The Transformations of Myths Concerning Yu the Great

into Daoist Narrative and Ritual

Draft prepared for the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies

Julius N. Tsai

INTRODUCTION

            The Shiji 史記 [Historical Records] of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145-ca. 85 BCE) relates a fairly standard account of the life and labors of Yu the Great大禹, flood-queller and founder of the Xia夏 dynasty.  This account, which helps set the opening context for my inquiry, is as follows: 

      During the time of the Emperor Yao, floodwaters surged towards the heavens, so vast that they embraced the mountains and covered the hills.  The people of the lowlands suffered from them.  Yao looked for someone who could regulate the waters. 

His assembled vassals and the Chiefs of the Four Sacred Mountains all said, “Gun can be used.” 

        Yao said, “Gun is a man who defied orders and ruined his clan’s name.  He cannot be used.”  

        The Chiefs of the Four Sacred Mountains said, “In comparison to him, there is not yet a person more capable.  We hope Your Majesty might try him.”

        After this Yao listened to the Chiefs of the Four Sacred mountains and employed Gun to regulate the waters.  After nine years, the waters had not receded and his work was unsuccessful.

        Emperor Yao then looked for another person and obtained Shun.  Shun was brought into the government, where he was put in charge of the imperial administration of tours of inspection.  During his travels he saw that Gun’s regulation of the waters was unimpressive.  He then banished Gun to Mount Yu to die.  The people of the world all regarded Shun’s sentence as correct.  After this, Shun promoted Gun’s son Yu and had him continue Gun’s task….

        Yu was a man both diligent and indefatigable.  His character was impartial, his personality was endearing, his words were trustworthy, his voice was the law, his behavior the standard.  He demonstrated these qualities in the proper manner.  And so earnestly, so reverently, these qualities became the net’s head-rope, became the yarn’s guiding thread [for his people]. 

        Yu, together with Yi and Hou Ji, in obedience to an imperial command then ordered the feudal lords and the families of the hundred cognomens to assemble their followers to build earthworks.  He traveled through the mountains, marking the trees, ordering the high mountains and great rivers.  Yu was saddened that the work of his deceased father, Gun, was unsuccessful and that Gun had been punished for this.  Thus he racked his body and wearied his mind, living outside his home for thirteen years, not daring to enter his house even when he passed its gate.  He neglected his clothing and food to make offerings of the ghosts and spirits.  He humbled his house and rooms to make funds for the ditches and canals.  On land he rode in cars, on water he rode in boats, through mud he rode a sledge, in the mountains he rode in sedan chairs. 

        He opened the nine lands, connected the nine roads, embanked the nine lakes, and surveyed the nine mountains, with a water level and chalk line in his left hand, a compass and carpenter’s square in his right, and a “four seasons instrument” in his carriage.  He ordered Yi to give the common masses rice to enable them to plant the low, wet lands.  He ordered Hou Ji to give the common masses foods which were then difficult to acquire.  He balanced the feudal lords’ [needs] where food was scarce by supplying it from where there was surplus. 

        Yu then set out to appraise the productivity of the land, all that could serve as standard tribute, and the [potential] of the mountains and rivers.¹  

        In the hands of Sima Qian, the flood-quelling activities of Yu spoke to such Confucian virtues as filial piety, ritual decorum, and placing the good of the people over that of his own person.  Mencius sang his praises with encomiums such as: “In guiding the floodwaters, Yu caused them to flow where they would be unobstructed,”² or, “[In ordering the floodwaters] Yu followed the way of the water.”³  In this context, Yu epitomized a hoped-for personal and hence social transformation, where the raging floodwaters of human appetite could be channeled into the dikes and levees of ritual cultivation. 

        However, rather than dwell on this rather tired image of Yu, in which he is raised as a timeless paragon of Confucian virtues, however, I want to focus on specifically localizable applications of the myth of Yu as a way to illuminate critical junctures in the history of Chinese religion.  For Yu – in his many incarnations -- proved, instead, a rich storehouse of narrative as well as ritual practice that the Chinese drew from to imagine and re-imagine, to apply and re-apply in times of historic and existential crisis.  Thus, instead of one rendition of Yu and his journeys, I would like to present three.  The first rendition envisioned Yu as a subjugator of the South, and in the Han 漢 dynasty, roughly (206 BCE-220 CE), heavily influenced the emerging ideology of empire.  The second rendition of Yu’s journeys imagined him as an apocalyptic savior in the turbulent world of medieval China (ca. 200-600), particularly in his supposed role as the recipient of heavenly revelations within religious Daoism.  The third rendition drew inspiration from Yu as the paragon for the ritual master – exorcist, controller of cosmic space and time, and conduit to the gods.  We will trace this persona of Yu as ritual master through an examination of the shamanic dance known as the Pace of Yu 禹步, practiced since ancient times but becoming increasingly visible in the Song dynasties (960-1279), when religious Daoism was forever altered by its encounter with spirit-possession cults of the south.  More broadly, I hope to show how the broad motif of the imperial journeys of Yu served as a common religious vocabulary – in terms of narrative frameworks and ritual models – that could be widely appropriated across social and sectarian lines. 

JOURNEYS OF THE SUBJUGATOR OF THE SOUTH

        It is almost impossible to separate the myth of Yu from early associations with the Chinese south.  Indeed, many of the accounts of his activity take place south of the Huai淮and to an even greater extent south of the Yangzi長江.  Gu states that “Yu is a figure stemming from the myths of the southern people,”⁴ pointing in particular to Yu’s associations with the peoples, to the peoples of the lush, humid, and flood-ridden lands of Chu楚and Yue 越.⁵  Indeed, by Han times myths of Yu were linked to local mountain centers in the south.⁶  Yu marries a woman from the clan of Mount Tu涂山 (Anhui 安徽), as seen in such Warring States and Han sources as the Shangshu 尚書 [Book of Documents], Chuci 楚辭 [Elegies of Chu], Lüshi chunqiu呂氏春秋 [Springs and Autumns of Master Lü], Shiben 世本 [Book of Lineages], and the Shuijing zhu水經注 [Commentary on the Classic on Waterways].⁷  Mount is in some traditions later conflated with Mt. Kuaiji 會稽 (Zhejiang), another great southern mountain center, located outside of Shaoxing 紹興, site of the capitol of Yue越during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BCE). ⁸  To Mount Kuaiji was variously ascribed Yu’s great gathering of the feudal lords; his performance of the Shan禪sacrifice to Earth;⁹ his receipt of Heavenly revelations and imperial treasures;¹⁰ his place of death and burial;¹¹ and his transformation into an immortal.¹²  Significantly, the people of Yue claim Yu as their royal progenitor.¹³ 

        In terms of even earlier associations between the figure of Yu and the peoples of the south, Gu has highlighted the bestial origins of Yu, from an early definition of “Yu” 禹as chong 蟲 [vermin¹⁴] in the Shuowen 說文 [Explanation of Words] of Xu Shen 許慎 (ca. 55-ca. 149),¹⁵ to tales of Yu’s hapless father Gun鯀and his transformations into the forms of a fish or bear.¹⁶  These bestial associations might well be understood in the context of early totemic traditions, as well as the Chinese penchant for naming the “barbarian” peoples of the four quarters after animals.  In terms of the latter, the peoples of the south were known by names connoting their reptilian or serpentine status, such as “Min”閩for the people of Yue, or “Man”蠻 as a general term for the southern races.  Han sources report that the people of Yue cut their hair and tattooed their bodies to resemble the watery snakes and dragons infesting the area.¹⁷  The south, as the watery land of amphibious folk, dragons and snakes, and unchecked floodwaters, would thus seem to have been ripe for the generation of myths regarding a flood-quelling hero.¹⁸ 

        If we see the quelling of floods as not only relating to literal water management, but as a metaphor for the battle between order and chaos, then it is not hard to see how Yu could function both as a powerful local hero in the shamanic mode as well as a potent symbolic figure in the service of a sinicizing, and imperializing, project.  Yu’s battle with his southern foes may serve to illustrate this point.  First among these foes was a rapacious people known as the Sanmiao三苗, said to be active between the Yangzi and Huai Rivers and in Jingzhou 荊州.¹⁹  While in the Shangshu, Yu causes the Sanmiao to submit through the transforming power of his virtue alone,²⁰ other sources suggest a battle more supernatural:  

In ancient times the three Miao tribes [Sanmiao] were in great disorder and Heaven decreed their destruction.  The sun came out at night and for three days it rained blood.  A dragon appeared in the ancestral temple and dogs howled in the market place.  Ice formed in summertime, the earth split open until springs gushed forth, the five grains grew all deformed, and the people were filled with a great terror.  Gao Yang gave the command in the Dark Palace, and Yu in person grasped the jade staff of authority and set out to subdue the ruler of the Miao.  Amidst the din of thunder and lightning, a spirit with the face of a man and the body of a bird came bearing a jade baton to wait upon Yu.  The general of the Miao was felled by an arrow, and the Miao army thrown into great confusion.  When Yu had conquered the three Miao, he marked off the mountains and rivers, separated those things which pertained to above and below, and clearly regulated the four extremities of the world, so that neither spirits nor people committed any offense, and all the world was at peace.²¹ 

        Yu’s battle was portrayed as a pacifying project that ordered the features of the landscape and marked a clear separation of the numinous and human realms, with the Sanmiao heralding a chaotic spilling over of the demonic into the human.  Imperial conquest and exorcism were hence inextricably linked. 

