Dadao Wuyin
(What follows is a folk legend.)
1. Master He of the Palace of Pure Joy, Who Neither Ate nor Drank
Master He was an old Taoist priest of the Palace of Pure Joy in the 1930s and 1940s. The Palace of Pure Joy stood in the city of Junzhou, more than 70 li from the foot of the Wudang Mountains. Master He’s way of spiritual practice was unusual: rather than choosing a quiet, secluded spot, he sat squarely in the main street of the city in seated meditation with his eyes closed. At first people treated him as a spectacle, but however much they pointed and gossiped about him, he always sat motionless like a clay statue. Some who liked to tease would keep pressing their mouths to his ear with questions, deliberately disturbing him; later, when people saw that he had stuffed his ears with cotton and stuck a plaster over his mouth, they lost interest in making fun of him.
The Palace of Pure Joy was not far from the county middle school and primary school, and the schoolchildren passed by every day on their way to and from school. As time went on, some naughty pupils began making mischief, picking up pebbles and pieces of tile to throw at him whenever they passed; Master He never paid them any attention.
Later Master He moved back into the main hall to sit in meditation and cultivate his practice. With Master He meditating in the hall, the schoolchildren discovered another strange thing: once he sat down he stayed for days, looking the same each day, and seemed never to eat or drink. So they decided to test it.
One day the pupils got hold of a big brass padlock and locked the door of the hall. Having locked it, they forgot all about it, and only after two whole weeks did they suddenly remember, and rushed to open the door, afraid Master He had starved to death. But when they opened it, there was Master He still sitting there without moving. In the 1950s, Master He disappeared, and no one knows where he went.
2. The “Old Practitioner” Who Grew Young Again
When I was a child, I once saw in the Jiuyang Palace an old Taoist priest surnamed Xin, over ninety years old. Every day he sat alone in a quiet room; he never chanted scriptures, burned incense, or worshipped the gods. No one knew his Taoist name, and most people called him the “Old Practitioner.”
The old man ate at no fixed times and in no fixed amounts: sometimes three to five meals a day, sometimes one or two meals in two days, and sometimes only one meal in seven or eight days. What he ate was nothing but beans or jujubes and the like; he never ate cooked food. Apart from this there was nothing strange about him. Later my family moved elsewhere, and in time I forgot about the old man; all I remembered was that he had a large black spot on the sole of each foot.
On a spring outing last year, deep in a dense forest outside the city, I saw a man in the prime of life, dressed as a layman, sitting cross-legged with eyes closed and feet bare on a large bluestone. Curious, I went closer to look carefully, and he seemed very much like the “Old Practitioner” I had seen in my youth. When I looked at the soles of his feet, the black spots were plainly still there.
After some questions and answers I learned that he really was the “Old Practitioner,” the Taoist priest I had known in the Jiuyang Palace as a boy. By this reckoning, the “Old Practitioner” must be at least 130 years old! Is this not a living example of what people call the Taoist “art of returning from old age to youth”?
3. Master Yang of the Zixiao Palace
In the early 1950s, a Taoist called Master Yang lived in the Prince’s Cave behind the Zixiao Palace. In his cave there was nothing but a heap of straw for him to sit on. All year round he wore the same tattered unlined clothes, which had never been washed.
He never slept, but sat in meditation day and night with his eyes lowered. Only one day a month did he go to the main hall of the Zixiao Palace to offer incense; then he would greet his fellow Taoists in the palace and go back into his cave.
Master Yang ate one meal a day, brought to him by Wang Yongqian, a young Taoist of the temple. It was one earthenware bowlful, all thin corn porridge, with no vegetables. The young Taoist would set the food down at the mouth of the cave without a word and carry back the empty bowl from the day before—and that was that. It went on like this for several years.
Later Master Yang left the Wudang Mountains and returned to his home in Henan, where he continued his practice in a derelict temple no one looked after. Sometimes he also treated the local people, curing many difficult and unusual illnesses without taking money; he accepted only some offerings, not caring whether they were much or little, valuable or not, and the local people were very fond of him.
When Master Yang grew old, he went on sitting and practicing every day no matter what happened around him. It is said that in the early 1980s Master Yang passed away in Henan (literally, “was transformed into a feathered being”), at nearly a hundred years of age.
4. The Practitioner of Mount Emei in Sichuan
A student of mine surnamed Zhang, a skilled photographer who loves traveling among mountains and rivers, once met a Taoist priest on Mount Emei in Sichuan who practiced Taoist qigong and had white hair and a youthful face.
This Taoist priest said: “Long ago there was a recluse who practiced on this mountain for more than three hundred years. His body had become the same color as the wood and stone; he neither spoke nor moved, like a stone carving—only his breathing never stopped, and his eyes could still see. Ordinary people found it marvelous, but seen with the eye of the Tao, this was someone who had never received the true transmission or a teacher’s lineage, but practiced by his own wild notions, and in the end became a useless being neither dead nor alive. Later bandits in the mountains split his skull with a sharp blade and he died—a real pity.”
