Life-Wandering and Death-Return of Liezi with Cross-Comparison to Plato’s Soul-Journey

The Liezi constitutes an important link between the Lao-Zhuang tradition and later Daoism, yet it has long remained marginal in scholarship due to controversies surrounding its provenance. Moving beyond debates over textual authenticity, this article examines Liezi’s reflections on life and death through a comparative dialogue with Plato’s account of the soul’s journey with you 游 as a bridging notion. In the Liezi, life is construed as a temporary wandering and death an inevitable return. This understanding weakens fixed subjectivity and normative structures, articulating a mode of cultivation that emphasizes accommodation, detachment, and the coexistence with the myriad things in a quasi-religious cosmos. In Plato, by contrast, the soul persists as a moral subject journeying between the sensible and intelligible worlds. It is integrated into a religious cosmic order that unites epistemic with ethical dimensions and is ultimately oriented toward its purification and return to the intelligible world. The comparison reveals a structural divergence between the two thinkers in the ultimate placement of human existence, while also demonstrating how cross-cultural comparison can generate mutually illuminating insights and reopen reflection on the Liezi’s place in intellectual history.