Liu Xie

(465 - 522)

Not long before his death in 522 around the age of fifty-five, Chinese writer Liu Xie was granted imperial permission to become a Buddhist monk. Until then he had spent his life editing religious texts, reading poetry, and writing The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, which is now considered a quintessential work of premodern Chinese literary criticism. “If literature is truly a vehicle for the mind,” he writes in the preface, “my mind has found a place to rest.”