1. Liezi's book has gone through three stages:
1) After Liezi's death, his disciples compiled more than eight articles according to his activities and remarks.
2) On this basis, the Han people supplemented it and made it into the number of eight-part essays recorded in Hanshu. Art and literature.
3) According to the books collected by Zhang Zhan's ancestors and the fragmentary volumes collected after the war, "only by attending or not attending the school is it complete". According to the eight articles recorded in Hanshu Yiwenzhi, this edition of Liezi was compiled. Because in the process of compilation, in order to dredge the text and connect the chapters, some of Zhang Zhan's own thoughts and some of his compiled contents will inevitably be added, so this edition of Liezi is mixed with some thoughts and languages of Wei Jin people, which is understandable. Liezi, written in three times, is inevitably miscellaneous. See the preface of Zhang Qinghua's Collection of Taoist Scriptures.
2. Introduction to the work:
Liezi's works (including those compiled by his disciples) have 20 old editions, and Liu Xiang and Liu Xin's father and son in the Western Han Dynasty removed the duplication and kept 8. The tenth volume of Hanshu, Yiwenzhi, has eight articles on Liu Xiang's Liezi. The sentence named Yu Kou was first named by Zhuangzi and Zhuangzi, and it should be eight articles compiled by Liu Xiang, Liu Xin and his son or others at the same time. But I don't know when I lost it.
This version of Liezi has dozens of versions. In the front of the book, most of them are prefaces written by Liu Xiang or Zhang Zhan (a native of the Eastern Jin Dynasty). The contents of each edition are not far apart, and there are a lot of fables, folk stories, myths and legends. The will in the book is roughly the same as that of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Today, there are Liu Zongyuan, Zhu, Gao, Ye Daqing, Chen, Liang Qichao, Ma Xulun, Wuyi's brother-in-law, Yang Bojun, etc.