After the Song, Daoism’s immense and unruly pantheon began to take on stable shape. The Taiqing and Lingbao traditions, among others, compromised with one another, and under the influence of the Song imperial house the ranks of the immortals were gradually fixed. At the summit stood the Three Pure Ones, the Four Sovereigns, the King Father of the East, and the Queen Mother of the West.
The Queen Mother of the West had, so far as records tell us, more than twenty daughters. One of the younger ones was called Lady Taizhen. She married Wang Youzi, the True King of Xuandu Taizhen. Wang Youzi originally held what amounted to an enviable central-government post, but after mishandling some affair he was demoted to become Lord of the Eastern Peak. In that age Buddhism had not yet entered China, so there was still no King Yama and no Eighteen Hells. The Lord of the Eastern Peak, who governed the underworld and its passages to the unseen realm, was in fact a very promising office. Lady Taizhen moved with her husband’s change of post, and so came to be known as the Lady of the Eastern Peak. She bore a son of thoroughly bad reputation, the famous Third Son of Mount Tai. We will leave him aside for now.
Once, while the Lady of the Eastern Peak was traveling home to visit relatives, she passed through Linzi and came upon a dying petty official who had been wounded by bandits. His name was He Junxian. Moved by compassion, she took out a pellet of immortal elixir and revived him. To her surprise, this minor clerk believed in repaying even a drop of kindness with a spring in return, let alone a life-saving favor. Without hesitation he offered himself as a servant, changed his name to Ma Mingsheng, and followed her away. She brought him back to Mount Tai, had him cultivate in a stone chamber for five years, and, finding him truly loyal, bestowed a piece of good fortune on him by recommending him to study immortal arts with the neighbor next door.
That neighbor, who lived in Langya, was none other than Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng’s own genealogies do not record Ma Mingsheng, which suggests that at the time Ma was no more than an informal disciple. Even so, Anqi Sheng naturally had to show respect to the daughter of the Queen Mother of the West, so he took this unofficial disciple on travels through the famous mountains of the realm and transmitted to him his household specialty, the art of long life. Only now, at this point, did that art finally acquire a formal name: the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity. After successfully completing his course, Ma Mingsheng took leave of Anqi Sheng and the Lady of the Eastern Peak and went off on his own to Huayin Mountain to refine elixirs and cultivate. On the day the elixir was completed, he swallowed only half a pellet, becoming half-immortal and continuing to roam the world in order to convert and guide mortals. Only in the early Jianning era, after Emperor Ling of Han, Liu Hong, took the throne in 168 CE, did he finally consume the remaining half and ascend completely as an immortal.
During Ma Mingsheng’s wanderings among the mortal world, he accepted a disciple who later became more famous than he himself: Yin Changsheng. Yin came from a great family; his great-granddaughter would later marry Emperor He of Han, the fourth emperor of Eastern Han. Ma Mingsheng already had more than a dozen students at the time, and, following the example of his benefactor the Lady of the Eastern Peak, he decided to test the loyalty of these eager learners. Day after day he made them do nothing but water flowers and sweep the ground, transmitting not a single technique. Unexpectedly, Yin Changsheng proved to have the same stubborn kind of foolish loyalty that Ma himself had shown in youth: he spent more than a decade quietly sweeping, until all the other students had given up and only he remained. Ma decided the test had gone far enough and passed on to him the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity. Evidently the face of the Queen Mother of the West really did carry weight. Anqi Sheng made not the slightest objection, even when an unofficial disciple went around casually transmitting the master’s own secret methods.
Yin Changsheng followed his teacher’s pattern. He found a mountain at Fengdu called Mount Pingdu and refined his elixir there. That mountain later became one of the Seventy-Two Blessed Lands listed in the diagrams of celestial palaces. When his elixir was completed, he too consumed only half and remained in the human world, turning tens of thousands of jin of things into gold and using it to relieve the poor, a kind of supernatural model worker for centuries on end. Later, when the time for his ascent had at last come, he judged the day ripe, swallowed the other half of the pill, and rose into the sky in broad daylight. Up to that point, Yin Changsheng’s immortal biography ran much like his master’s. Yet because his surname was Yin and because he had refined elixirs in Fengdu, later generations of Daoist descendants enshrined him in the Fengdu Ghost City and gave him a resounding title: the Great Emperor of Fengdu.
The exact date of Yin Changsheng’s ascension is uncertain, but it must have been no earlier than Eastern Jin and perhaps as late as the early Northern and Southern Dynasties, because in the first year of Daxing, 318 CE, he was still in the mortal world taking on a disciple, the real subject of this essay: Bao Liang.
