Chiyang Daoren, Eastern Taoism
Master Zhenyi: Sima Chengzhen (647–735) was a Tang-dynasty Taoist priest, Taoist scholar, calligrapher, and painter. His courtesy name was Ziwei, his religious name Daoyin, and he was also called Master White Cloud (Baiyunzi). He came from Wen in Henei (present-day Wen County, Henan).
From youth he was devoted to learning and loved the Tao, with no interest in an official career. He served the Mount Song Taoist priest Pan Shizheng as his teacher and received from him the scriptures and methods of Shangqing along with talismans and registers, daoyin, and the arts of taking medicinal substances. He later traveled to famous mountains throughout the land and settled as a recluse on Yuxiao Peak of Mount Tiantai, calling himself “White Cloud Master of Tiantai.” With Chen Zi'ang, Lu Zangyong, Song Zhiwen, Wang Shi, Bi Gou, Li Bai, Meng Haoran, Wang Wei, and He Zhizhang, he was counted among the “Ten Friends of the Immortal Lineage.”
Empress Wu Zetian of Tang heard of his fame, summoned him to the capital, and issued an edict in her own hand praising his lofty conduct in the Tao.
In the second year of the Jingyun era of Emperor Ruizong of Tang (711), he was summoned to the palace and asked about the numerology of yin and yang and the governing of the state. He answered that such numerology was “heterodox” and that governing the state should be founded on non-action (wuwei). This pleased the emperor greatly, who presented him with a precious qin zither and a cape patterned with rosy clouds.
In the ninth year of the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (721), the emperor sent envoys to bring him into the palace and personally received the Taoist registers from him, becoming a Taoist emperor.
In the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era (727), he was again summoned to the palace, and the emperor asked him to choose a fine site on Mount Wangwu, where the Yangtai Temple was built for him to live in. At his wish, a shrine to a True Lord was also built on each of the Five Peaks. He excelled at seal and clerical script, forming a style of his own known as “golden-scissors script.”
Emperor Xuanzong ordered him to write out the Tao Te Ching in three scripts, collating and correcting its text, and to have it carved in stone as a stone classic.
After ascending as a feathered immortal, he was posthumously granted the title Grand Master of the Palace with Silver Seal and Blue Ribbon and the posthumous name “Master Zhenyi.”
Sima Chengzhen's Taoist thought absorbed the Confucian teaching of rectifying the mind and making the intention sincere and the Buddhist teachings of cessation and insight and of meditative concentration; taking the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi as its foundation, it fused these into a Taoist theory of cultivating the Tao and becoming an immortal. He held that the qualities of an immortal are already present in human nature; one need only “follow one's own naturalness” and “cultivate one's own empty qi” to cultivate the Tao and become an immortal. He divided the process of cultivating immortality into the “Five Gradual Gates”: fasting and precepts (bathing the body and purifying the heart), dwelling in peace (living deep within a quiet room), visualization (gathering the mind and restoring one's nature), sitting in forgetfulness (leaving the body behind and forgetting the self), and spirit liberation (penetrating all dharmas with the spirit), saying that “the Way of the immortals—its five return to one gate.” He divided cultivation of the Tao into the “Seven Stages”: reverent faith, cutting off entanglements, gathering the mind, simplifying affairs, true observation, great stability, and attaining the Tao. These Five Gradual Gates and Seven Stages, he held, could be summarized in three precepts: “simplifying entanglements,” “being without desire,” and “stilling the mind.” By diligently cultivating these three precepts, one could reach the realm of the immortal Perfected, “merging darkly with the Tao, with all concerns left behind.”
His thought had some influence on the formation of the Northern Song Neo-Confucian theory of “taking stillness as primary and removing desire.”
His extant works include Tianyinzi, Treatise on Sitting in Forgetfulness (Zuowang Lun), Secret Essentials of Cultivating Perfection, Treatise on the Body of the Tao, Illustrated Mirror of the Shangqing Sword Containing Images, Scripture of the Court Rites of the Five Peaks and Famous Mountains of Dongxuan Lingbao, and Treatise on the Essential Meaning of Qi Ingestion (his life is recorded in the “Biographies of Recluses” in the Old Book of Tang, scroll 11 of the Gazetteer of Mount Mao, and elsewhere).