This Taoist priest’s words are golden! In cultivating the Tao, unless one is supremely intelligent, one must have a teacher’s lineage and transmission; one cannot practice relying only on Taoist books or one’s own insight, because many Taoist books “mean more than they say.” Without a teacher’s instruction it is hard to grasp their true meaning, and most of those cultivating immortality will go astray into deviation, or simply waste their time and let the years slip by in vain.
5. A Taoist Master of Mount Tai Teaches the Art of the Flying Elixir
My friend Mr. Pan loved martial arts, but his constitution was very weak and he had never met an enlightened teacher, so when he studied boxing and combat with his friends, he lost time after time and never won.
Later, traveling on Mount Tai, he met a poor Taoist priest, whom Mr. Pan looked after in many ways. When they parted, the Taoist priest taught him breathing exercises (tuna). The Taoist priest said: “This is the Taoist art of drawing in the elixir, but you must do good deeds in many ways, and one day you may obtain the fruit of the Tao.”
After returning to Beijing, Mr. Pan practiced diligently day and night. One day, as he was breathing in seated meditation with his eyes closed, he suddenly saw a dazzling radiance before his eyes: a small round pearl, white tinged with yellow, broke through his mouth into his throat and rolled down into the elixir field (dantian) in his lower abdomen. From then on he felt his body light and his strength great, moving as swiftly as a flying bird. Secretly delighted, he sparred with others again, and his opponents were thrown more than a zhang away at a touch; many famous martial artists were defeated at his hands.
Later, at a friend’s house, he saw a lovely young girl, graceful and charming. Mr. Pan seduced her by every means and took her virginity without cause—and the girl was his friend’s daughter. Later, the girl he had defiled took her own life. When Mr. Pan heard of it, he was utterly unmoved! Three years later, one day while Mr. Pan was meditating and practicing, he suddenly seemed to see a young girl before his eyes, who poked at his mouth with her hand; his mouth fell open of itself, and he felt the elixir he had once swallowed burst out of his mouth. From then on his body and spirit were both ruined; he was so weak that a breeze could knock him over, his legs were heavy, and he needed a cane to walk. In the end he fell gravely ill and died young.
As the saying goes, the Great Way of the Golden Elixir is gained by the virtuous and lost by those without virtue. If you wish to learn the Way of the immortals, you must first be a good person; if you seek attainment of the Tao, you must also reject evil and do good. Otherwise you will toil all your life only to end up “climbing a tree to look for fish” or “boiling sand to make rice,” your body perishing and your Tao dissolving. Therefore, those who cultivate the Tao must first cultivate the heart.
6. Master Tong of the Wudang Mountains, Who Died Seated After Grain Avoidance
Tong Hequan was an old resident Taoist of the Wudang Mountains, a sixteenth-generation heir of the Longmen (Dragon Gate) lineage and one of Xu Benshan’s disciples, a local man. He studied Wudang internal skills with his teacher for decades, and his Taihe boxing was also superb.
In the late 1950s he continued his practice in secret with a young Taoist, Mao Fashun. Later, life in the countryside grew hard, and people could not even get enough to eat, so he took the opportunity to practice grain avoidance (bigu). He could go eight or ten days without any grain, yet still dig the ground and carry stones as usual.
For several years there were great disasters and no harvests, and many people had nothing to eat. He simply pleaded illness and stayed in bed, practicing grain avoidance day and night, and after several months passed away sitting in meditation.
Before he died he warned Mao Fashun again and again not to abandon his skills, saying that the Taoist community would flourish again and the skills would still be of great use. Mao Fashun heeded his words and practiced every night in the deep of the night, never letting anyone find out. In the late 1970s, when religious policy began to be implemented again, Mao Fashun returned early to the Zixiao Palace as a cultural relics keeper, and practiced all the more diligently.
At that time the Zixiao Palace was a shortcut for local people going to Nanyan, and sometimes people passed through the palace even in the middle of the night. Master Mao happened to live in a side room beside the main hall of Zixiao.
In time, some local people said that when they occasionally passed his room at midnight, they saw a candle lit inside and him walking alone across the brick floor on his knees; they had no idea what it was about. As soon as he heard any sound outside, he would immediately blow out the candle and get into bed.
Mao Fashun became an accomplished cultivator of the Tao.
7. The Nameless Taoist’s Taihe Boxing
During the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Eighth Branch School of the Nationalist Central Army Officers Academy and the Commander’s Headquarters of the Fifth War Zone were set up in turn at Caodian Town and Zhoufu’an at the foot of the Wudang Mountains.
