Tao Hongjing

Biography

Family Background and Early Years

Tao Hongjing descended from a prominent Jiangdong family. According to the Record of the Origins of Master Huayang Recluse, written by his nephew Tao Yi, he was a seventh-generation descendant of Tao Jun. His grandfather Tao Long fought for Emperor Xiaowu of Liu Song and was enfeoffed as Marquis of Jin’an. His father Tao Zhenbao rose to the post of administrator of Xiaochang in Jiangxia and was well versed in materia medica. Tao Hongjing was intelligent from childhood. From the age of nine he read Confucian classics such as the Book of Rites, Book of Documents, Book of Changes, and Analects. At age ten, according to the Record of the Origins, he obtained Ge Hong’s Biographies of Divine Transcendents and studied it day and night, developing an interest in practices for nourishing life. Gifted in writing, at fifteen he composed Record of Seeking the Mountains, describing his wish to leave worldly society, travel through mountains and waters, and search for medicines of immortality, with detailed depictions of deep mountains and secluded valleys.

At twelve Tao saw a handwritten copy of Methods of the Supreme Clarity Elixirs by Xi Yin and became enthusiastic about alchemy. In his twenties he began ingesting substances regarded as medicines of immortality. In 479 (Jianyuan 1), after Xiao Daocheng displaced Liu Song and founded Southern Qi, he selected Tao as a reader to the imperial princes and offered him the post of attendant to the Prince of Yuzhang, which Tao declined. In 481, Tao’s father was killed by a concubine, an event that deeply affected him and led him to resolve never to marry. In 482 he became reader to Xiao Keng, a son of Emperor Gao of Qi, and received the military title General Who Rouses the Martial. According to Tao’s biography in the Book of Liang, Emperor Gao had already selected him as a reader to the princes while serving as chief minister, so the appointment should fall between Jianyuan 1 and 3. Tao encountered exclusion by powerful figures at court and remained frustrated in official life. In 491 (Yongming 9), after receiving the low-ranking appointment of Court Gentleman for Attendance, he decided to resign and withdraw from office.

Official Service and Daoist Practice

Around age thirty, Tao became a disciple of the Daoist Sun Youyue, receiving talismans, diagrams, scriptures, ritual methods, and revealed instructions. He then traveled widely among famous mountains in search of sacred medicines and authentic scriptures. In 484 (Yongming 2), Tao suddenly became ill and remained unconscious for seven days without food or drink. During this period he experienced in dreams what he understood as scenes from the divine realm. This strengthened his decision to pursue Daoist practice and fixed his devotion to the Shangqing scriptures attributed to Yang Xi, Xu Mi, and Xu Hui of the Eastern Jin. Thereafter he concentrated on finding authentic manuscripts of the Shangqing revelations written by Yang and the two Xus, traveling through Zhejiang and the Yue region and collecting their handwriting from other Daoists and members of the elite. In 488 he obtained genuine manuscripts by Yang Xi and Xu Mi on Mount Mao, and in 490 he journeyed east to visit lay practitioners and religious teachers.

In 492 (Yongming 10), Tao submitted a memorial resigning office, hung his court robes at Shenwu Gate, and retired to Mount Juqu in Jurong, now Mount Mao, styling himself Huayang Recluse. Officials and scholars turned out in exceptional numbers to see him off. Tao and his disciples built the upper and lower Huayang lodges on the mountain, and conditions were difficult in the early period. In 494 (Jianwu 1), Emperor Ming of Qi ordered Tao to pay ritual visits to famous sacred mountains and pray for peace throughout the realm, a mission lasting three years. Thereafter the emperor often sent envoys to him and Tao’s reputation grew. His friend Shen Yue repeatedly invited him to leave seclusion while serving as administrator of Dongyang, but Tao declined. Back on Mount Mao, Tao built a three-story residence: he lived on the upper floor, disciples occupied the middle floor, and the ground floor was used to receive visitors. There he devoted himself to organizing Daoist texts and wrote works including Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Materia Medica.

“Prime Minister in the Mountains”

When Xiao Yan raised an army in 501 (Zhongxing 1), Tao submitted a memorial congratulating him and, citing prophetic texts, proposed the dynastic name “Liang.” Xiao Yan trusted Tao greatly. After becoming Emperor Wu of Liang, he repeatedly sent envoys to invite Tao into government, but Tao firmly refused to leave the mountains. On one occasion, after the emperor invited him to participate in government, Tao painted two oxen: one roamed freely among grass, while the other wore a golden halter and was led by a rope and driven with a stick. The picture conveyed his unwillingness to return to office. Whenever the court faced major matters involving auspicious or inauspicious signs, campaigns, and other affairs, messengers were often sent to consult him. Correspondence with the emperor was frequent, sometimes several letters in a month, and contemporaries therefore called him the “Prime Minister in the Mountains.”

In 504 (Tianjian 3), Emperor Wu sent gold, cinnabar, azurite, realgar, and other materials for Tao’s alchemical work. In 505 Tao selected a site in the central part of Mount Mao and began preparing an elixir; he opened the furnace early the following year, but the attempt failed. In 508 he adopted the name Wang Zheng and quietly left Mount Mao, eventually reaching Qingzhang Mountain in Yongjia, where he continued his experiments and accepted Zhou Ziliang as a disciple. In 511 he traveled by sea to Mount Huo, now Huotong Mountain in Ningde, Fujian, traditionally said to be associated with the immortal Lord Mao and Lady Wei. The next year he left Mount Huo for Muliu Island off eastern Zhejiang, and Emperor Wu sent an envoy to summon him back. In 514 the emperor ordered Zhuyang Lodge to be constructed for Tao on Mount Mao; Tao moved there in 515. That same year his disciple Zhou Ziliang underwent what Daoist sources called “release from the corpse,” leaving extensive records of spirit communication. Tao edited and annotated them as Records of Zhou’s Communications with the Netherworld. In 516 Emperor Wu also built the Taiqing Altar for him “to make the luminous teaching uniform.” In 520 Tao went to Jingkou at Xiao Gang’s invitation and held discussions for several days. In 527 he presented the Shansheng and Weisheng swords to Emperor Wu. Tao died in the third lunar month of 536 (Datong 2), aged eighty-one. Emperor Wu posthumously granted him the office of Grand Master for Palace Accord and the title Master Zhenbai.

