“Lieh-tzu is not the only Chinese philosophical text of disputed date, but it is perhaps the most important”, wrote A.C. Graham in his seminal article “The date and composition of the Lieh-tzu” (Asia Major 8/2, 1960–61, 139–98). Scholarship on the Liezi has not substantially advanced: since Graham wrote those lines over fifty years ago, the Liezi has continued to be neglected. Riding the Wind with Liezi aims to fill this gap by presenting a collection of twelve essays that re-engage the Liezi from different points of view and try “to find overlooked dimensions of Daoist philosophy” as Roger Ames writes in his introduction. As the ambitious subtitle promises us New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic we shall discuss the kind of perspectives presented and where their innovative contribution lies. For this purpose the essays may be divided into those which try to locate the Liezi by contextualizing the text historically and philosophically on the one hand and those who locate the text by identifying themes in it that are well known from the fields of early Daoism or early Chinese philosophy on the other. A fundamental difference with regard to two basic assumptions about unity and diversity in the Liezi text and the Daoist tradition divide the perspectives and analytical approaches of the essays in the book.

Although most of the articles in one way or another refer to A.C. Graham as the authoritative voice on the Liezi, few follow Graham's differentiation between those passages from earlier texts (of pre-Qin and Han provenance) that have been copied into the Liezi and make up a quarter of the whole text, the non-Daoist hedonist Yang Zhu chapter and the fatalist Endeavour and Destiny chapter, and the rest of the text which Graham finds coherent and Daoist. May Sim in her comparison of Liezi's Daoism with Epictetus's Stoicism, John Berthrong in his discussion of themes of process and transformations in the Liezi, Thomas Michael in his analysis of Liezi's reformed cosmogony, Philip J. Ivanhoe in his exploration of the theme of unselfconsciousness in the Liezi, Jeffrey Dippmann in his examination of how the Liezi re-reads the Zhuangzi, Jeffrey L. Richey in his contribution on the self as machine in the Liezi, Robin R. Wang in his interpretation of Yinyang as the emergent structure in the Liezi and David Jones in his analysis of Liezi passages that “speak to the question of death and death's relation to life” all try to point out particular features of the text as a whole and thereby reconstruct a unified position of the text based on selected passages. Other authors start from a different assumption. Livia Kohn differentiates two distinct positions on the body in the Liezi which she locates in certain chapters and links to different Daoist traditions. Ronnie Littlejohn and Erin M. Cline both provide an analysis only of specific parts of the Liezi which they compare with the earlier texts of Zhuangzi and Laozi. Littlejohn only focuses on the part which he thinks has been copied into the Liezi from the Zhuangzi, he is thus interested in the Zhuangzi rather than in the Liezi text.

The second basic assumption – that the Liezi can be explained as part of a unified and coherent tradition of early Daoist or Chinese philosophy – underlies the essay by Berthrong, who identifies motifs of transformation in the Liezi with motifs found in Yijing and correlative philosophy, Zhuangzi and Laozi to such a degree that the Liezi appears as a mere derivative of these earlier texts without its own characteristics. Ivanhoe uses Liezi as one among other examples to introduce the theme of unselfconsciousness, the main focus of his interest. Wang takes the Liezi to illuminate a general principle of Chinese trinary thinking; and Jones repeatedly emphasizes that positions on life and death taken in the Liezi are the same as in other Daoist texts. In contrast, the other authors try to focus on the difference between Liezi and earlier Daoist texts. Littlejohn and Dippmann both point out differences between the Zhuangzi passages of the Liezi and the transmitted Zhuangzi, providing different hypotheses for these deviations. While Littlejohn interprets them as traces of an earlier Zhuangzi text transmitted in the Liezi, Dippmann explains them as deliberate changes added to the text by later editors to advocate their pursuit of immortality in the milieu of religious Daoism in southern China. Sim restricts her comparison strictly to the Liezi text, Michael regards the Liezi as a modified extension of Laozi, Zhuangzi and Huainanzi and as a reform work, Kohn relates different strands of the Liezi to different Daoist traditions, Richey sees the Liezi as a “record of Taoist engagement with competing Buddhist ideas and practices in early medieval China”, and Cline analyses the differences in the concept of wuwei between the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and one passage in the Liezi.

Most of the contributions discuss the Liezi out of historical context. Only Michael, Dippmann, Kohn and Richey try to locate the text in its fourth-century ce social and intellectual context, explaining its philosophy as a response to apocryphal weishu, religious Daoism, yangsheng practices or Buddhism. Tim Barrett approaches the Liezi from the perspective of reception history, providing a 1,000 year long history of commentarial readings of the Liezi in China.

Reading through the contributions it is striking that a number of text passages from the Liezi are taken up in several essays as evidence for various, sometimes quite diverging, arguments and analytical approaches. Apart from Dippmann, who once refers to the other editor Littlejohn's diverging interpretation of the same phenomenon, we do not find any cross-references to, or discussions of, diverging interpretations of the same passages, which indicates that the authors were not aware of each other's research. We hope that this rich new contribution to Liezi studies will inspire further scholars to engage in a discussion with the various new perspectives on the Liezi presented in this publication.