        Han commentators to the Shiji called the Sanmiao “Taotie” 饕餮, also a more general term of southern peoples.²² 

        (Figure 1) 

        The taotie image, as is well known, adorned Shang and Zhou bronzes, their icongraphic and ritual significance a matter for much discussion among modern-day scholars.²³  The Zuozhuan relates: 

The tripods of Zhou are decorated with [images of] the Taotie.  It has a head but no body.  It devours people, but since it can never swallow them, its actions bring harm to itself.  This expresses the principle of retribution.²⁴         

      In the eyes of traditional Chinese sources the Sanmiao had fallen firmly on the other side of the line that divided the fully human from the barbaric, the bestial, and the demonic.

        This theme of exorcistic conquest is even more pronounced in the case of Yu’s battle with Gong Gong共工.  Gong Gong himself appears in more than one narrative; in some accounts is the very one who stirs up the floodwaters in the time of Shun and Yu; in his earlier incarnation as a foe of the emperor Zhuan Xu顓頊he strikes the pillar holding up the sky in the northwest.²⁵  His minister Xiang Liu相柳 is described in the Shanhai jing as having “nine heads and a snake’s body, coiling upon himself, consuming the soils of the Nine Provinces, with everything that he spits upon coagulating and becoming marshland.”  When Yu dispatched Xiang Liu, the latter’s blood made fetid the land that it flowed upon; Yu subsequently created atop this land a royal terrace, located to the north of Mount Kunlun 昆侖.²⁶  While Yuan Ke sees this particular narrative as a replay of the struggle between Huangdi 黃帝and Yandi 炎帝 – between a waxing and a waning dynasty, a more apt comparison might be the struggle between Huangdi and Chi You蚩尤.²⁷ Noteworthy is how imperial architecture is built upon the site of exorcistic struggle. 

        A third story of primordial conflict is linked directly to the south.  This is Yu’s execution of the wayward minister Fang Feng防風.  When the forces of Wu吳 attacked Yue 越 at Mount Kuaiji during their struggles in the Spring and Autumn Period, Wu soldiers were said to discover a gigantic bone.  When the Wu ruler sent an emissary to inquire of Confucius regarding this find, the sage purportedly said: 

Of old Yu summoned the various gods on the mountain at Kuaiji; Fang Feng was the last to arrive.  Yu killed and butchered him, and bones and sinews filled a whole cart.  That is the reason why this bone you have found is so large.²⁸ 

        While Yu’s great gathering on Mount Kuaiji was an often-repeated story meant to show the perspicacity of the virtuous ruler in providing the cultural and political standard for his feudal lords, we perceive additional texture when the southern traditions concerning the scene of this primordial execution are also taken into account.  Indeed, while Eberhard interprets this as the possible remnant of an ancient harvest sacrifice, the Liang梁 Dynasty (502-557 CE) Shuyi ji 述異記 [Record of Marvels], Ren Fang任昉noted that Fang Feng was a divine figure worshiped by the people of Yue, who took him to be the ancestor of a clan of a people of great physical stature.  What is noteworthy about the following quote from the Record of Marvels is the reference to ancient music, the wailing, and loosened hair and dance, which seem to point to local mediumistic practices:  

Today among the southern people there is a clan known by the surname ”Fang Feng.”  They are Fang Feng’s descendants.  They all are large in stature.  Among the Yue folk they sacrifice to the god Fang Feng and play the ancient music of Fang Feng, cutting three chi long bamboo and blowing them in a way that sounds like wailing.  [In these rites] three people will let their hair loose and dance.²⁹ 

        In the Han, the Shiji praised an array of flood-quellers, from the water engineer Li Bing 李冰, to Ximen Bao’s 西門豹 victory over a coterie of river mediums.  In the latter Han, the general Ma Yuan馬援 was dubbed the “Wave-Quelling General”伏波將君, not so much for engineering waterworks, but for military campaigns against the “floods” of barbarians that overran Nanyue 南越, which encompasses modern-day Guangdong, Guangxi, and parts of northern Vietnam. ³⁰  As we have seen, in the Chinese battle between order and chaos, attributes of the enemy were painted with a highly blended palette of the raw in nature, the bestial, the barbaric, and the demonic. 

        As the myth of Yu was universalized into a paradigmatic myth of royal sovereignty, particularly during the latter Zhou dynasty and the imperial consolidation of the Qin and Han empires, elements of his story were expanded or created to lend authority to imperial institutions and practices.  In the chapter of the Shangshu 尚書 known as the “Tribute of Yu” 禹貢, Yu was said to be the creator of the Nine Provinces of China, later schematized to integrate Yin and Yang 陰陽 and the Five Phases 五行 in a comprehensive cosmological system.³¹  Yu was also said to have cast the legendary Nine Cauldrons, a set of magical bronze vessels of which it is said: 

Formerly, when the Xia dynasty had reached the height of its virtue, [people in] the [nine] distant regions made pictures of the strange beings [in their respective areas] and presented metal as tribute to the nine governors.  With the metal, [the ruler Yu] caused cauldrons to be cast on which these beings were represented; [images of] the hundred strange beings were prepared.  In this way people were made to recognize [all] spirits and evil influences, so that, when they traveled over rivers and marshes and through mountains and forests, they would encounter no adversities, and spirits such as the chi, the mei, and the wangliang could not bother them.  By these means concord reigned between those above and those below, and the people received the favor of Heaven.³² 

        Bronze vessels were central to ancient sacrifices as well as being highly prized symbols of rank and prestige, and of them it was said: “In ritual offerings the Son of Heaven uses nine cauldrons, the feudal lords use seven, the senior officials give, and the lower ranks, three.”³³  Yu’s mythical cauldrons, nine in number like the number of provinces into which he divided China, represented the totality of the world and of the cosmic processes of Yin and Yang.³⁴  Possession of them served as a display of royal virtue and the favor of Heaven.  That these cauldrons were cast from metal offered as tribute from the nine distant regions idealized the relationship of the imperial center to the barbaric periphery.  Tribute and goods would flow in, while the emperor’s transforming moral influence would radiate outwards.  That on the cauldrons were cast images of the fantastic creatures, peoples, demons, and gods of the outer regions –the mythic origins of that record of marvels, the Shanhai jing -- shows a desire to know, classify and contain the unknown powers which resided at the poles.³⁵ 

        Furthermore, Yu’s flood-quelling tour of the world provided a template for historically-practiced imperial tours such as the inspection tour to the Five Sacred Mountains 五嶽 and the Feng and Shan sacrifices 封禪 on Mount Tai 泰山during the Qin and Han dynasties.  In this capacity, Yu was seen, as the opening passage from the Shiji that I quoted above shows, as the master surveyor, “with a water level and chalk line in his left hand, a compass and carpenter’s square in his right, and a ‘four seasons instrument’ in his carriage.”  His march through the world becomes a march not just through space, but through time, as he embodied the ideal ruler who “treads the four seasons,” like the king in the Hall of Light, maintaining the fundamental structures of the cosmos through his never-ending peregrinations.³⁶

      Thus, early accounts of the myth of Yu display deep roots in the natural and cultural landscape of the south.  Yu’s battles with the floods reflected not only the efforts of humans to cope with a hostile natural and spiritual environment, but also the conflict between early imperial ambitions and regional centers of power.  Although Yu was granted an honored place among the civilizing sage-kings of old, we should not forget the deeper, and darker, sides of that struggle.     

