沖虛至德真經

Chōngxū zhìdé zhēn jīng 沖虛至德真經

True Scripture of the Void-and-Emptiness and Supreme Virtue

attributed to 列禦寇 (Liè Yùkòu; traditional dates Warring States; received text early 4th cent. CE, pseudepigraphic)

The canonical Daozang edition of the Lièzǐ 列子 — the philosophical classic attributed to Liè Yùkòu 列禦寇 (Warring States), preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 668 / CT 668, 洞神部本文類) in eight juàn / eight piān with the interspersed commentary of the Eastern Jìn commentator Zhāng Zhàn 張湛 (zì Chùdù 處度; fl. 370). The work has been known as Chōngxū zhēn jīng 沖虛真經 since the Táng canonisation of Lièzǐ as Chōngxū zhēnrén 沖虛真人 in 742 (per Jiù Táng shū 24.926 and Sòng cháo dà zhào lìng jí 135.1a), and under the fuller title Chōngxū zhìdé zhēn jīng since 1007 (under the Northern Sòng court’s expanded canonisation). The eight piān are:

1. Tiān ruì 天瑞 (Auspice of Heaven) — on the unceasing self-generation of the cosmos.
2. Huángdì 黃帝 (The Yellow Emperor) — parables of the sage-ruler.
3. Zhōu Mù wáng 周穆王 (King Mù of Zhōu) — fantastic voyages and the oneiric character of experience.
4. Zhòng Ní 仲尼 (Confucius) — dialogues with Confucius and his disciples re-read through a Daoist lens.
5. Tāng wèn 湯問 (Questions of Tāng) — cosmological and geographical marvels.
6. Lì mìng 力命 (Power and Fate) — on the inescapability of fate (the most systematically fatalistic chapter).
7. Yáng Zhū 楊朱 (Yáng Zhū) — the famously hedonist-individualist chapter, attributed to the Warring-States egoist Yáng Zhū.
8. Shuō fú 說符 (Explanations of Resonances) — short parables on the unexpected workings of the Way.

About the work

The scripture opens with the famous cosmogonic passage of Tiān ruì:

Yǒu shēng bù shēng, yǒu huà bù huà. Bù shēng zhě néng shēng shēng, bù huà zhě néng huà huà. Shēng zhě bù néng bù shēng, huà zhě bù néng bù huà. 有生不生，有化不化；不生者能生生，不化者能化化；生者不能不生，化者不能不化。

(“There is that which generates without itself being generated; there is that which transforms without itself being transformed. The ungenerated can generate the generating; the untransformed can transform the transforming. The generated cannot but generate; the transformed cannot but transform.“)

This is followed by the classical “Sì tài” 四太 cosmological sequence: Tài yì 太易 (Great Change), Tài chū 太初 (Great Beginning), Tài shǐ 太始 (Great Commencement), Tài sù 太素 (Great Simplicity) — respectively the pre-form-pre-matter state, the beginning of qì, the beginning of form, and the beginning of matter. Zhāng Zhàn’s commentary identifies Tài yì with the yì 易 of the Zhōuyì xì cí (tài jí 太極) and with Lǎozǐ’s hùn chéng 渾成 (undifferentiated completeness, Dàodé jīng 25). The Lièzǐ source-text was therefore, in Zhāng Zhàn’s reading, the decisive philosophical intersection of Yì, Daoist, and HuángLǎo cosmogony.

