The Daoist Mixtape

The Liezi: A Survival Guide for Anxious Times

Daoism reaches most modern readers as a kind of therapy. Let go. Go with the flow. Nothing is worth the anxiety. The healing effect of Daoism might not be a coincidence.

In 311, a Xiongnu army took Luoyang, the capital of the Jin dynasty. The city burned, and the emperor was captured and later executed. For the first time in the imperial era, the capital fell to invaders from beyond the frontier, and most of the imperial library and collections were burnt. It could be thought of as an event equivalent to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The great families and clans fled south, carrying what they could, and later rebuilt in the South.

However, 311 was just a milestone. Long before the disaster in Luoyang, the country had experienced long division and war. After the fall of the Eastern Han came the famous Three Kingdoms era (三國). A later novel depicted it as an era of heroes; however, it might be better described as an era of disenchantment and disruption. The rituals and social conventions of the previous centuries were broken and violated, and new thinking began to grow. Great thought and great turmoil always seem to have some connection.

The Crack Before the Fall

The Han was an empire that, for more than three centuries, had recruited its officials through Confucian learning, and whose people believed in ritual and in the blessing of Heaven. However, the Three Kingdoms era stripped away the illusions of the old system; violence and power became the only currency.

Cao Cao 曹操 never declared himself emperor, even though he had every power to do so; he took the title King of Wei in 216 and died in 220. His son Cao Pi 曹丕 then forced the last Han emperor to abdicate and proclaimed himself emperor of Wei in 220.

Later the Sima family turned on the Cao family. In 249 Sima Yi 司馬懿 executed the regent Cao Shuang 曹爽 and his clan; in 260 the Wei emperor Cao Mao 曹髦 was killed in the streets of Luoyang by Sima Zhao’s 司馬昭 men (Which gave rise to the famous Chinese idiom “司馬昭之心，路人皆知” — Sima Zhao’s intentions are known to everyone). In 266 Sima Yan 司馬炎 forced the last Wei emperor to abdicate and proclaimed himself emperor of Jin.

Educated men witnessed a century of moral decline, in which sons killed fathers and ministers killed emperors. The old promise no longer held. People started to question the dominant Confucianism: its rituals, its ideal of governing, its ideal of Tianxia 天下. Beyond conventional political theory, people started asking what the deeper essence of the world was. Men were no longer sure how the world should be governed. They began asking what the world actually rests on.

The Study of the Mysterious

A retrospective on Confucianism gave rise to what was later called xuanxue 玄學, “the study of the mysterious.” The name comes from the first chapter of the Daodejing: 玄之又玄, “mystery upon mystery.”

Xuanxue centered on the “Three Mysteries” 三玄: the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the Yijing (I-Ching). People practiced xuanxue through qingtan 清談, “pure conversation,” where educated men gathered in salons to debate with paradox, anecdotes, and wit. The central debate was between mingjiao 名教, the social order of names and rites, and ziran 自然, things as they are by themselves. This produced many commentaries on the key classics. Famously, Wang Bi 王弼 wrote his commentary on the Laozi in the 240s. Around 300, Guo Xiang 郭象 edited the Zhuangzi into the thirty-three chapters we read today.

Confucianism explained the order of society: Which rites? Which names? Which duties? Xuanxue asked what lay underneath all this. What is the root of the ten thousand things 万物? Are rules and institutions the root of order, or only its branches? Can words fully express meaning, or must we forget the words once we grasp the meaning? These created three key pairs of concept: Being and non-being 有無, Root and branches 本末, Words and meaning 言意.

Wang Bi argued that the root of everything is 無, non-being. Rites and names are only branches. However, it was not a rejection of Confucianism. When asked why Confucius never talked about non-being, Wang Bi replied that Confucius embodied it, while Laozi, who kept talking about it, had not quite reached it: 聖人體無，無又不可以訓，故言必及有；老、莊未免於有，恆訓其所不足.

Read this way, xuanxue was an attempt to find something beneath the ritual and order that did not depend on them.

Some people also lived out these ideas. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢 were the most famous examples.

Ji Kang 嵇康 argued that one should “go beyond the rules of names and rites and follow what is so of itself” 越名教而任自然. He refused office under the Sima regime, wrote a famous letter explaining why he could not serve, and was later executed for his disobedience.

Ruan Ji 阮籍 broke with etiquette and asked, “Were the rites made for people like us?” 禮豈為我輩設也. At his mother’s funeral, he ate meat and drank wine against the rules of mourning. He then cried out and vomited blood. He expressed his real grief while rejecting the ritual form.

Liu Ling 劉伶 drank naked at home. When shocked visitors confronted him, he said that heaven and earth were his house and his clothes were his house, so what were they doing inside his clothes? 我以天地為棟宇，屋室為褌衣，諸君何為入我褌中？

Xuanxue became a way of life. In a regime that executed its critics, it also offered a way to stay out of politics without openly opposing it.

The Editor and the Mixtape

So much for the era. Back to Liezi. The person who gave the Liezi to the world was Zhang Zhan 張湛, a high official in the Southern Court in the late fourth century. In his preface, he tells how the book survived.

Zhang says his grandfather grew up in the Wang family, the same family that had produced Wang Bi and owned a library of nearly ten thousand scrolls. When Luoyang fell in 311, his grandfather fled south with a cart full of them. On the way, he chose the Liezi, which had eight chapters. By the time he crossed the Yangzi, only three scrolls remained. Over the following years, the family found four more scrolls in one relative’s house and six in the house of Wang Bi’s son-in-law. Comparing one copy with another, Zhang writes, “for the first time it was complete” 始得全備.