THE JOURNEYS OF AN APOCALYPTIC SAVIOR

      The Han dynasty went through its death throes at the end of the second century amidst widespread warfare and the rise of messianic movements.  One of the movements that survived the fall of the Han dynasty and into the subsequent period of division was the Way of the Celestial Masters 天師道, inaugurated in 142 with a revelation from the deified Laozi to Zhang Daoling 張道陵.  The rise of religious Daoism as a sociologically recognizable community begins with the Celestial Masters.³⁷  In the beginning of the fourth century, northern China was invaded by nomadic peoples from the plains of Central Asia.  When the capital at Luoyang was destroyed in 317, many of the ruling families fled south of the Yangzi River, establishing a new government, the Eastern Jin東晉 (317-420).³⁸  As the literati of the subsequent Southern Dynasties struggled to redefine the cultural tradition in the face of monumental loss and disruption, they explored new frontiers in literature, philosophy, and religion.  Within this larger cultural context, the Daoism of the Celestial Masters and its orthodoxies confronted the magico-religious immortality cults of the south, and in these times of crisis and foreboding, new apocalyptic revelations emerged, notably, the Shangqing and Lingbao revelations.  As it turns out, the wandering tracks of Yu passed this way as well.

      We turn now to the Daoist text known as the Lingbao wufu xu 太上靈寶五符序 (HY 388) [Preface to the Five Talismans of Lingbao], a core text of the Lingbao 靈寶, or “Numinous Treasure,” revelations, one of the main bodies of sacred scripture in the medieval Daoist canon.  The reason we should pay attention to this text is because its composers actually re-wrote the ancient flood-quelling myth of Yu into a new myth – the myth of the founding of the Lingbao revelations themselves.  As is apparent from the rather rough, composite nature of its text, the Wufu xu bears the marks of a complex process of redaction.  Though it may be firmly dated to the fourth century, the Wufu xu certainly contains many elements that are considerably more ancient and draw from the weft texts and hagiographies of the immortals of the Latter Han Dynasty.³⁹  It provides a glimpse into the transitional period between the esoteric arts of the Han Dynasty and the rise of established Daoist communities in the south in the early medieval period. 

        Following is the narrative that concerns us.  Onto the traditional telling of Yu’s myth, taken nearly verbatim from the Shiji account with which we began this essay, the composers of the Wufu xu grafted a new account. ⁴⁰  They re-wrote the ancient flood-quelling myth of Yu into a new myth – the myth of the founding of the Lingbao dispensation itself.  What follows is a new chapter in the tale, which picks up after Yu’s successful governing of the waters: 

Yu then performed an inspection tour at Mount Zhong. He sacrificed to the Thearch on High at the Jade Porte, returned to ascribe his great works to the Heavenly Empress, and rendered his great success to the myriad spirits.  After that he ascended this mysterious peak, and on a hill of its lovely peaks, in these fair precincts, he suddenly received these [Lingbao] texts. 

          Yu thereupon even more reverently fasted and made himself proper in a dark grotto in the woods.  He asked that he be able to receive the texts and keep them on his body, whereupon the Perfected One told him, “Your meritorious virtue has moved the spirits, and Heaven and human both support you.  And yet your years and lifespan are indeed moving towards decline.  How dangerous this is!  I will give you oral instructions in order [for you to practice] the way of long life; I will reveal these things to you by means of the methods of ingestion of the Perfect Treasure.”  The Perfected selected some things out for him; they separated and each returned to their own place.  

          Yu then made a reckoning of his labors at the wilds of Kuaiji.  He summoned the gods at Kuaiji upon the mountain of Eastern Yue.  At this time the four qi were warm and effulgent, and the light wind beat and shook.  His profound efficacy was mysterious and overflowing.  He emptied his mind and governed himself within; he contemplated withdrawing his bodily form in order to hide his traces, and hid his phosphors in the murky beginnings.  He surveyed the numinous hidden places of the Nine Heavens, and viewed the treasure parks of the Three Heavens.  His movements for the purpose of completing life were called the Great Accord, and his being still for the purpose of housing his vital essence was called Long-lasting Vision. 

          Above, he looked upon the Heavenly scriptures and saw that they were murky and hard to fathom.  Below, he took pity on all living things because they did not know its principles.  He thus soared like a phoenix to South Mountain, to the dragon-high sea islands.  Yu further wrote out the mystic essentials of the authentic numinousness [of the scriptures], compiled the treasure-books of the heavenly palaces, and gave the texts a ranking and classification.  He separated out [aspects of] the Five Colors that he had been putting into practice, established their corresponding cardinal directions, and named their corresponding imperial titles.⁴¹  The Most High had given the texts the primordial name, The Five Talismans of Lingbao.  The heavenly writings were hidden in the midst of a mystic platform, in the hollow of a rock, hidden away in a grotto on Mount Miao [Mount Kuaiji].  They would appear once every ten thousand years to show that they would not decay. 

          Yu wrote out another copy of the book on a cinnabar cloth of southern harmony [red].  He retreated and fasted on a hill at Menglong, and afterwards sealed the text in a golden-flowered box, imprinted with the seal of the Mystic Metropolis.  This copy he commanded the water gods of the rivers and marshes to transmit to the Lord of the Grotto Chamber of the waters of the Zhen [Lake Tai太湖].  They needed to await the passage of 3,000 hui [3,240,000 years] and would be transmitted to the Water Master Fu Bozhang.⁴²  However, the texts that were hidden in the stone cabinet would await the arrival of one great kalpa and would then be spread abroad. 

          Yu then ingested a numinous recipe in order to conceal his phosphors.  They buried him on this mountain to display his ending.  The immortals understood Yu’s covenant [of immortality with the gods], while fools said that he had died.  How great, this divine transformation!  He left them his corpse to place in the ancestral hall in order to fool the great lords, while his mystic steps were lofty and wide-ranging.  The myriad kalpas attest to this text that he compiled, as all speak of and chant its methods. Once per “Yang Nine” cycle one may glimpse this scripture from the high heavens, and once per “Hundred Six” proclaim the accomplishments of [Water] Master Fu. ⁴³    

        Yu’s imperial activities include first of all his inspection tour to the sacred mountain, Mount Zhong, where he performs a sacrifice to Shangdi and Tianhou in a double sacrifice that recalls the Qin and Han practice of sacrificing to Heaven and Earth in the Feng and Shan sacrifices of Mount Tai.  This mountain, however, is no ordinary mountain.  Mount Zhong is described in the Wufu xu as a cosmic mountain on par with or identified outright with Mount Kunlun – far beyond the Ruo Waters弱水in the North, filled with precious minerals and magical flora; simply alighting on the mountain is enough to confer immortality.⁴⁴  On this sacred mountain Yu has an encounter with one of the Perfected, who confers on him the Lingbao texts, which, importantly, not only confirm his Mandate as emperor, but confirm his enrollment into the ranks of the heavenly immortals.  The koujue 口訣 [esoteric oral instructions] that he learns from the Perfected One provide him with the first step towards immortality, that is, the cultivation of longevity.⁴⁵  In the episode at Mount Zhong, Yu is recast, from upholding the Confucian ideal of the benevolent ruler, to playing a role more amenable to the masters of esoterica 方士 – that of an adept of immortality.  Not that we should view these roles as truly separable, for as it was said of the cosmicized body, “A person’s body is the image of a country… thus the one who knows how to govern his body will also know how to govern the country.”⁴⁶ 

        To be sure, earlier traditions do characterize Yu in this way, amplifying his flood-quelling journeys into far-flung flights to fabulous lands.  In the Lüshi chunqiu, for example, his tours to the furthest reaches is mentioned in tones reminiscent of the ecstatic flights seen in Warring States and Han-era texts such as the Chuci 楚辭 [Elegies of Chu] or in the cosmic tours of Emperor Mu in the Mutianzi zhuan 穆天子傳 [Annals of Emperor Mu]:  

Yu went east to the land of the Fusang tree, to the land where the sun comes up from the nine fords, to the wilderness of the Blue Qiang tribes, to the place of clumping trees, to the mountains that touch the sky, to the settlements of the Valley of Sunshine and Green Hill, and to the states of the Black-teeth people.  He went south to the states of Jiaozhi, Sunpu, and Xuman, to the mountain of Nine-fold Yang, where there ware cinnabar grains, lacquer trees, bubbling streams, and rushing rivers, to the dwellings of the feathered and naked peoples, and to the villages of villages of the immortals.  He went west to the states of Sanwei, to the base of Shamanka Peak, to the people who drink the dew and suck in the cosmic ethers, to the mountain of piled gold, and to the villages of the weird-forearmed people, the one-shouldered people, and the people with three faces.  He went north to the state of Lingzhi, to the limits of the Great Darkness, to the top of Mount Heng, to the state of the Dog Rong barbarians, to the wilderness of Kuafu, to the place of the nature spirit Yuqiang, and to the mountains of accumulated ice and of accumulated stones.  These are extreme instances of traveling the farthest distance.⁴⁷   

