Most people know Jiang Ziya from Investiture of the Gods. The influence of that novel has been so immense that even divine figures wholly invented within it, Hongjun Patriarch for example, were later posthumously elevated by some temples and given statues for worship. Xu Zhonglin’s prose is admittedly rather poor, assuming Xu Zhonglin really was the author, which is no more certain than it is for the Four Great Novels. The plot is full of holes, and as literature it falls short. Yet because the materials connected with the Chinese divine world are so vast, and because the author truly did put enormous labor into assembling them, later readers who began to infer and investigate discovered a wealth of details. In that respect, it is no less rewarding than reading Journey to the West through a scholarly lens.
Today I want to discuss one hidden matter concerning Jiang Ziya in Investiture of the Gods: everyone knows he distributed divine offices without assigning one to himself. In fact, that is not quite true. He also left himself a way out.
Everything begins with the single character yue, “peak.”
Among the figures of high antiquity there is one called the Four Peaks, said to be descended from the clan of Gonggong. The Four Peaks lived a very long life, recommended Shun to Yao, then Yu to Shun, and later, for assisting Yu the Great in controlling the flood, was granted the surname Jiang and enfeoffed at Lü. Yes, this is the ancestor of Jiang Taigong.
Jiang Ziya’s full formal style should run like this: Taigong Wang; surname Jiang, clan Lü, personal name Shang, style name Ziya, courtesy title Feixiong, Flying Bear. The courtesy title is the strange part. Where did “Flying Bear” come from?
The Six Secret Teachings records that King Wen, famed for divination, once cast a hexagram and was told that if he went to the Wei River plain he would meet a man of great virtue who would assist him. What sort of man? “Neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf,” though some versions use pi in place of “wolf.” It was an omen of the highest fortune: once obtained, this man would not only help secure the realm but would benefit the Zhou house for at least three generations.
Thereafter, later generations often used the eight characters “neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf” as a metonym for King Wen’s discovery of Jiang Ziya. But eight characters are awkward, and the Chinese prefer four-character expressions, so it was shortened to the idiom “neither bear nor grizzly.” Li Bai, in his very long “Grand Hunt Rhapsody,” uses the allusion like this: “He gained heaven’s treasure at Chencang; he bore the Not-Bear by the Wei.” For the sake of balancing the parallelism, the allusion there is already compressed to two characters, and later writers did this more and more.
But here a problem arises. Scholars can play such games in old books; anyone who spends his days rummaging through paper piles can always produce a few obscure allusions from the bottom of the chest. Ordinary people, however, do not understand them. So as “Not-Bear” continued to be repeated, the phrase gradually drifted into “Flying Bear.” By the time of the Song vernacular Pinghua of King Wu’s Attack on Zhou, King Wen’s dream had already become a dream of an actual flying bear entering his sleep.
Very well, let us set Flying Bear aside for the moment. The reader will now ask: if the title claims there are two Jiang Ziyas in Investiture of the Gods, where is the other one?
In chapter twenty-three of Investiture of the Gods, King Wen says that he dreamed “a white-browed fierce tiger with wings growing from its flanks leapt toward my tent.” In other words, he dreamed of a flying tiger. Yet Sanyi Sheng insists on interpreting the flying tiger as a flying bear, which leads directly into the famous tale of Jiang Taigong fishing for the willing, and of King Wen pulling the carriage for eight hundred steps so that Ziya might preserve the Zhou for eight hundred years. At this point it is perfectly obvious. Xu Zhonglin comes within a hair of adding a footnote that says outright: Huang Feihu is Jiang Ziya’s alter ego.
“Neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf.” Flying Bear. Flying Tiger.
Again and again, Investiture of the Gods tells the attentive reader quite plainly that Huang Feihu is Jiang Ziya.
Like Hongjun Patriarch, Huang Feihu is an original creation of Investiture of the Gods. In the first chapter, when the personnel around King Zhou of Shang at Chaoge are introduced, we are told that civil matters have Grand Preceptor Wen Zhong, while military affairs have Huang Feihu, Martial Accomplishment King who pacifies the realm. Never mind the novel’s chaotic mixing of official titles from different dynasties. The real question is: who is the Martial Accomplishment King?
