Five Mountains
Chapter 31. The Grotto-Heaven
Offered to the Reverend Teacher, the Daoist Priest Gao Rugui on the completion of my ordination and his return to Beihai Dao is hidden, can’t be seen,
its divine writings stored in grotto-heavens.
For forty thousand eons my teacher
transmitted it from one generation to another.
He leaves behind a green bamboo staff, singing as he goes, walking on purple clouds.
The mind at parting knows not near or far, held forever in the City of Jade.245
奉餞高尊師如貴道士傳道籙畢歸北海 道隱不可見，靈書藏洞天
吾師四萬劫，歷世遞相傳 別杖留青竹，行歌躡紫煙 離心無遠近，長在玉京懸
Li Bo’s kinsman Li Yangbing 李陽冰 collected his poems after his death, and wrote a preface to it. Here he speaks of Li Bo’s departure from Court around 744:
The Son of Heaven knew he couldn’t keep Li Bo, so he be-stowed gold on him and sent him off. Li Bo then went to Kaifeng, where his great-uncle Li Chongyu was Investigative Commissioner. His uncle gave him an introduction to the Daoist Master Gao of Beihai, from whom he requested an ordination register at the Laozi temple of the Purple Polestar in Ji’nan. Li Bo then planned to return to the isles of Penglai, as an immortal who rides on clouds and dwells in deathless Cinnabar Hill.246
We know nothing more of Master Gao Rugui,247 although he figures in another poem of Li Bo on this event.248 Probably Li underwent an ordination in which he received both a register of protective deities and a talisman, a lu 籙 and a fu 符. From The Encyclopedia of Taoism:
The register records the names and attributes of the divine generals and their soldiers, whom the adept calls upon in visualizations and spells to protect himself, affect healing, and convey petitions to the otherworld. In return, the adept agrees to obey certain precepts. In effect, the adept is enter-ing into a contract with the deities as well as the master who bestows the register.
[Ordination registers may include charts], which consist of images or maps of the cosmos and the names of transcen-dents, and thereby act as passes for safe conduct to the oth-erworld.249
And:
Daoist talismans are diagrams, conceived as a form of celes-tial writing, that derive their power from the matching ce-lestial counterpart kept by the deities who bestowed them.
[…] The most influential Daoist account of the origins of fu, found in the Zhen’gao, relates them to a primordial form of writing that emerged with the differentiation of the Dao at the birth of the cosmos, still used by the highest gods and available to humans who have received them through proper transmission. The earliest script later became fragmented and simplified into various mortal scripts. The second pri-mordial script, the Cloud-seal Emblems of the Eight Drag-ons (balong yunzhuan zhi zhang 八龍雲篆之章), remained unchanged and is the form used in fu.250
Today they still look like this:
Fig. 42. Daoist talismans.251 Perhaps their modern equivalent, now unabashedly commerce-based, look like this:
Fig. 43. A QR code.252 Li Bo tells us that “Although Dao is hidden and can’t be seen, its divine writings are stored in grotto-heavens (dongtian 洞天).” A grotto, and also a heaven, a pure land inside a grotto — what a surprise! For beneath the greatest mountains, hidden from or-dinary sight, are great heavens,
with their own suns, moons and stars, as well as the palaces of divine immortals who control blessings and chastisements
and keep the registers of life and death. This is where the Per-fected Ones reside and immortal princes dispose.253
The alchemist Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343) explains:
[These grotto-heavens] all have true gods within them, and sometimes earth-bound immortals. Numinous mushrooms (zhi 芝) and plants grow there. But you can also avoid the great calamities of war in them, not just compound medi-cines.254
There’s a grotto-heaven beneath every great mountain, and they connect underground with each other, in an invisible secret network.255 Later, like many other numinous things, they were systematized, into ten major and thirty-six minor.256 And like all numinous things, their life-span depended on their relationship with human attention. When that attention began to fade, after Tang, the grotto-heavens faded with it:
By the early modern period, famous caverns had become synonymous with literary outings, and only artificial caves made within decorative mountain landscapes in urban gar-dens preserved their memory.257
The same Ge Hong explains what it means that Li Bo’s teacher leaves a green bamboo staff behind. The story: A certain Fei Changfang meets a thaumaturge who lives in a gourd. His only name is Sire Gourd. Fei serves him properly and is invited into the gourd to receive further teachings. Thereupon:
Sire Gourd told Fei Changfang, “I will leave on such-and-such a day. Can you go with me?” “I want to go, and I will not go back on my word,” Fei replied, “but I wish it were possible to cause my family and loved ones not to realize that I left them [to practice esoteric arts with my teacher]. Is there a way to do this?”
“Easy,” said the Sire. He selected a green bamboo staff and gave it to Fei, with the instructions, “Take this piece of bam-boo back home with you. Say that you are ill. Place this staff in the spot where you were lying, and then sneak back here.”
Fei did as instructed. After he had left, his family per-ceived that Fei had died. But his corpse, lying on his bed, was really the bamboo. And so they bewailed and buried him.258 Who, then, is Sire Gourd? He explains himself:
“I’m an immortal. Fool that I am, I had a post in Heaven, but I was inattentive to my duties, so I was banished, sent back for a while to this human realm.”259
Like Li Bo, another banished immortal, though one who recalls his past, present and future.
Li Bo tells us that his teacher treads on purple clouds — more accurately, it’s purple smoke. A contemporary of Ge Hong writes of it in his poem cycle, “Roaming in immortality” (youxian 遊 仙):260
Red Pine, the immortal, looked down as he roamed on high, driving the wild swan and riding purple smoke.
赤松臨上遊，駕鴻乘紫煙
And finally the City of Jade. Ah, it’s the dwelling place of the di-vine Laozi! From the History of the Wei Dynasty (Wei shu 魏書):
The wellsprings of Daoism all emerge from Laozi — he said so himself. He was born before Heaven and Earth, manifests in ten-thousand forms. Above, he dwells in the City of Jade, as ancestor to the divine Jade Emperor.261
The last line of the poem, “held forever in the City of Jade.”
“Held,” xuan 懸, but it actually means “to hang or be suspend-ed,” with the feeling of something unresolved, like a law suit that
can’t be settled. We could say, “He remains forever hovering in the Jade Capital,” though in a positive way.
But does Li Bo tell us that he will hang there forever? We’ve said so, yet that’s not actually what he says — there is no word
“forever” in Chinese, even after the Buddhist invasions, here things can only go on for so long, then they stop, and something else happens. So he says, “He will hang here the longest time.”
Apologies for our bad translation.