Mid-Táng Daoist and military theorist, floruit 713–741 (Kāiyuán 開元 era). One of the most consequential Táng interpreters of the Huángdì yīnfú jīng 黃帝陰符經, and the originator — in his pseudonymous self-authenticating Huángdì yīnfú jīng shū 黃帝陰符經疏 (DZ 110, actually a tenth-century work falsely attributed to him) — of the famous legend of the Old Woman of Líshān 驪山 who revealed the authentic interpretation of the scripture to him.
Lǐ Quán’s main surviving work is Huángdì yīnfú jīng jízhù 黃帝陰符經集註 (DZ 109), a collected-commentaries edition of the Yīnfú jīng that bundles commentary-strata pseudepigraphically attributed to ancient military-and-strategic authorities (Yī Yǐn, Tàigōng, Fàn Lǐ, Guǐgǔzǐ, Zhūgě Liàng, Zhāng Liáng) with his own substantial substantive commentary. His reading of the Yīnfú jīng is naturalistic and military-political, reflecting the Yīnfú jīng’s dual classification as both Daoist and military.
Lǐ Quán’s commentaries prompted the contemporary Daoist Zhāng Guǒ 張果 to write his own Huángdì yīnfú jīng zhù (DZ 112) in refutation — an early example within the Daozang of direct commentarial polemic.
Studies: Christopher Rand, “Li Ch’üan and Chinese Military Thought,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39 (1979), 107–137; Florian C. Reiter, “The ‘Scripture of the Hidden Contracts’ (Yin-fu ching): A Short Survey on Facts and Findings,” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 136 (1984), 75–83; Anna Seidel, La divinisation de Lao-tseu (EFEO, 1969), on the Old-Woman-of-Lí-shān legend. No CBDB record was found.