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Liezi (The Book of Master Lie)列子

Handed down under the name of Lie Yukou · The text we have now dates from about the 4th century · China · 8 pieces · 33,549 Chinese characters

Counted with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi as one of the three Daoist books, though the taste of the reading is quite different. It tells stories rather than argues, and those stories became proverbs in later ages. The man of Qi who could not sleep for fear that heaven and earth would fall in, Yugong who set out to move the mountains and counted on his sons and grandsons, the monkeys who flew into a rage at being given three acorns in the morning and four in the evening, and Zhong Ziqi who heard Mount Tai and the running river in the sound of a zither all came out of this book. The eight chapters differ in grain. "Heaven's Gifts" and "The Yellow Emperor" speak of coming to be and changing; "King Mu of Zhou" shakes the boundary between dreaming and waking; "The Questions of Tang" opens the largest imagining on this shelf — the bottomless gulf Guixu and the great turtles that hold up the five mountains, and the puppet of Yan Shi that walked and sang just like a man until they cut it open and found leather and wood. "Endeavor and Destiny" sets strength and fate face to face to contend, "Yang Zhu" is where the saying "I would not give one hair of mine to profit the world" comes from, and "Explaining the Conjunctions" closes with thirty-four short pieces.

Eight chapters and 139 paragraphs fully translated. The graph counts were matched against the source text chapter by chapter, and all eight chapters were confirmed to differ by not a single graph (33,549 graphs). Lie Yukou is handed down as a man of Zheng in the Warring States period, but the eight chapters that survive are taken to have been compiled around the Wei and Jin. Zhang Zhan (張湛) added a commentary, and it is also called the True Classic of Perfect Emptiness. There are several passages that overlap with the Zhuangzi — the Kun and the Peng, the hunchback who catches cicadas, and the man who crosses the water at Lüliang. Which of them came first is disputed. The source text already uses full-width marks, so there was nothing to correct. There is not one Western mark in it. Among the names of beasts and insects there are several graphs no longer in use (𪀊掇, 乾餘骨, 九猷 and the like), so they are rendered by their sound with the Chinese graphs set beside them.

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Explaining Conjunctions
Effort and Destiny
The Questions of Tang
Zhongni
King Mu of Zhou
The Yellow Emperor
Heaven’s Gifts