Bao Liang, style name Taixuan, descended from Bao Xuan, a major Western Han statesman later killed by Wang Mang. The Bao line transmitted itself in orderly fashion, with nearly every generation producing high office and conspicuous rank. Bao Liang was one of those people said to possess suhui, memory from former lives. Presumably this was because the legend of Lady Meng had not yet fully formed in those days, and so he had missed the bowl of Meng Po’s soup. At age five he told his family that he had been the son of the Li family in Quyang, and that at age nine he had forgotten everything after falling into a well. His family sent people to investigate and found the facts exactly as he had said. Historical records say he was broadly learned in astronomy and the books of the River Chart and the Luo Writing. He first served as Central Commandant in Nanyang and was later transferred to become Governor of Nanhai. While serving in Nanhai, he met the teacher who would alter his life: Yin Changsheng.
Why Yin Changsheng had appeared in Nanhai, I suspect, is because he had gone to pay respects to his own grand-teacher, Anqi Sheng, who was then cultivating on Mount Luofu. At that time southern immortal Daoism was thriving as never before, with figures frequently visiting one another and often linked by lines of transmission. Better-known names such as Zuo Ci and Chen Mu all show ties to practitioners who traced themselves back to the Qi region.
Curiously enough, Yin Changsheng did not pass the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity on to Bao Liang. My guess is that Anqi Sheng had spoken up: Ma Mingsheng was allowed to transmit it once, but to pass it on yet again would have been going too far. Bao Liang later lived to more than a hundred, but of course that is still not the same as the art of true immortality. What Yin Changsheng did hand on to Bao Liang, however, was another great Daoist secret of transcendence: shijie, release through the corpse. He explained in detail two forms of it, release by blade and release by bamboo. After Bao Liang’s death, his body was buried at Shizigang.
Why did Yin Changsheng know corpse-release? Do not forget Li Shaojun, who cultivated together with his grand-teacher Anqi Sheng on Mount Luofu. Li Shaojun was a master of that very technique, so it is hardly strange that Anqi Sheng’s descendants in the line should also possess it. While he was still alive, Bao Liang often ran off to Mount Luofu in the evening and would not return to Nanhai until daybreak.
In the second year of Xianhe, 327 CE, the rebellion of Su Jun erupted. Su Jun, that traitor’s son, deserves a full essay of his own, because he later became a notorious southern evil god of the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, generating the cult of Lord Su for several centuries. We will put that aside for now.
Like Cao Cao, the Lord Su god loved to play tomb-raiding general. He sent troops to dig up Bao Liang’s grave. When they opened the coffin, there was no corpse inside, only a great broadsword. The thieves tried to take the sword, but suddenly around the grave there erupted the sounds of clashing troops, battle cries, and men shouting in the charge. The robbers fled in terror. From this came the later belief that Bao Liang could command ghost soldiers. The logic is simple enough. As a descendant of the Eastern Peak lineage, he naturally had close dealings with the underworld. And once that is granted, it becomes much easier to understand the stories of Bao Liang boiling white stones as military rations for his troops.
The story still does not end there. Bao Liang’s line continued, and its reputation only grew greater.
Fang Xinru, who made three embassies to the Jin in the Southern Song, was a man of great courage and unusual eloquence. He wrote a poem:
Seeking cinnabar, I came to the seashore;
In the empty hills the ruined well has gathered dust.
Had there not been one drop to revive the scorched,
The sacred mugwort’s fame for reviving life would be vain.
The poem is titled “The Well of Lady Bao.” It concerns Bao Gu, one of the four great women physicians of ancient China. Her medicine was wonderfully efficacious: a single dose brought results, and the people called her Immortal Lady Bao. Her father was Bao Liang.
Bao Liang doted on his daughter and specially built for her a place called Yuegang Cloister, honored as the Northern Temple. The Northern Temple has stood unshaken for a thousand years and is still in Guangzhou today, with incense thriving. It is what is now called Sanyuan Palace, where the Three Officials are enshrined: the Heavenly Official, the Earth Official, and the Water Official. Even from the deities worshipped there one can glimpse the pattern of early Daoist reverence.
And still the story does not end. Bao Liang loved this daughter dearly, but he loved an especially gifted disciple as well, and so he married Bao Gu to that disciple. The disciple was Ge Hong. Without the Biographies of the Immortals written by Ge Hong, the Daoist genealogy of immortals would have remained a mess for several hundred years longer.
Ge Hong is too famous to detour over here. Bao Liang also had a close friend, Xu Mi, revered in Daoism as a Shangqing Perfected and the third patriarch of the Shangqing school.
By this point, the great shape of southern Daoism had taken form. The historical outlines of the Way of Great Peace, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, and the Northern Celestial Masters all became increasingly blurred.
The line of the Old Man by the River, Anqi Sheng, Ma Mingsheng, Yin Changsheng, Bao Liang, and Ge Hong formed the cinnabar-and-elixir branch of southern immortal Daoism. All who came after in that current were descendants of this line.