        The sovereign’s directional tour of the realm has been transmuted into a tour of the marvelous outer lands, in which Yu encounters lands, creatures and peoples endowed with powers of longevity and immortality.  Here we also note images that are reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s description of the Perfect Man of Guye, both drawing from even more ancient reservoirs of immortality practice.⁴⁸  On another occasion, Yu gets lost and stumbles into a Peach Blossom-like land:  

When Yu was draining the Flood, he blundered and lost his way, and came by mistake to a country on the Northern shore of the North sea, who knows how many thousands and myriads of miles from the Middle Kingdom.  The name of this country is Utmost North; I do not know where its borders lie.  It has no wind and rain, frost and dew; it does not breed any species of bird or beast, fish or insect, grass or tree.  The country is flat in all directions, with high ranges all around it; and right in the middle is a mountain named Urn Peak, shaped like a pot with a bracelet, which is named the Cave of Plenty.  Waters bubble out of it, named the Divine Spring, which smell sweeter than orchids and spices, taste sweeter than wine and musk.  Four streams divide from the one source, flow down the mountain and irrigate every corner of the country.⁴⁹ 

        Here, the people live lives free of trouble, and are refreshed by the pure waters that there flow.  Indeed, the connection with the travels of King Mu are explicit here, for King Mu also passed through this place while traveling north “and for three years forgot to return home.”⁵⁰

        Yu is more specifically linked to magical medicine plants and hints of sexual practices.  In the Shanhai jing we read that in the Great Wilderness, “there is the Mountain of Cloud and Rain with a tree called a luan tree.  Yu conquered the mountain and upon it was a red stone from which grew medicinal plants with red stems and green leaves.  All of the emperors acquired their medicinal plants here.”⁵¹  Along with such medicines, Yu is also associated with a medicinal plant called “Yu’s Leftover Provender” 禹餘糧, a waterborne medicinal plant.⁵²  In the weft texts, there is also a cluster of stories concerning a heavenly maiden that is sent down to Yu.  The weft texts call her alternately “Jade Maiden” 玉女, “divine woman” 神女, or “Mystic Maiden” 玄女.⁵³  The source on the Jade Maiden describes her as “a person with a countenance of jade.  Heaven sent down its quintessence to birth the Jade Maiden, causing her to be able to nourish people.  This beautiful woman with the jade countenance could nourish a person so as to extend their life.”  Though brief, this may be a reference to sexual techniques for the cultivation of longevity. 

        At Mount Kuaiji, a number of indicators tell us that Yu has now earned the Mandate of Heaven.  For one, it is said that Yu summons the gods and not the feudal lords, as is the traditional telling of it.  Beyond a straightforward tabulation of the merits and failings of the feudal lords, as idealized in the Mencius, we might here think instead of the idea of summoning and reckoning as applied to the adept of immortality’s possession of the register of the names and attributes of the gods and demons, as in the Chisong zi zhangli 赤松子章歷 [Master Redpine’s Almanac of Days] and the Celestial Masters’ invocation of the 1,200 Officials, the divine generals and officials who would descend to vanquish demonic foes.⁵⁴  Yu remains at rest on Kuaiji while his spirit “surveyed the numinous palaces of the Nine Heavens, and viewed the treasure parks of the Three Heavens.”  His kingly perspicacity is able to bring “Great Accord” to the people.  As the ideal is stated in a passage from the Huainan zi, though he remain at rest within the palace walls, 

he is wholly cognizant of all that goes on within the world because the sources that feed him are immense and those who tap him are numerous.  Hence, without going beyond his doors, he knows about the world; without peeping out through his window, he comprehends the heavenly Way.⁵⁵ 

        But there was another, more critical indicator of imperial attainment that the composers of the Wufu xu wished to capitalize on to legitimize the Lingbao revelations.  They linked Yu’s receipt of the Mandate of Heaven with his receipt and founding of a new scriptural dispensation.  This is not without precedent, however, for Yu had long been associated with the receipt of the River Chart河圖and the Luo Script洛書, a more ancient pair of talismanic diagrams.  This provides the real key to understanding the prominent role of Yu in this narrative in the Wufu xu.   

      (Figure 2)

            Figure 2 shows the Five Talismans of Lingbao.⁵⁶   Very generally, the Five Talismans followed the cosmic progression of the Five Phases of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and were associated with the divine qi emanating from the corresponding directional heavens.  But it is in understanding the legacy of the sacred diagrams that the Lingbao talismans were meant to replace – the River Chart and the Luo Script – that we truly understand the significance of the Five Talismans. 

            (Figure 3)

      The River Chart and Luo Script, to the right and left, respectively, in Figure 3, were intimately related to the cosmological traditions of the Yijing 易經, and were said to provide conceptual models for the ordering activities of the ancient sages.  Over time, configurations of numbers were appended to the Yijing to represent the transformations of the natural order, with sets of odd, or yang as well as even, or yang numbers assigned to each of the Five Phases.  These numbers are represented by the dots in the diagram.  In the River Chart, these numbers are arrayed in the generative cycle of the Five Phases, while in the Luo Script, these numbers are arrayed in the conquest cycle of the Five Phases, also linked with the nine divisions of the “Great Plan” 洪範 chapter of the Shangshu and the cosmologically-significant “magic square” of a 3x3 grid, to which we will subsequently turn.⁵⁷  Now aside from the almost endless numerological and cosmological speculation that could, and did, proceed from such diagrams, the River Chart and the Luo Script were seen in ancient times as imperial talismans that matched up the virtue of the ruler to the Mandate of Heaven particularly in the Latter Han (25-220) chanwei 讖緯 [prognostication and weft] texts.⁵⁸  Since as early as the Shangshu 尚書 [Book of Documents], but especially as developed in Han apocryphal literature, the River Chart and Luo Script represent Heaven-sent imperial treasures that confirm the Mandate, serving as charts and registers that manifest the natural patterns of the cosmos.  In myth the Hetu was seen as the origin of the revelation of the eight trigrams, while the Luo Script was seen as the source of the sage-king Yu’s 禹Hong fan 洪範 [Great Plan].  Yu, for whom is claimed not only the River Chart but also the Luo Script,⁵⁹ is a crucial connecting point between the ancient tradition of imperial treasures and the aspirations of the author of the Wufu xu for the Five Talismans.⁶⁰ 

        On the Lingbao side, Kaltenmark has amply demonstrated its rich and ancient contexts, primarily as a hierogamatic pair.  The Talismans of Lingbao, placed between silks of red and green when transmitted,⁶¹ are explicit replacements for the River Chart and Luo Script, as in the Huainan zi portrayal: “The Lo River produces the red text; the Yellow River produces the green chart.”⁶²  Kaltenmark makes the connection between the hierogamous pair of the ling 靈 [numen] and bao 寶 [treasure] – of a medium and the deity that descends into the body, of heaven and earth, and even more on the mark, of a writ and a chart – as is the case of the River Chart and the Luo Script.⁶³  The tie is further evidenced by two of the three names given for the “Lingbao methods” that according to the first scroll of the Wufu xu were bestowed upon Hua Ziqi 華子期 (a Han immortal): the Hetu yincun fu 河圖陰存符 [The Hidden Talisman on the River Chart]; the Yinluo feigui 隱雒飛龜 [Soaring Tortoise of the Hidden Luo River Text] (1.11b).

        Replacing the River Chart and the Luo Script with the Five Talismans of Lingbao was a bold move, to say the last, and an attempt to anchor these new revelations in the prestige of age-old imperial symbols.  The River Chart and Luo Script had been granted by Heaven to Yu to legitimize his founding of the Xia dynasty.  In this new version of the story, the Five Talismans of Lingbao were granted by Heaven to Yu to legitimize the founding of a new body of sacred scriptures.  In this new revelatory dispensation, the Lingbao talismans served to guarantee not kingly succession from emperor to emperor, but scriptural transmission from Daoist master to disciple.  