The work’s most famous passages include:

• The skull of Zhuāngzǐ’s model (Tāng wèn 5): the story of the sān shān 三山 (three immortal islands), the immortality-isles of Péng lái 蓬萊, Fāng zhàng 方丈, and Yíng zhōu 瀛洲;
• Yú gōng yí shān 愚公移山 (Yú Gōng moves the mountain) — the classical Chinese proverb on persistent labour defeating insurmountable obstacles;
• Bó Yá and Zhōng Zǐqī 伯牙、鍾子期 — the classical paradigm of the zhī yīn 知音 (“he who knows the tone”) friendship;
• Kǒng Qiū’s admission of ignorance (Tāng wèn): “Who knows — perhaps the great is vast and the small is minute; this is not what I can know,” Confucius telling the child that the sun is closer at noon or at dawn is an unsolvable dispute.
• Yáng Zhū’s hedonism: “If only he might pluck a single hair to benefit the entire world, he would not do it” — the famous egoist maxim that triggered Mèngzǐ’s condemnation.

Prefaces

The Daozang edition is preceded by a brief biography and an illustrated portrait of Lièzǐ (see figure 1 in Schipper & Verellen 2004, 1:62 — a Míng 1598-reprint portrait derived from DZ 163 Xuán yuán shí zǐ tú 玄元十子圖). Zhāng Zhàn’s preface to his commentary (which survives separately and is reproduced in DZ 732 Chōngxū zhìdé zhēn jīng sì jiě 沖虛至德真經四解) describes the transmission of the work in some detail; Graham’s “Date and Composition” study provides the standard modern analysis.

The DZ 668 edition also includes interspersed phonetic annotations (yīn yì 音義) with the commentary — a practice characteristic of the mature TángSòng text-edition format.

Abstract

Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 1:62, DZ 668) classifies the text in section 1.A.1 Philosophy and reads:

“True Scripture of the Void and Supreme Virtue. The philosophical work Lièzǐ 列子 has been known under this title since 1007. It had previously been granted the title Chōngxū zhēn jīng 沖虛真經 in 742 (Jiù Táng shū 24.926; Sòng cháo dà zhào lìng jí 135.1a). According to Graham’s study, the work’s textual history is as follows: A Lièzǐ in eight piān, first mentioned in the bibliographic chapters of the Hàn shū 漢書藝文志 30.1730, was listed as lost at an early date. Liú Xiàng’s 劉向 (c. 77–6 BCE) memorial presenting the collated text, however, is preserved. In the first half of the fourth century, a Lièzǐ, the contents of which fit Liú Xiàng’s description, was written, probably by the grandfather or father of Zhāng Zhàn 張湛 (fl. 370). Zhāng Zhàn was the first to write a commentary on this text. In the preface to his commentary, Zhāng describes the transmission of the work (cf. DZ 732 Chōngxū zhìdé zhēn jīng sì jiě; for a summary and analysis of this preface, see Graham, ‘Date and composition’). The present edition contains interspersed phonetic annotations and is preceded by an illustrated brief biography of Lièzǐ (fig. 1; from DZ 163 Xuán yuán shí zǐ tú).”

The dating question is well-established since A. C. Graham’s foundational work. Graham demonstrated — by lexical, thematic, and intertextual analysis — that the received Lièzǐ is a c. 300–370 CE Eastern-Jìn forgery, composed by a member of Zhāng Zhàn’s immediate family (probably his grandfather or father). The text incorporates substantial materials drawn from the Zhuāngzǐ, the Lǚshì chūnqiū, the Huáinán zǐ, Buddhist texts of the early medieval period (including the Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish, which furnishes the “Yú Gōng moves the mountain” parable), and other late sources not available to a Warring-States author. Per the project’s dating rule, the frontmatter uses 300–370 (Eastern Jìn) as the composition bracket for the received recension, with dynasty “東晉”; the traditional attribution to Liè Yùkòu is preserved in the persons: field as pseudepigraphic (attributed).

The catalog meta’s “dynasty: attributed to Warring States” author-line is corrected in our frontmatter to reflect the received-recension date. Graham’s conclusion is now universally accepted; the Lièzǐ must be classed among early-medieval Chinese pseudepigrapha, alongside the Wénzǐ 文子 (KR5c0053-adjacent) and the Wénshǐ zhēn jīng (KR5c0048, a later, Southern-Sòng example of the same genre).