In the nineteenth year of the Kaiyuan reign, 732 CE, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang ordered the establishment of a martial temple, endowed with sacrificial dignity equal to that of the Confucian temple. Jiang Shang was enshrined there as principal deity and granted the title Martial Accomplishment King, while ten famous generals of later ages were installed to left and right as his accompanying spirits.
So the Martial Accomplishment King is Jiang Taigong. This is an imperial title issued by successive dynasties; it is not something anyone may apply casually.
Then in chapter thirty-three, during Huang Feihu’s battle at Sishui, the introductory set-poem describing him says, quite directly, that the Flying Tiger is the same as the Flying Bear:
Face like brushed gold, beard and hair red,
Strange eyes, pupils crossing gold.
Tiger-skin robe over linked armor,
Jeweled belt, bright and fine.
Secret arts transmitted, unmatched beneath heaven,
Men call the Seven-Head one a Flying Bear.
Huang Feihu also has two younger brothers, Huang Feibao and Huang Feibiao, making a full set of four “flyings.” As for the novel’s claim that Huang Feihu’s family had served the Shang for seven generations, is that not simply Jiang Ziya’s own Lü lineage in disguise?
Perhaps Jiang Ziya already knew he would not receive a divine office and so cut off one soul and one spirit to leave himself a retreat. Or perhaps his teacher, Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy, pitied his beloved disciple and left him a hidden door. In any case, the Chan school clearly acquiesced in Jiang Ziya’s cheating.
In chapter ninety-nine, when Jiang Ziya returns home and confers the gods, he appoints Huang Feihu in these terms: “Chief of the Five Peaks, and with an additional decree, to hold authority over the Eighteen Hells of the Underworld. In all matters of life and death, transformation among men, gods, immortals, and ghosts, all shall first be examined by the Eastern Peak before action is permitted. By special decree you are hereby invested as Great Emperor of Heaven-Aligned Humanity, Eastern Peak Mount Tai, governing altogether the auspicious and baleful fortunes of heaven, earth, and the human realm.”
The importance of the Eastern Peak Emperor in the Chinese divine system is enough to support a whole graduate thesis.
First, Eastern Peak Mount Tai: Jiang Ziya takes the glory of his ancestor, the Four Peaks, and overlays it onto the supreme rank among the Five Peaks, in some sense inheriting his ancestor’s title.
Second, Mount Tai becomes chief among the Five Peaks because of its special role. Before the Wei and Jin, before Buddhism had distilled and implanted in China the full notion of the Eighteen Hells of the Underworld, the divine geography of the Classic of Mountains and Seas placed the passage to the netherworld upon the southeastern branch of the peach tree on Mount Tai. The one responsible for the affairs of the dead there was the Lord of Mount Tai. Over time this office grew ever more important, eventually being elevated into the Eastern Peak Emperor. Both Mount Tai and the peach tree remain important places and implements within Daoist systems. In truth, that older underworld arrangement still runs in parallel even now.
As for the Eastern Peak Emperor’s other function, governing all auspicious and inauspicious fortune under heaven, that part is comparatively vague and not especially worth dwelling on.
Huang Feihu’s son, Huang Tianhua, who rides the jade qilin, is enfeoffed as the “Bingling Duke, Orthodox God of the Three Mountains.” The three mountains are usually taken to be Yingzhou, Penglai, and Fangzhang, though because none of these have secure real-world referents, they are sometimes instead identified with Mount Huang, Mount Lu, and Mount Yandang. None of that matters very much. What matters is “Bingling Duke.” This figure is the historically famous, or rather infamous, Third Son of Mount Tai, notorious for abducting women and killing people at whim. Accounts of his misdeeds appear with remarkable frequency in Wei-Jin anecdotal literature. And the father of that Third Son of Mount Tai is precisely the righteous god of Mount Tai, the Eastern Peak Emperor.
Xu Zhonglin was remarkably exacting with these small details. They leave a lingering aftertaste in the mind, and this is one reason why Investiture of the Gods, despite its poor prose, remains hard to put down.