        What is the context in which this kind of substitution, this kind of tale, would sense?  First, it fit the physical environment of the south.  For the fact that copies of the Lingbao texts are secreted on Mount Kuaiji as well as in a grotto-chamber in the waters of the Zhen, an ancient name for Lake Taihu,⁶⁴ show an intimate link to the holy places of the south.  It was this geography of the south, a land of grotto-filled mountains and rushing waters, that produced the eventual system of the Grotto-Heavens洞天.⁶⁵  Second, it was the apocalyptic tenor of the times that can be said to have been most conducive to the generation of this updated myth of Yu.⁶⁶  For the re-definition of Yu as an apocalyptic savior-figure well fit the prophetic hopes of the fourth and fifth century, a time that the historical record confirms as one of incessant warfare and devastating floods.   Kikuchi Taishø, for example, examines prophecies occurring in numerous Daoist texts of the period concerning the great floods of the sexagesimal jiashen 甲申year (384, 444) and how they were interpreted to portend the end of the Eastern Jin dynasty (317-420) and the rise of the Liu-Song dynasty (420-79) at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century.⁶⁷ Thus, watery deluge was not simply a horrific scenario confined to the time of the cultural heroes, but a present danger in medieval Jiangnan.  While it is yet unclear who exactly Fu Bozhang refers to, he may refer to some kind of messianic figure for apocalyptic times, or perhaps an avatar for Yu himself.⁶⁸ 

        References in the narrative to cosmic periods of time such as 10,000 years, the hui會of 1080 years, or the jie劫 [kalpa], as well as the Yang Nine陽九and Hundred Six百六 all refer to apocalyptic frameworks of time that were being introduced into Jiangnan in the fourth and fifth centuries.⁶⁹  Likewise, the third fascicle of the Wufu xu displays the “Flying Talismans of Lasting Peace of the Nine Heavenly Kings” that associates Yu with the Water Master Fu Bozhang, talismans are given that allow the carrier to escape from the disasters of great and small kalpas.⁷⁰  The talismans are to be placed in front of one to protect in times of the great kalpa, and behind one in times of the small kalpa: 

When a person of the Dao carries these talismans to pass through the Yang Nine and the Hundred Six, the thousand poisons will not attack his body.  In olden days Yu of the Xia hid these talismans in a stone coffer to pass it to Fu Bozhang, the Manager of the Waters.⁷¹   

        Lu Xiujing 陸修靜 (406-77), one of the main redactors of the Lingbao scriptures and ritual system, makes use of apocalyptic prophecy, much of it coming out of the tradition of the weft texts, to support the rise of the Liu-Song Dynasty: 

“Forty-six dinghai years after the time of the flourishing of the Tang, sooner or later within this period of time… In the gengzi year… the short-lived ones will continue to form gangs at Yu’s Mouth; the rebellious hordes will fill with their corpses the streams of Yue… A strong minister will declare himself hegemon; a weak lord will spread out toward the west… The descendant of dragon seed, the lord who will continue the mandate…”  The lord is to eradicate the false ruler, cut down and drive off the rebellious people.  At this the strength of the myriad ways will come to an end and these scriptures will circulate.  Figuring by the fated numbers and considering what actually happened, all of [these predictions] have proved trustworthy.  Since the foretold cycle has arrived, the Grand Law [of Lingbao] has risen to prominence.⁷²  

        Thus, in very real political terms, as illustrated by the relationship between Lu Xiujing and Liu Yu劉裕, founder of the Liu-Song dynasty (420-79), the positioning of the Lingbao revelations as the ultimate imperial treasure appealed both to ambitious rulers and their desire for divine legitimation, as well as to Daoist masters and their desire for imperial sponsorship. ⁷³   

        We should note, however, that the appearance of the story of Yu seems more of an adventitious appropriation for tentative, transitional times.  For Yu was not to endure in his role as prophet and redactioner of the Lingbao scriptures.  For his role is gradually diluted with the development of a systematized Lingbao cosmology and scriptural set.  Lu Xiujing subsequently he divided the Lingbao corpus into two sections, the first, “comprising scriptures revealed by the Heavenly Worthy of Primal Origin元始天尊, contains a total of thirty-six fascicles 卷, divided into ten sections 篇.  These scriptures arose in primordial times, and are written on gold tablets kept in the Palace of Purple Tenuity.  The second section, “lists instructions訣, explanations解and other texts which serve to supplement the basic revelation.”  These are the scriptures bestowed through the Duke Transcendent Ge 葛仙公.  This is the group into which our scripture falls.  In a classic reversal, the historically older scriptures were now considered the “new” scriptures, while the historically newer scriptures were now presented as the fully complete “old” versions, perfect and complete and descending from the Heavens in this particular age. ⁷⁴  Indeed, as Lu explains in the preface to a Lingbao catalog in the Yunji qiqian: 

Now the writings of Lingbao began in the Longhan Era.  Prior to the Longhan era, there is nothing that we can know of to record.  The long kalpa of the Jiankang era was characterized by an endless period of primordial chaos.  Because of the Dao’s being hidden in the depths, the treasured scriptures were not revealed.  The Chiming Era started began its cycling and the numinous writings began to arise then.  In all the heavens the scriptures were revered as the ancestral origin, and each heaven possessed its own orders and regulations regarding them.  With the revolution of one kalpa, the times once again changed cycles.  Following the accumulation of five kalpas, things arrived at the time following the Kaihuang Era.  In the inaugural year of the Shanghuang Era, the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Origin let descend his teachings.  The Great Law was circulated, the multitudes of spirits were made manifest, and he redacted and compiled the sundry essentials of the scriptures in order to summarize them into a set made up of ten sections and 36 cases.  This was to guide those who would seek its learning thereafter and for the salvation of heaven’s people.  Following the Shanghuang Era the time of the Six Heavens circulated.  The multitudes of spirit hid themselves and ascended, and the scriptures returned to the Grand Veil heaven.  From that time on, the Primal Law has been made to return and disappear from the world, even though Emperor Gaoxing [Di Ku, the great-grandson of Huangdi and the father of Yao] was able to summon a response from the cloudy carriages of heaven, and Yu the Great came to possess the texts of Mt. Zhong, Laojun descended in his verity upon the Celestial Master, and the Duke Transcendent received writings on Mt. Tiantai.  All of these are [individual] cases of moving the Most High through their worthiness, signifying that these men had attained numinous achievement.  But is it then indeed the case that the scriptures are not to be upraised and spread throughout the world, to be universally announced in their entirety?⁷⁵ 

        As Lu says later in that same preface: “But the scriptures have only begun to flourish and have not yet been entirely revealed or put into practice.  Of the ten sections of the old catalog, only three parts are out.”⁷⁶  As newer scriptures were composed, they needed to be cloaked in the guise of cosmic antiquity.  In a canonical case of placing the cart before the course, the Lingbao catalog appeared before the individual scriptures did, leaving room for Lu Xiujing himself or others to “fill in” the missing pieces of the canon.⁷⁷  The narrative concerning Yu, a bridge to the mythic imperial past, now receded with narratives that linked the Lingbao scriptures to an even more primordial and cosmic past. 

THE MARCH OF THE RITUAL MASTER

        Much has been written on the complex interaction between religious Daoism and popular religious traditions.  The early Celestial Masters portrayed themselves as celestial bureaucrats in the service of the cosmic empire, imposing order on the unquiet souls of the dead and unruly demons who, posing as deities, misled the people with demands of excessive, bloody sacrifice and ecstatic rites of possession.⁷⁸  But this same scholarship has shown that, despite the rhetorical distancing of a “classical” traditions of religious Daoism from the “vernacular” traditions of popular religious practice, such boundaries were far from established.⁷⁹  In a study on petitions advanced to counter lawsuits from beyond the grave, Nickerson notes that 

from a certain perspective the bureaucratic aspects of early Daoism constituted merely a visible exterior that sometimes concealed Daoism’s roots in popular, exorcistic ritual traditions.  One might say as well, though, that bureaucratic forms acted as a kind of exoskeleton, providing structure for those more inchoate elements.⁸⁰ 

In a somewhat different fashion, the figure of Yu the Great – and that is to say the narrative and ritual traditions that evolved therefrom – was able to occupy a unique place in the interplay between the traditions of religious Daoism and those of popular religious practice.  This is due, first of all, to the figure of Yu being a paradigmatic articulation of sacral kingship, combining in his person the roles of grand exorcist and conqueror, moral and cosmological standard and significantly, the ultimate ritual master.  That Yu is seen as a ritual master is related to a second point, that he is above all a peripatetic ruler.  The forms of his mythic journeying were well-suited to adaptation as potent ritual ambulations, and I here refer to the the development and transformations of the ritual dance known as the “Pace of Yu” 禹步.  Rather than being fixed to a particular segment of society or class of ritual specialists, the Pace of Yu became a kind of ritual trace-element through which we might observe the evolving status of popular shamanic and exorcistic elements in the ritual structures of religious Daoism.  In doing so, we also observe the diffuse nature of the imperial idiom throughout a range of Chinese religious traditions.     