The Eighth Branch School and the Fifth War Zone often organized trips to the Wudang Mountains for officers and soldiers. One year the officers and soldiers of the Fifth War Zone held a New Year gathering at the Zixiao Palace. Beforehand, having heard that the Wudang Taoists could perform Wudang boxing, they invited the Taoists of the temple to give a performance at the gathering. But every Taoist in the temple said his skill was not good enough and a performance would only embarrass him.
So the officers and soldiers asked who had the best skill, and the Taoists said that only the master practicing in a cave on the back mountain had the finest skill. The officers and soldiers went with the Taoists to the back mountain to invite this master. They came to a small rock cave whose mouth was entirely walled up with stones. The Taoists leaned against the stones and called softly inside, “Master,” and only after calling for a long time did they hear an answer from within.
The Taoists pulled away the stones at the mouth of the cave and invited the master out. When the officers and soldiers looked at him, the Taoist wore only a pair of shorts; his face was full of wrinkles, his hair tousled and snow-white, and he looked more than a hundred years old. When the old Taoist had asked why they had come, and after everyone had urged him again and again, he finally agreed to go to the palace to demonstrate his boxing.
He stretched his arms and legs, rubbed his hands, and wiped them over his face—and at once all the wrinkles vanished, leaving a rosy, smooth, delicate face; he now looked only thirty or forty years old. The old master walked ahead at an easy pace, and the brisk, vigorous soldiers could not keep up with him.
At the Zixiao Palace the old master performed a set of Wudang Taihe boxing for the officers and soldiers of the Fifth War Zone, winning thunderous applause. Then, after saluting the officers and soldiers with his fist in his palm, he sprang up on tiptoe and leapt several hundred meters away, flying back up to his cave on the back mountain.
8. A Strange Person Transmits Divine Skills
Old Master Mao of the Zixiao Palace told me this story a few years ago. He had once taken a teacher on the Wudang Mountains (Master Mao did not reveal his teacher’s name. He said the Taoist community has a rule: speak of the patriarchs, not of one’s teacher. No wonder many Taoists do not reveal their teachers’ names). His teacher said that when he first began studying the Tao, he met a youth on the Wudang Mountains who said, “I see you are not poorly gifted; I am willing to transmit the Tao to you.” But the teacher thought this was just a childish, naive boy playing a game and ignored him. The youth simply walked off smiling, and after that he never saw him on the Wudang Mountains again.
About thirty years later, the teacher met the youth again on the Wudang Mountains, looking, acting, and dressed exactly as he had thirty years before. Only then did the teacher realize that this was a true immortal, and that thirty years earlier he had lost his affinity with the Tao through his own lack of insight. So he at once knelt and kowtowed, begging the true immortal to show him the way out of his confusion. The youth then taught him the secret arts of inner alchemy (neidan). This teacher later lived to over a hundred before departing as an immortal.
9. Contests Between Eminent Taoists Are Never About Fighting and Killing
In 1987, on the Golden Summit of the Wudang Mountains, I talked with Master Luo about the martial skills of the Wudang Taoists. He did not answer directly, but only told of a small incident.
He said that a year earlier a mysterious person had come to the Golden Summit and made a mark, which others could not make out, on the South Heavenly Gate of the Forbidden City there—at a spot that could be reached only with a tall ladder. So anyone in the martial world could see at a glance that it carried two meanings: first, a display of extraordinary lightness skill; second, a challenge to a contest of martial arts.
They also found that the mysterious person stayed hidden around the Golden Summit for several days without leaving. Later, in the deep of the night, a Taoist of the Golden Summit made another mark at a place even higher than the mysterious person’s mark, and the next day they found that the mysterious person had gone down the mountain.
10. What Master Li of the Wudang Mountains Saw and Heard
In the winter of 1991, on the Golden Summit, I asked Master Li about the famous perfected and eminent Taoists of Wudang today, and he disclosed to me an incredible thing he had seen and heard.
He had not meant for me to make it public, but since he disclosed it, I shall record it faithfully.
Master Li said: In 1986 I was still living at the Zixiao Palace. It was a late autumn night with fine moonlight, and I came out of my room intending to practice boxing in front of the main hall. As I came out, I happened to glance toward the Hall of the Parents behind the main hall and saw something strange: a person came floating down from the sky above the ancient forest behind the Prince’s Cave. I could not see his face clearly, but he plainly looked like an old man. He was thin, wore unlined clothes, and his hair was five or six chi long; his floating flight looked like swimming in water, his hands slanting forward, one leg bent and the other stretched back, his hair trailing three or four chi below his body. He floated once around the Hall of the Parents and then drifted silently away toward the back mountain.
Not long after, an old man in his eighties named Shitou from Xueji in Guanghua, my home county, came to see me while on pilgrimage to offer incense. He asked me to help him look for a Taoist called Master Yang on the Wudang Mountains.
