezi as "a philosopher who never lived" (1887).

Lionel Giles noted that very little is known of the author beyond what he tells us himself, and that Lie Yukou appears to have been living in the Chêng State not long before 398 BC, when Prime Minister Tzu Yang was killed in a revolution. Giles also mentioned that Lie Yukou figures prominently in the pages of Chuang Tzu, from whom it is learned that he could "ride upon the wind." A critic of the Sung dynasty declared, on the insufficient ground that Lie Yukou is not mentioned by the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, that Lieh Tzu was a fictitious personage invented by Chuang Tzu and that the treatise under his name was a forgery of later times.

This theory was rejected by the compilers of the great Catalogue of Ch‘ien Lung's Library. Herbert Allen Giles wrote that the burning of the books gave scholars of the later Han dynasty (A.D. 25-221) a chance to forge ancient works, and that someone produced a treatise under the name of Lieh Tzu, not seeing that the individual was a creation of Chuang Tzu's brain.