Heng, Sacred Mountain of the South

At the river, seeing off the Daoist priestess Chu Sanqing on her way to the sacred mountain of the south

The Daoist priestess of Wu River ties a lotus flower headscarf.

Her rainbow skirt untouched by rain, fantastic as the goddess’s of ancient dream.

Wearing shoes that shrink distance,

she skims across the waves, raising the finest mist.

Gone to the sacred mountain of the south to seek immortals, surely she’ll see Lady Wei!²⁰⁵

江上送女道士褚三清游南嶽 吳江女道士，頭戴蓮花巾 霓裳不濕雨，特異陽台神 足下遠游履，凌波生素塵 尋仙向南嶽，應見魏夫人

The sacred mountain of the south, the Southern Marchmount, Hengshan 衡山, in present-day Hunan. Not a solitary mountain peak like the Marchmount of the East but a hundred-mile range of hills, a region numinous long before the fact, later infused with Imperial, Daoist and Buddhist structures, now a tourist destination.

Fig. 31. Mount Heng.²⁰⁶ Yes, but who is Lady Wei, and how did she get there?²⁰⁷ If Li Bo’s teacher Sima Chengzhen is the Twelfth Patriarch of Highest Clarity Daoism, Lady Wei is the First.²⁰⁸ Born Wei Huacun 魏 華存 in 252 ce, “from youth she loved the Dao, longing intently to become a divine immortal”²⁰⁹ and practicing in her father’s Celestial Masters (Tianshi 天師) lineage. Some thirty years after her legal and social death in 334, she received thirty-one scrolls from the Immortals, which she transmitted in vision to Yang Xi 楊羲 (330–386). These became the root texts of Highest Clarity, and Yang its Second Patriarch and first public voice.²¹⁰

Yang Xi and his successors dwelt south of Nanjing on Mao Mountain, Maoshan 茅山. But by early Tang Lady Wei had manifested robustly in the Southern Marchmount, some 500 miles to the southwest, drawing the same intensity of devotion as the Queen Mother of the West. There, from her Flying Altar (feiliu tan 飛流壇), Lady Wei ascended bodily to the Heavens, a deity becoming a yet more subtle form of herself. And it is here that she returns to earth.

The goddess, that site of ascension, and her human disciples emerge together: each creates the other. So just as a holy site can be discovered, it can be lost, through neglect or obscuration.²¹¹ We might expect that in her ascension Lady Wei became purely

divine, leaving her body behind. But this assumes her coarse human body were an impediment to that divinity, rather than its instantiation and instrument of manifestation in the earthly realm. She was, after all, already divine. Her ascension, then, is a matter of refinement within a continuity of increasingly subtle modes of existence, yet also a quantum leap to a new function-form in the Heavens — this is a paradoxical universe, both gran-ular and smooth.²¹²

And who is Chu Sanqing, now seeking Madame Wei in this south mountain?²¹³ We can see her now only through this poem — everything else about her has been forgotten for more than a thousand years. Li Bo tells us that she is a Highest Clarity priestess — thus in Lady Wei’s tradition of women adepts — and from Wu River, near Soochow. Her name Sanqing 三清 means Three Clarities and refers to the three pure realms of the great Daoist deities.²¹⁴ She wears the traditional lotus headscarf of her religious profession.²¹⁵ Today she might look more like this:

Fig. 32. A present-day Daoist priestess.²¹⁶ But Li Bo sees in her skirt all the colors of rainbows. That skirt belongs to another god, the Sun, who sang to his consort, a

thousand years earlier in the great poetry collection Songtexts of Chu:

Your beauty and music are so enchanting

that I forget I must leave you and rise into the sky.

Let the flute sound! Blow the pan-pipes!

See the priestesses, how skilled and lovely, whirling and dipping like birds in flight.

In my cloud-coat and rainbow-skirt, grasping my bow I soar high up in the sky.²¹⁷

More: the “goddess of ancient dream” of line four is the Spirit of Yang Terrace, wetlands consort of the King of Chu, whom we have already met in “The Moister South.” Another poem from the same Songtexts tells how they met once in dream, but only once.

More: half a millennium later, and inspired by that rhapsody (fu 賦) of King and shaman lover, another poet met an ondine by the river’s edge. He describes her extravagantly, line after line, in words that Li Bo could not resist:²¹⁸

She wears embroidered shoes that shrink distance and trails a skirt of silken dew,

exuding the full fragrance of secret orchids.

踐遠遊之文履，曳露綃之輕裾，微幽蘭之芳藹兮 and

Skimming across the waves with tiny steps, her gauze stockings raise the finest mist.

凌波微步，羅襪生塵

But as this poem ends, the deity does not abandon him, nor will the poet turn from her.

In response to these images, and breathing in their fragrance, the great theorist Yan Yu 嚴羽 (1191–1241) asks us to consider who the priestess celebrated in Li Bo’s poem might actually be.

He concludes, “If you look at the middle four lines, Chu Sanqing must have the same qualities as Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (844–868).”²¹⁹

And who is Yu Xuanji? Yes, another Daoist priestess of late Tang, but also a courtesan, wild poet, consort of the great bou-doir lyricist Wen Tingyun 溫庭筠 (812–870), free roamer.²²⁰ She lived a hundred years after Li Bo, but was, nonetheless, the hero-ine of his poem.