I asked him which temple Master Yang was in; he said Master Yang did not live in a temple but practiced in a mountain cave. I asked which cave; he said he did not know—only that every few years Master Yang would send him word that he was still on the Wudang Mountains.
I asked how many years Master Yang had been practicing on the Wudang Mountains; he said he could not say exactly, but it must be over two hundred years. I asked how old Master Yang was now; he counted on his fingers through the sixty-year cycle (jiazi) and said that by 1986 he would be 268.
I asked how he knew Master Yang, and old Shitou said: “My grandfather once left home to become a Taoist on the Wudang Mountains and took Master Yang as his teacher. Later he returned to lay life, but remained a lay disciple. My father also once became a Taoist and knew Master Yang too.
“More than forty years ago Master Yang came to our home, and I saw him too. When he came, he would neither come in the door nor eat. His white hair was more than two zhang long; right in front of our door he coiled his hair into a round cushion and sat on it to meditate. Then he left. When he left he said he would never leave the Wudang Mountains in his whole life, and that he would see several generations of our descendants. I believe he is still on the Wudang Mountains, because every few years he sends word—so he is still on the Wudang Mountains.”
11. A Taoist High Priest Ascends the Altar to Pray for Clear Skies
On the fifteenth day of the third lunar month of the Jichou year, the holy birthday of Patriarch Yuchan, a village opera was staged at Wenbi Peak in Hainan, due to begin at the hour of You (5–7 p.m.). The venue was in the open air, and it had rained all day without stopping as dusk approached; the performers and guests could not help hesitating. The high priest (gaogong) then led the Taoist community up to the altar to pray for clear skies. As soon as the memorial was presented, the rain suddenly stopped, and the performance went ahead without trouble. When it ended, the rain fell again. Everyone marveled at the power of the gods.
The liturgists of the White Cloud Temple (Baiyun Guan) in Beijing went to Pingluo in Ningxia to consecrate the Jade Emperor Pavilion. On the day they arrived it was overcast with continuous rain, and on the next day, the day of the consecration, it was still drizzling without end. The head of the pavilion and the believers were unhappy, thinking there was no divine response. But when the high priest ascended the altar, paced the stars and offered incense, and silently worked his inner practice, the clouds suddenly parted on all sides and sunlight burst through! Everyone leapt for joy, saying the gods had responded. When the liturgy was over, the clouds closed again into rain, and everyone marveled once more.
12. Not Eating the Cooked Food of the Human World
The Taoist nun Wang Xuemei entered the Tao as a girl. At thirteen she came to loathe cooked food and began eating pine and cypress needles; later she gave up grain altogether and ate nothing, only drinking water each day. It has now been more than twenty years. She has visited Taoist temples and monasteries in many places and gained a modest reputation. When the media heard of her and wanted to interview her, she always declined, saying it was “not worth mentioning.” Later she went to Louguantai in the Zhongnan Mountains and to the Xiangu Abbey on Mount Hua to practice in seclusion, but soon left again, and now no one knows where she has gone.
13. Master Peng Shujun, Skilled at Rock Climbing and Exploring Caves
Master Peng Shujun of Mount Hua is skilled at rock climbing; there is no cave on the mountain he has not reached. Once, at the end of the Plank Walk in the Sky, he let himself down on a rope and reached a stone chamber containing statues of deities made by Taoists of old and several scrolls of scriptures. Peng took the scriptures and returned. Knowing that his learning was shallow, he visited Wang Liping, the renowned qigong master of our time, and gave him all the scriptures he had found.
14. The Qianshan Cable Car Has Been Safe and Sound
When the Qianshan cableway in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province, was completed, Master Wang applied for Taoists to ride the cable car free of charge, but was refused.
One day a car came off the cable, killing and injuring people. Master Wang applied again and was again refused. He sighed and said: “It is not that we Taoists want to take advantage of you—we are truly protecting you! If you still do not understand, I fear there will be another accident!”
A few days later, another car came off the cable, and the provincial Party committee ordered the cableway shut down for rectification. Only then did they believe Master Wang’s words. The leaders personally invited Master Wang again and again to ride the cable car for free, and only then did Master Wang lead the Taoist community to ride it.
That day, the media gathered in force. In the cable car, Master Wang said to the cameras: “All is well now!”
To this day, the Qianshan cable cars have been safe and sound.
15. A Dead Cypress Revives, and the Taoist Teaching Shines Again
The cypress in front of the Hall of the Three Officials at Longmen Cave died in the Bingwu year. In the Gengshen year, people saw small branches suddenly putting out leaves on the dead cypress; the next year several more branches appeared, and by the Renxu year it was flourishing with branches and leaves. That same year, the Hall of the Three Officials at Longmen Cave was restored and rebuilt. When the Zongsheng Palace at Louguantai in Shaanxi was about to be built, a dead cypress there also came back to life.