Lie Yukou

Who is Lie Yukou?

Lie Yukou is considered the author of the Daoist book Liezi, which uses his honorific name Liezi. The second Chinese character in Yukou is written kou 寇 "bandit; enemy"; the first is written yu 圄 "imprison", yu 禦 "resist; ward off", or occasionally yu 御 "drive; ride; control". Lie Yukou was born in the State of Zheng, near today's Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

There is little historical evidence of Lie Yukou as a Hundred Schools of Thought philosopher during the Warring States period. This could be due to the burning of books and burying of scholars which occurred during the reign of Qin Shi Huang. However, some scholars believe that the Zhuangzi invented him as a Daoist exemplar. Frederic H. Balfour, who translated several Daoist texts, called Liezi "a philosopher who never lived" Lionel Giles expresses doubt in his Introduction:

Very little is known of our author beyond what he tells us himself. His full name was Lieh Yü-k'ou, and it appears that he was living in the Chêng State not long before the year 398 BC, when the Prime Minister Tzu Yang was killed in a revolution. He figures prominently in the pages of Chuang Tzu, from whom we learn that he could 'ride upon the wind'. On the insufficient ground that he is not mentioned by the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, a certain critic of the Sung dynasty was led to declare that Lieh Tzu was only a fictitious personage invented by Chuang Tzu, and that the treatise which passes under his name was a forgery of later times. This theory is rejected by the compilers of the great Catalogue of Ch'ien Lung's Library, who represent the cream of Chinese scholarship in the eighteenth century.