Liu Hsieh (ca. 465-522) was a Chinese literary critic. His treatise, "The Literary Mind," is the most systematic and comprehensive work of traditional Chinese literary criticism and influenced the development of Chinese criticism and poetics.

Liu Hsieh, with the courtesy name Wen-ho, was from Tung-kuan, the present-day Lühsien, Shantung Province. He was only a child when his father died, and he was reared in poverty by his mother, who passed away when he was 20 years of age. Liu Hsieh never married, partly because of his poverty and partly because of his great interest in Buddhism. In his youth he stayed with the monk Seng-yu for over 10 years, assisting him in editing Buddhist sutras. During this period he stored his mind with Chinese classics and literature, for without his wide reading and his deep concern with the contemporary state of literature, he could not have written Wen-hsin...