      (Figure 5)

      Figure 5 shows a Song illustration of a classic pattern of the Pace, performed in three sequences of three steps per sequence (with allowances for Yang and Yin steps, relating to the gender of the performer or to the Yin-Yang polarity of the day of the performance).⁸¹  The earliest extant ritual instructions, from the fourth-century Baopuzi抱朴子of Ge Hong葛洪 (283-343),⁸² relate: 

Method for walking Yu’s Pace.  Stand straight.  [Advance the left foot.]⁸³  Advance the right foot while the left remains behind.  Then follow the right foot with the left so that they are level with each other.  This constitutes the first sequence of steps.  Advance the right foot, then the left, then bring the right side by side with the left.  This constitutes the second sequence of steps.  Advance the left foot, then the right, then bring the left side by side with the right.  This constitutes the third sequence of steps.  In this way, the method of treading the Pace of Yu is completed.  Everyone engaged in the hundred magical arts in the world should know the Pace of Yu, and not only for this particular application of it.⁸⁴ 

Another passage makes clear that performing these sequences adds up to nine steps total.⁸⁵

        Warring States and Han (206 BCE) texts offer the mythological etiology in which the Pace of Yu might have been understood.  Through these scattered references, the fact that the Pace of Yu is understood to be a “limp” is most pronounced.⁸⁶  Han sources attribute this limp to the rigors of the labor that Yu’s flood-quelling labors exacted on him: 

Yu’s body was lengthy, and he had large feet and forearms.  He walked injured, with his left hand followed by his right.  He labored his left side and rested his right.⁸⁷ 

        Granet relates what he calls the “dessication” of Yu’s body to the theme of sacrifice – that it is necessary that the founding father of a dynasty be consumed in order to give birth to the new order.⁸⁸  While Granet’s view indeed presents a wider pattern found in the early mythologies, early Chinese sources themselves locate the power of the Pace in shamanistic traditions.  The Fayan 法言[Exemplary Sayings] of Yang Xiong 楊雄 (53 BCE-18 CE) states: “Long ago, Master Si [surname of Yu] brought the waters and the soil into order, and moreover the steps of the shamans are largely in imitation of Yu.”⁸⁹  By the time we come to the next version of the story, from a medieval Daoist text in the Sanhuang 三皇 tradition, Yu’s limp remains a constant while the reason for his limp is attributed to the magical power of nature itself:  

The Pace of Yu generally refers to the arts performed by Yu of the Xia, a type of pacing to summon and command gods and spirits.  This has become the font of myriad magical arts and essential point of mystic mechanisms.  Long ago when Yu was quelling the waters, he found that he was able to gauge neither their height nor depth, and so he set up a black plumb-line and once more took his view of the waters.  This was so that he could take measure of the task before him.  In cases where there were boulders lying in the springs of water, invisible to the eye, he summoned Ruo of the sea,⁹⁰ river deities, mountain gods, and earth divinities to come to clear them out.  Then he went to the shores of the Southern Sea and observed birds using binding incantations who could cause large boulders to flip over.  When the birds uttered these binding incantations, they would always perform a certain pace.  By imitating and reproducing their manner of walking, Yu was able to penetrate their art.  From that time on, there was no magical art that he could not render efficacious.  Because Yu fashioned it, it is called “The Pace of Yu.”⁹¹     

The Pace of Yu is here described in broader terms as not only an efficacious means to summon the gods and spirits, but more than that as one of the foundational techniques for engaging in any of the “myriad magical arts.”  Yu’s traveling to the south to obtain these arts once more points to a southern basis for the Yu mythic and ritual complex.⁹² 

        In recent decades, however, archaeology has yielded early evidence for the practice of the Pace of Yu, most notably in the Rishu 日書 [Daybooks] in a tomb dated to 217 BCE at Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Hubei 湖北) and the Wushi’er bingfang五十二病方 [Fifty-Two Ailments] in Tomb Three at Mawangdui 馬王堆 (Hunan湖南) dated to 168 BCE.⁹³  As Harper points out, such tombs and their documents attest to the widespread diffusion of the magico-religious arts 方 among the elite throughout China, from their origins in the practice of “religious personnel or the shamans of regional cults.”⁹⁴

        The Mawangdui passage relates what might have been the most common uses of the Pace of Yu, for exorcistic healing.  Here, the Pace of Yu is invoked on ten occasions, eight cites occurring in the section Fifty-two Ailments and two cites occurring in Recipes for Nourishing Life, ranging from therapeutic uses for the treatment of wounds, warts, swellings, abscesses; for exorcism; and for travel.⁹⁵  Therapeutically, the Pace of Yu is used to drive out illness, sometimes in methods of magical transference, as when illness is transferred to water in a gourd that is then discarded,⁹⁶ or to clods of earth that serve as body substitutes representing the afflicted.⁹⁷  In terms of its effect on the landscape of the body, the Pace of Yu seems to be used to unblock swellings just as in myth Yu smoothed out the obstacles in the ways of the major watercourses.   

        The Daybooks yield two passages relating to the Pace of Yu.  The first is as follows:  

When you reach the gateway to the demarcated area and find yourself bound in, perform the steps off Yu in its three exertions.⁹⁸  As you take the first step, cry out in a drawn-out fashion: “This I deign to proclaim: ‘Wherever I (so-and-so) go, let me cause no offense.’”  You should first impersonate Yu to clear the path.  Then draw on the earth five times.  Pick up the dirt in the central region [you have drawn] and carry it in your bosom.⁹⁹ 

        The phrase “demarcated areas” 邦, which can refer a large realm, the walls of a city, or the enfeoeffed territory of a feudal lord,¹⁰⁰ along with the term “gateway to the demarcated area” 邦門, indicate that one is moving out of one zone and into another, danger-filled zone.  One is protected through “impersonating Yu” 為禹 in his magical step, which as we have seen serves to summon gods and expel demonic obstructions.  A second passage in the Daybooks also indicates a similar practice, only here beginning with orientational directions that one follows while carrying a “Talisman of Yu” 禹符.¹⁰¹  Furthermore, the drawing on the earth seems to create a protective zone, the collecting of earth from that protected zone also serving to serve in a portable, talismanic fashion.  This practice of drawing lines also appears in the Fifty-two Ailments, in the context of staunching a bleeding wound.  Harper speculates: “The act of drawing five lines on the ground creates a magical diagram,” a “magical space that protects the wounded person from further harm.”¹⁰² Other passages from the Mawangdui medical manuscripts and the Baopuzi stress this protective function of the diagram, whether it is the adept that resides safely inside the protected area, or evil that is contained within.¹⁰³ 

        Andersen more specifically relates it to the cosmically-significant movement connected with the Pace of Yu: 

It is of course debatable whether this drawing on the earth refers to a circle divided into four station and leading finally to the center or to five circles around the center, but it appears in any case to be related to forms of movement used in connection with bugang in many contexts.  To give but one example, the Bu tiangang jing 步天綱經 (HY1305) prescribes a circling of the Dipper, representative of the center of heaven, before undertaking the walk along the stars (HY 1305, 1.a-b, 9b).  But perhaps even more to the point, the drawing on the earth seems to correspond to the very basic pattern guiding the proceedings of many different forms of Daoist ritual and determining that action should take place in the five directions, in the order east, south, west, north, center.¹⁰⁴    

This order of direction, it should also be notes, is the basic Five Phases pattern that is asserted, among other things, in imperial rituals such as the inspection tours to the Five Sacred Mountains and the circumambulation of the emperor in the Hall of Light 明堂.

        In the fourth-century, the Baopuzi carried on older exorcistic and protective functions of the Pace of Yu,¹⁰⁵ but set them into the context of newer astronomical and hemerological technologies, based on the Five Phases and the sexagesimal calendar made up of the system of ten tiangan 天干 [Heavenly Stems] and twelve dizhi 地支 [Earthly Branches].  For example, in the years dominated by the elements of Metal or Wood, the adept would be exhorted to use the Pace of Yu to escape the ills of warfare.¹⁰⁶  In the Baopuzi, the nine steps were said to form the pattern for the hexagram Jiji 既濟, which Anderson notes is “a combination of the trigrams kan and li, representatives of north and south, water and fire, respectively, but [which] may also be seen as an intertwining of the trigrams qian and kun, which represent heaven and earth.”¹⁰⁷  Such space-time coordinates are important in order to protect oneself from baleful forces, “open up” the hidden face of the mountain and access its herbological and mineralogical treasures.¹⁰⁸

        The BPZ passages in particular point out the association of the Pace of Yu with the calendrical arts of dunjia 遁甲 [arts of avoidance by means of the Six Jia].  This is seen, for example in the following passage: 

