Poetics of Immortality in Medieval Daoist Verse

This paper investigates a fourth-century CE séance (the so-called Mt. Mao revelations) in which spirit medium Yang Xi received a lengthy poem thought to have been written three centuries earlier. The imagined poet was an ancient resident mooring their boat across an idyllic pond belonging to farmer Guo Sichao. The lyrics, which ostensibly describe the beauty of the scene, are metaphors for Daoist bodily cultivation. The writer describes a dark bird who is hidden, yet whose words can still be heard. The waves upon which Guo sails carry him towards his heavenly destination, which he navigates by directing his boat towards the dawn’s wind. The waves continue to carry the singer onward on his journey to godhood; it leads him to study the Dao and seek transformation into a perfected being. By the end of the tune, the singer imagines himself not atop the waves of the reservoir, but rather as soaring into the heavens amid a flock of phoenixes. The singer completes his transfiguration and notes that he leaves not a single trace of humanity behind.

The poem that Yang recovered reflects how readers in the 4th century CE imagined their predecessors in the Han and how Daoist practice was embedded in the poetic expression. Spiritual advisors such as Yang did not simply relay historical facts but wielded knowledge over the literary products of old. Memory about past adepts connected to Mt. Mao establishes both a precedent and a kind of spiritual ownership of the property. All the revelations (many of which are heavily laden with drug lore) shape knowledge about Mt. Mao’s landscape positions the Xu family as heirs and custodians over the mountain. These passages reflect the multivalency of pharmacological knowledge and monasteries: they address the medicinal benefits of materials like minerals, water, plants, and mythical flora, they also attach legitimacy and efficacy to particular sites where Daoist buildings were built.

This paper not only translates and interprets this Daoist poem, but uses it to critique recent studies of religious poetry, most of which are rooted in expressions of Abrahamic traditions. I will build upon Kevin Hart’s recent work on poetry and religion in which he writes that “Poetry does not simply ask ‘What?’ or ‘Why?’ It is deeply concerned with the question, ‘How?’” Hart’s analysis is helpful because it draws our attention to this poem of bodily cultivation not as a historical record of (or an account of) the motives for medieval Daoist practice. Rather, it draws our attention to the imagination and conceptions of how Daoist practice was carried out, especially since this poem was not imagined as a contemporary text of the 4th century, but rather a recovery of the approach of ancient adepts.

On the other hand, the evidence from Daoist texts challenges many of the assumptions about what Hart and others consider to be the underlying purpose behind poetry in a religious context. Whereas poetry in a Christian or Muslim context might be a vehicle or mode in which the divine/sacred/God appears to the poet, the effects of poetry in a Daoist context are experienced differently. This ancient poem on bodily cultivation, when recited, would manifest a sacred presence, but it would relate how humans could transcend their bodies to become gods themselves.