This is the first comprehensive study in a Western language of Liu Tsung-yUan, one of the finest prose stylists China has ever produced. Liu was not only a leading writer of T'ang China (618-906) but also an important thinker of his time. Examining every major aspect of his life and thought, the book also discusses the relationship of his thought to mid-T'ang intellectual changes and offers a new interpretation of the origins of a key intellectual watershed, the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the eleventh century.