When heading into the mountains and forests, you should first grasp some grass from the direction of the Green Dragon, break the grass in half and place it on the ground in the direction of the Feng Star.  Passing through the area of Mingtang and entering into the area of Taiyin, perform the Pace of Yu and advance.  Thrice you should incant, “I call out to you, general of Taiyin, that you only open the way for your great grandson so-and-so.  Do not open the way for outsiders.  Make it so that when people see me, all they see is a bundle of deadwood.  Let those who do not see me take that there is no one there at all.”  Then break in half the grasp in your hand and place it on the ground.  With your left hand take some dirt and place it between your nose and mouth.  With your right hand hold the grass and hide yourself, and with your left hand motioning forward, advance using the Pace of Yu.  When you reach the direction of the Six Gui, hold your breath and stay there.  Neither humans nor demons will be able to see you.¹⁰⁹    

        In the explanatory passages that follow in this chapter, Ge Hong corresponds each of the above directional names to sets of sexagesimal gods.  For example Green Dragon corresponds to the Six Jia甲, the Feng Star to the Six Yi乙, the Mingtang to the Six Bing丙, and the “middle of Yin,” or Taiyin, to the Six Ding丁.  These gods, or “chronocrats,”¹¹⁰ were the gods that were believed to be in charge of those coordinates in space and time.  The method of moving along successive stations of the Jia, Yi, Bing, and Ding is related to methods of “mounting” or “hiding” with the Jade Girl and conferring invisibility and escape through loopholes in time and space.¹¹¹  Schipper and Wang have also researched the arts of invisibility through a manipulation of such loopholes in the sexagesimal stem and branch system.¹¹²  In Daoist ritual, the “Marvelous Gate” (qimen 奇門) in the arts of dunjia becomes the focus of attention as a ritual threshold to access the divinities.¹¹³   

        As the Pace of Yu was absorbed into medieval Daoism, its connections to cosmic schemes of space and time were heightened.  In an important shift from earth to sky, the Pace of Yu now became a pace upon the stars of the Northern Dipper 北斗.  Knowledge of the unique orienting properties of the Dipper can be dated as far back as 433 BCE to the well-developed system of the 28 lunar lodges surrounding the Dipper found on the inside of a coffin in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng 曾候已.¹¹⁴ Sima Qian provides the earliest systematic description of the stars, as found in the Tianguan shu 天官書.  He divides the sky into Five Palaces (wugong 五宮), and in looking at this stellar terrain we see “the sky as a celestial counterpart of the terrestrial imperial state,” an example of the lengths to which the early Chinese carried the idea of the correspondence between Earth and Heaven (along with the third member of the triad, the Human).  For example the fenye 分野 [allotted areas] system developed by Liu Xin (53 BCE-23CE), matched up the 12 feudal states to representations among the 28 lunar lodges, so that the sky portrayed a map of the territory of China.¹¹⁵  Simply looking at the stars’ names in Sima Qian’s treatise, we see representations of the royal court and noble clans, the imperial bureaucracy and administration, buildings, military outposts, armies and weapons, traffic and transportation, rituals ceremonies, aspects of social life, philosophical and religious concepts, mythological and legendary figures, and administrative provinces and geographical regions, “an entire cultural complex projected onto the sky, characterizing an imperial society.”¹¹⁶

        In this complex, the Dipper played a particularly prominent role.  In the following passage from Sima Qian below, we see how the motion of the Dipper is correlated to key heavenly as well as earthly coordinates: 

The [astronomical instruments of the] xuan-jade, the ji-instrument, and the yuheng regulate the Seven Rulers [sun, moon, and Five Planets].  The handle of the Dipper connects to Dragon’s Horn [stellar lodge of the east].  The Heng star of the Dipper, which is its center, meets up with the Southern Dipper, and the Kui star [which points northwards] serves as a “pillow” for the “head” of the Can constellation.  At dusk the hand is set in the south, and this handle extends from Mt. Hua towards the southwest.  In the middle of the night the Heng star of the Dipper is what is established in the south.  The Heng [the fifth star] points towards the territory between the Yellow River and the Ji River in the central provinces.  At dawn the Kui star [the first star in the Dipper, corresponding to Yang and the east] is set towards the south; it regulates the northwest territory starting from the coastlands around Dai.¹¹⁷   

Sima Qian sums up the guiding function of the Dipper as follows: 

The Northern Dipper serves as the chariot of the emperor and effects its control over the four cardinal points by revolving around the center; it separates the yin and the yang and regulates the four seasons; it maintains balance between the Five Elements; it moves [the year] through the seasonal nodes and orders; it determines the epochs of the calendar.  All these things are put into order through the Dipper.¹¹⁸ 

      The diagram to the right shows the nine stars of the Dipper and the stars known as the Three Terraces 三台. ¹¹⁹  Prominent uses of the Pace of Yu, also known as bugang步綱,¹²⁰ appeared in the early medieval Shangqing上清 [Upper Purity] scriptures.¹²¹  The Dipper served to protect; to invigorate the body of the adept into which the starry gods were summoned;¹²² and perhaps most importantly serve as a conveyance that would transport the meditating adept to the gates of Heaven.¹²³ 

        (Figure 6)

        There were two ways in which the Pace of Yu served as a Pace upon the Dipper.  The first, as illustrated in Figure 6, envisaged a pace upon a schema of the nine stars of the Dipper.  In the Bu tiangang jing步天罡經 [Scripture on Pacing the Heavenly Guideline], stars of the Dipper known by the following names: yangming 陽明 [Yang Brilliance], yinjing 陰精 [Ying Quintessence], xuanming 玄冥 [Mysterious and Dark], danyuan 丹元 [Cinnabar Origin], beiji 北極 [Northern Culmen], tianguan 天關 [Heavenly Gate], and are joined by two “dark” stars that serve as the hun 魂and po 魄souls of Dipper, fuxing 輔星, and bixing 弼星and that help form an esoteric “outer” Bushel. In addition, three stars known as the Three Terraces 三台 were seen as a kind of staircase connecting heaven to the earth. ¹²⁴  One proceeded from star to star, after having first circled around the Dipper thrice, the ultimate goal being to mount up to the Shangqing heavens.¹²⁵ 

        (Figure 7)

        The second way, as shown in Figure 7, that the Pace of Yu became a pace closely associated with the Dipper was by tracing a zig-zagging path through what was known as the “walk of Taiyi through the nine palaces” 太一步九宮, represented by eight trigrams around the center as given in the Luo Script, as in the illustration.¹²⁶  This is the “magic square” of Chinese numerology, where along with its Five Phases correlations, every row in any direction adds up to fifteen.  Such dances through the Nine Palaces may also be seen in the Shangqing huangshu guodu yi上清黃書過度儀 [Initiation Rite of the Yellow Writings] (HY 1284), an early Celestial Masters initiation rite made up of twenty ritual units to be performed by a male-female pair, literally pacing the Earthly Branches, the Five Phases, and Nine Palaces on the cosmicized body of each of the partners.¹²⁷

        In the Song dynasties, the Pace of Yu was a heavily-used weapon in the spiritual arsenal of an emerging group of lay exorcists known simply as the Ritual Masters 法師, who came to mediate between the classical rites and hierarchies of the Daoist priests and the potent activities of the local village spirit-mediums.  The tension that they mediated was not restricted to Daoism alone, but extended to a wider confrontation between centralizing bureaucratic and religious hierarchies and emerging bases of local power.¹²⁸  Thus, it is not surprising that in Song Daoist sources such as the Jinsuo liuzhu yin, the master employing the Pace of Yu is to adopt the awe-inspiring identity of an emperor out on an inspection tour of the realm, and is given martial titles such as “The Protocol Master Who Deploys Arms For Entering into Battle, into Mountains, Waters and Foreign Lands” 行兵、入軍、入山、入水、行往他國禮師.¹²⁹  Such titles and methods reflect not only the battle with the “illicit cults” of the localities, but also national anxiety arising from threats of Jurchen invasion from the north, a threat that became a reality when the Song ruling house was forced southwards to Nanjing, inaugurating in 1127 the epoch of the Southern Song.  But while the battles with local cults was clearly antagonistic, we should not forget the fact that at the same time, regional deities and their rituals were just as often absorbed and appropriated, catalyzing a revitalization of Daoism itself.¹³⁰ 

        The aforementioned Jinsuo liuzhu yin, attributed to Li Chunfeng 李淳風of the Tang, but more likely a compendium of Song and Yuan practices, is a text which displays the astonishing variety of uses to which the Pace of Yu was put.¹³¹    A look at the topics covered in the text attest to its wide range of uses: self-cultivation; sleeping on the dipper; qi methods; jiao; avoiding enemies; cultivation with regard to the Five Phases and the six Jia gods; rainmaking; to the 28 stellar lodges; to bring peace to one’s family and the nation; to dispel disaster; to cure disease; to exorcise; to subdue beasts; to deal with infectious diseases; to deal with tombs; shrinking distance for travel; and to interrogate evil spirits. 