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:62 (DZ 668, H.-H. Schmidt). Primary reference.
• Graham, A. C. “The Date and Composition of Liehtzyy.” Asia Major n.s. 8 (1961): 139–98. The foundational philological analysis, demonstrating the 4th-century-CE forgery status of the received text.
• Graham, A. C. The Book of Lieh-tzu. London: John Murray, 1960. Revised edition New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. The standard English translation.
• Barrett, T. H. “Towards a Date for the Chin-shu k’an-wu-lun.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41, no. 2 (1978): 290–95. For Zhāng Zhàn’s intellectual context.
• Forke, Alfred. Liä-dsï: Das wahre Buch vom quellenden Urgrund. Translated by Richard Wilhelm. Jena: Diederichs, 1921. Standard German translation.
• Wieger, Léon. Les pères du système taoïste. Paris, 1950. French translation with Zhuāngzǐ and Lǎozǐ.
• Chen Guying 陳鼓應. Lǎo Zhuāng xīn lùn 老莊新論. Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Gǔjí, 1992. Includes analysis of the Lièzǐ’s textual-philosophical history.
• Yáng Bójùn 楊伯峻. Lièzǐ jíshì 列子集釋. Běijīng: Zhōnghuá, 1979. Standard modern Chinese critical edition with collected commentaries.

Other points of interest

The work’s 4th-century-CE compositional status — demonstrated by Graham — does not diminish its importance as a Daoist philosophical text; rather, it makes the Lièzǐ a key witness to the philosophical synthesis of the Eastern Jìn 東晉 period, when Buddhist ideas were being absorbed into the Daoist-xuánxué 玄學 tradition. The eight-piān structure, the character-studies of Yáng Zhū and Confucius, and the embeddedness in the Zhuāngzǐ citational idiom mark the Lièzǐ as a distinctively early-medieval Chinese creation.

The dual-track canonical ascension under the Táng (742, Chōngxū zhēn jīng) and the Northern Sòng (1007, Chōngxū zhìdé zhēn jīng) — together with the parallel Táng canonisation of the Dàodé jīng and the Nánhuá zhēn jīng (the Zhuāngzǐ, KR5c0051) — completed the formal establishment of the “three zǐ of Daoism” (Lǎozǐ, Zhuāngzǐ, Lièzǐ) as the foundational philosophical triad of the Daoist canon. The three are regularly presented together in the Daozang under matching editorial conventions (see Schmidt’s note that the portrait-and-biography arrangement is common to the three).

The Lièzǐ’s vivid cosmogonic prose — the Sì tài sequence, the elaborate dialogues on fate and destiny, the fantastic voyages of King Mù of Zhōu — has made the work one of the two or three most widely-read Daoist philosophical texts in the late-imperial period after the Dàodé jīng and the Zhuāngzǐ, and the source of many Chinese proverbs ( Yú Gōng yí shān — Yú Gōng moves the mountain; Qí rén yōu tiān 杞人憂天 — the man of Qǐ who worried that the sky would fall; Kuā fù zhuī rì 夸父追日 — Kuā Fù pursues the sun; Bó Yá jué xián 伯牙絕弦 — Bó Yá breaks his strings [on the death of the friend who understood him]).

Zhāng Zhàn’s commentary — the first to the received text — is philosophically significant in its own right. Zhāng developed a sophisticated xuánxué 玄學 reading of the Lièzǐ that drew heavily on Wáng Bì’s 王弼 Lǎozǐ and Guō Xiàng’s 郭象 Zhuāngzǐ exegetical traditions, fusing the three into a unified Eastern-Jìn Daoist-philosophical system. The commentary is transmitted in the DZ 668 edition in interspersed form; its independent compilation is in DZ 732.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0049
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 1:62 — DZ 668 entry (H.-H. Schmidt).
• Wikipedia: Liezi
• ctext.org: Liezi — primary-text reference edition.