Zhang presented it as a rediscovery of the classics. However, most scholars today see it as a fourth-century book, assembled from older and newer material, possibly within Zhang Zhan’s own circle. I think it is better described as a Daoist mixtape. About half of its stories have close parallels in earlier books: the Zhuangzi, the Lüshi Chunqiu, the Huainanzi, and the Shanhaijing. Many are almost word for word. It also remixes earlier stories, sometimes giving them new endings. The zither player Bo Ya, who smashes his instrument when his friend dies in the older version, never smashes it here. The book’s two most famous stories today, the Foolish Old Man who moves the mountain and the man who fears the sky will fall, appear in no surviving earlier source. The whole collection is credited to Lie Yukou, a sage known mainly from a few lines in the Zhuangzi.

What makes a mixtape more than a pile of songs is the taste of the person who chose them. The editor of the Liezi kept returning to one kind of scene: a person trying to master the world, only to find that the world was larger than their plans.

The Mixtape Highlight

The wind (列子御風). The Zhuangzi mentions Lie Yukou for wind riding:

夫列子御風而行，泠然善也……此雖免乎行，猶有所待者也。

Liezi rode the wind, light and skilful… Though he was spared the trouble of walking, there was still something he depended on.

For Zhuangzi, the wind-rider is the example of a freedom that is not yet free. The Liezi tells the same scene from the inside. After nine years of training, Liezi says, he drifted east and west like a dry leaf:

竟不知風乘我邪？我乘風乎？

In the end I could not tell: was the wind riding me, or was I riding the wind?

Zhuangzi saw a man using a tool. The Liezi describes a man who no longer knows who is in charge, and presents that as the achievement.

Liezi 列子, Book Two, 竟不知風乘我邪？我乘風乎？

The mountain (愚公移山). The Foolish Old Man 愚公, ninety years old, sets out with his family to dig away two mountains blocking his door. A neighbour laughs at him. He answers:

雖我之死，有子存焉；子又生孫，孫又生子……子子孫孫無窮匱也，而山不加增，何苦而不平？

Even when I die, my sons remain; sons beget grandsons, grandsons beget sons… generations without end, and the mountain grows no higher. Why worry that it won’t be levelled?

But the old man does not level it. Heaven hears of his persistence, 帝感其誠, “the Emperor of Heaven was moved by his sincerity,” and sends two giants to carry the mountains away. Inside the Liezi, the story can be read less as effort conquering nature than as a steady effort that triggers something larger, which then achieves what he could not achieve.

The sky (杞人憂天). A man of Qi 杞 fears the sky will fall and stops eating and sleeping. A friend explains that the sky is only air and the earth only packed soil, and he is relieved. However, Liezi laughs at both:

言天地壞者亦謬，言天地不壞者亦謬。壞與不壞，吾所不能知也。

Those who say heaven and earth will collapse are wrong; those who say they won’t are also wrong. Whether they collapse or not, I cannot know.

The monkeys (朝三暮四). A keeper offers his monkeys three acorns in the morning and four at night; they riot. Four and three, then? They cheer. The Zhuangzi told this story first, as a lesson about perspective. The Liezi borrowed it and added a line of its own:

聖人以智籠群愚，亦猶狙公之以智籠眾狙也。

The sage herds the crowd of fools with his wit, just as the keeper herds his monkeys.

The machine (偃師造人). An artisan named Yanshi presents King Mu with a performer who sings, dances and flirts with the royal concubines. The king, taking it for a man, orders the artisan killed. Yanshi takes it apart: leather, wood, glue and lacquer, every organ inside artificial. The king tests it:

王試廢其心，則口不能言；廢其肝，則目不能視；廢其腎，則足不能步。

The king tried removing its heart, and the mouth could not speak; its liver, and the eyes could not see; its kidneys, and the feet could not walk.

Delighted, he sighs, 人之巧乃可與造化者同功乎, “can human skill really match the work of creation?” When Lu Ban and Mozi, the most celebrated engineers of antiquity, heard the story, they never again dared to speak of their own craft, 終身不敢語藝: however great your skill, the world holds a greater one.

Daoist Mixtape or Universal Guidance?

In 742 the Tang emperor Xuanzong, who claimed Laozi as his ancestor, declared the Liezi a scripture, the Chongxu zhenjing 沖虛真經, “the True Classic of Simplicity and Emptiness,” and put it on the syllabus of a new Daoist civil examination.

On paper, Liezi is Daoist. Yet for me it has always been hard to treat it as a Daoist classic. Most Chinese readers meet its stories long before they meet Liezi. 愚公移山 is in a school textbook. 杞人憂天 tells to stop worrying. 朝三暮四 warns those who keep changing their mind. None of them labelled as Daoism.

For most Chinese people, Daoist ideas are not a doctrine to follow, but part of the ordinary wisdom for getting through life: know when to stop pushing, don’t lose sleep over the sky, and let things take their course. The mixtape worked so well that no one hears the curator anymore. It became a kind of wisdom so common that it no longer needs a name. The editor’s question still sits at its heart: 竟不知風乘我邪？我乘風乎？ In the end I could not tell: was the wind riding me, or was I riding the wind?

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