        The five types of ritual masters mentioned in the fourth fascicle provide a glimpse into the ways in which Celestial Masters Daoism was attempting to incorporate a new kind of ritual master, here called the Protocol Masters, into its ranks.  What is significant is that the rites that these five types of Protocol Masters perform all involve the use of the Pace of Yu.  Here are how the traditional duties of the Celestial Masters are set against the duties of these new ritual masters: 

The Celestial Master said, “Methods such as visualizing the Five Organs and the Three Gods of the body, commanding the body gods, the Protecting Spirits Invocation, the Activation of the Incense Burner, the Reverencing of the Four Directions, the Sending out of the Divine Officials, the Reading of the Petition, and the Re-calling of the Divine Officials – all these are methods that I, Ling [Zhang Daoling] have set forth point by point in the Scripture of the Flowing Pearls of the Golden Lock.  Only regarding the Protocol Masters have I not completely exhausted my account of their origin.  The Protocol Master Taishang Laojun granted the methods of the Protocol Masters to Huangdi.  It has its own set of rites, which can be divided into five levels.  The first relate to the Protocol Master who Advances Petitions and Memorials; the second relates to the Protocol Master who Paces the Guidelines; the third relates to the Protocol Master who Interrogates and Summons to Heal Illness; the fifth relates to the Protocol Master Who Deploys Arms For Entering into Battle, into Mountains, Waters and Foreign Lands.¹³² 

      In one of the methods of interrogation and summons 考召法, the Protocol Master performed the Pace of Yu as part of a ritualized tour of the territory.  What is notable is the imperial imagery that accompanies this tour, from the entourage of the Five Powers, to the Twelve officials in tow, and the references to the ranks of the barbarians.  On this tour of inspection, conquest, judgment, and execution, the Protocol Master assumes the awesome mien of a representative of the celestial imperium: 

First, you must visualize the Five Powers [green dragon, white tiger, red bird, Dark Warrior and the Yellow Court], the Three Primes, in addition to which visualize the Six Jia, the Six Guidelines and the Twelve Divine Officials and their entourages, the Six Rong peoples, the Eight Man peoples – visualize them one by one according to the prescribed method.  As the scripture has it, visualize and cause them to emerge and make a tour of inspection of the human world, forbidding and stopping the harm caused by the violent and willful demonic deviances and perverted quintessences.  Those that harm people or things, rely on the codes and laws to rebuke them and send them away.  Those that are unwilling to leave, rely on the laws to spellbind them.  If those that are spellbound do not submit, then pace the Dipper, advance a memorial and execute them.  When you finish, place a plaque at the shrine or temple that commemorates the date that you cut them off, and give the people concerned the talismans and plaques concerned, and the deviances will be observe the period of proscription that you set.  Now when you wish to perform this method of pacing the Dipper, you should first treat the Guidelines thrice in your quiet chamber, then distribute your steps and perform the Pace of Yu in fifteen steps.  Clothe yourself and point towards the place, whether it be such-and-such province, county, village, or hamlet, and such-and-such a person and family who have fallen ill.  When rescuing a household you may also use this method as diagrammed.¹³³ 

        This kind of tour, empowered by the Pace of Yu, could be used for kings or commoners, for natural or human-caused disaster, to trump the divine weaponry of competing religious factions, and to save from political oppression or, worse, lawsuits initiated by aggrieved spirits from beyond the grave.¹³⁴

        In the Tang and Song, the performance of the bugang became so much tied to the duties of the Celestial Master that it became a part of the title of the Daoist priest once he had received the 24 Celestial Masters registers.  The priest would then be empowered to “advance petitions and perform jiao醮 [communal offerings] on behalf of others, enfeoff the mountains with titles of office, expel or summon deviant spirits and poisons, pay court at the stars and constellation…”  His title would then be “Disciple of the Covenant of the Orthodox One, Libationer in the Lineage of the Celestial Master of such-and-such Parish and such-and-such Qi, Perfected of Primal Mandate Who Performs the Treading of the Mainstay of the Three and Five of the Red Heaven.”¹³⁵  From its likely origins in popular magico-religious healing and in the esoteric arts, the Pace of Yu had now been absorbed into the formal structure of the Daoist priestly hierarchy as well as that of the communal liturgy. 

        Among the new Daoist ritual movements that arose out of intense interaction with southern spirit-possession cults in the Song was that of the Orthodox Method of the Heart of Heaven天心正法.  Much of the ritual structure of contemporary Daoism, particularly in the southeastern coastline in Fujian 福建 and among immigrant Fujianese Daoist lineages on Taiwan owes a fairly direct debt to the ritual innovations of the Heart of Heaven tradition.  The Pace of Yu came to play a critical role in the great communal rites of the jiao.  On the one hand, the Pace of Yu carried on its ancient exorcistic functions, most notably in the purification of the altarplace.  This can be seen in the purification of the altar, know as chitan 敕壇 [Establishing Command of the Altar].  Along with directional recitations of purificatory incantations and visualizations of demon-quelling gods, the Pace of Yu is performed in nine steps, and in which is incanted: “Today I perform the Pace of Yu.  Above let it respond to the Heavenly Mainstay, and let demons and gods thus be brought into submission.  Below, let it dispel all that is inauspicious, and let all that I ask for be granted as I desire…”¹³⁶   

        On the other hand, the Pace of Yu continued to provide access to the gates of heaven, particularly in the all-important presentation of the memorial 上章, a bureaucratic procedure of communication in which the priest plays the role of an official of the celestial empire, advancing formal written communication to the offices above.  The Song Daoist Master Bo Yuchan 白玉蟾 (1134-1229) characterized the ritual function of the Pace of Yu as follows: “One makes the spirit soar and the memorial fly, one goes in audience to make the statement.”¹³⁷  In a section in the Taishang zhuguo jiumin zongzhen miyao 太上助國救民總真祕要 [Secret Essentials of the Most High for Aiding the Nation, Saving the People, and Gathering the Perfected] (HY 1217) called “Diagrams and Texts regarding the Pace of Yu on the Dipper and Mainstays, and the Listing Out of Mudras.”¹³⁸  It speaks of the methods of the Pace of Yu as 

the great essentials of the Way, and the origin and guideline for its methods.  “Treading the guideline” means riding the proper qi in order to ride on things.  “Listing Out of the Mudras” means presiding over numinous mechanisms to circulate through one’s transformation.  Whether investigating and summoning, or restraining and subduing [demons], in none of these methods can you refrain from using the Pace of Yu as a resource.¹³⁹

            In one of its methods for advancing petitions, the priest was instructed to step through each of the Eight Trigrams in turn, concluding with a halting pace known as the “T-step” 丁字步through the stars of Three Terraces, culminating in an approach to the heavenly courts.¹⁴⁰  Concluding the walk, the priest took the Seal of Purple Tenuity 紫微印and at the location of the Qian乾trigram (northwest), and was told to “transform one’s form” 化身by means of the divine seal.  Then, one would be “riding a white crane, floating towards the gates of Heaven, there to pay court to the Thearch Lord帝軍, relating to him all that is on your mind.”  Following would be the priest’s return from the heavenly gates and back down to the southwest corner of the altar.¹⁴¹ 

      The transformation of the Pace of Yu into the culminating mechanism for the advancing of the written petition – the procedure that lies at the very heart of Daoist ritual – is nothing short of breathtaking.  However, perhaps it is not so surprising when viewed in the light of the elements that the pattern of the imperial journey represents: cosmogonic peregrination, exorcistic conquest, moral reckoning, and sacrificial and bureaucratic communication to Heaven.  The Daoist priest, as a veritable Son of Heaven, was now authorized to retrace that pattern of journey to mediate between the people and the gods.       

CONCLUSION

        Like the tracks that are left after the performance of the Pace of Yu, I have tried to give a glimpse of the wide-ranging tracks of Yu the flood-queller.  The tracks are testimony to imagined and re-imagined applications of a central narrative of Chinese culture, and have taken us from the early imperial campaigns to subdue the south; to medieval apocalyptic prophecy; to the later confrontation of classical Daoism with southern cults of spirit-possession.  Through these changing times, the myths and practices revolving around images of Yu the Great held together a remarkably dynamic paradigm of the wandering king, who could at once serve as the measure of an exorcistic conqueror, an apocalyptic savior, and ritual master.  Like the biblical Moses, hidden in the hollow of the rock to behold the passing figure of God, what we have seen is never Yu “himself,” as if such a figure ever existed.  What we do have access to is far more interesting – the ever-transforming meaning of a divine culture-hero in particular times, in particular places, and for particular people.