Later Years and Posthumous Legacy

In his later years Tao became increasingly devoted to Buddhism. In 513 he dreamed that the Buddha bestowed on him the name “Bodhisattva Shengli,” after which he went to the Ayuwang Pagoda in Mao County to receive the Five Precepts. He established separate Buddhist and Daoist halls on Mount Mao and worshiped at them on alternate days, and he had a white bodhi pagoda built there. He referred to himself as the “self-sacrificing Bodhisattva Shengli” and a “disciple of Śākyamuni Buddha.” In his later years, according to Buddhist sources such as the Comprehensive History of the Buddhist Patriarchs, Tanluan, later regarded as an early patriarch of the Pure Land tradition in northern China, traveled south to study with him. Tao gave Tanluan books on materia medica and methods of immortality, while learning the Sutra on the Contemplation of Amitayus from Tanluan. The surviving evidence for this episode comes from Buddhist sources. Tao’s last instructions called for his burial clothing to combine Buddhist and Daoist elements.

Tao lived in seclusion on Mount Mao for forty-five years. The mountain thereafter became a center of the Shangqing tradition. From Tao’s time onward, the Shangqing school there came to be called the Maoshan tradition, and Tao was regarded as its founder. In the Yuan period, the Maoshan tradition posthumously honored him as the ninth-generation patriarch of Shangqing.

Major Activities

Contributions to Daoism

Tao Hongjing was an important transmitter of the Shangqing tradition. He inherited philosophical ideas associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi and Ge Hong’s traditions of immortality, blended Daoist and Buddhist ideas, and advocated convergence among Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He wrote that the “hundred teachings converge, yet none goes beyond the sphere of the Three Teachings.” Building on the work of Lu Xiujing, he further organized Daoist scriptures. During his time as a Shangqing Daoist on Mount Mao, he traveled in search of scriptures and wrote many Daoist works to promote Shangqing teachings, particularly Declarations of the Perfected, a work with the character of a sectarian history. It systematically recounted the transmission history of the Shangqing scriptures and presented sacralized accounts of their origins and revelation. He also wrote works such as Secret Instructions for Ascending to Perfection and Record of Nourishing the Inner Nature and Extending Life.

Tao also compiled a hierarchical Daoist pantheon in Chart of the Ranks and Functions of the Perfected Spirits. It arranged roughly three thousand gods, terrestrial deities, ghosts, immortals, and perfected beings into seven ranks and is described in the Chinese source as the first Daoist work in China to systematize a pantheon in this way. Tao transmitted five sets of Daoist texts and talismanic diagrams, including the Lord Lao’s Six Jia Talismans, Western Sacred Peak Lord’s Mountain-Prohibition Talisman, True Forms of the Five Sacred Peaks, Writings of the Three Sovereigns, and Five Talismans of the Lingbao. He collected formulas for ingestible preparations and compiled works including the two-volume Essentials of Plants and Trees of the Supreme Clarity, the three-volume Essentials of Various Elixirs of the Supreme Clarity, the four-volume Procedures for Compounding Elixirs, and the three-volume Formulas for Ingested Preparations. He also compiled the two-volume Record of Nourishing the Inner Nature and Extending Life, drawing largely on the Collected Essentials of Nourishing Life edited by Zhang Zhan and others and citing more than thirty books. In his thought on longevity, Tao emphasized cultivating both body and spirit and maintaining their unity in pursuit of long life.

Because Tao’s principal religious activity on Mount Mao was the transmission and promotion of Shangqing scriptures, and because he enjoyed great personal prestige and had many followers among both court and society, Mount Mao effectively became a center of the Shangqing tradition from his time. Later Maoshan transmitters were themselves often learned and prominent Shangqing Daoists, allowing the mountain to retain its central place. From its development under Tao through the Sui and Tang and into the Song periods, the Maoshan tradition produced many influential figures and remained an important Daoist school.

Medical and Pharmaceutical Achievements

Tao Hongjing was one of the most important early contributors to the development of Chinese materia medica. In his time more than ten different materia-medica texts circulated without a unified standard. Older works had become disordered, with minerals and plants insufficiently distinguished and insects and animals poorly differentiated, making clinical use inconvenient. Tao undertook the task of comprehensively organizing the earlier literature. He sorted the available material into the Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica and the Supplementary Records of Famous Physicians, combined the two, and added his own research to produce the seven-volume Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Materia Medica.

The Collected Commentaries contained 730 medicinal substances. It introduced a classification method that grouped them by natural category—jade and stone, herbs and trees, insects, beasts, fruits, vegetables, and grains and foods—rather than relying solely on the older three-grade classification by therapeutic effect. The original book has been lost, though Dunhuang fragments survive. The text reportedly used red and black marks to indicate hot or cold properties and summarized earlier experience in the use of drugs; the text of the Divine Farmer’s Classic was written in red, while material from the Supplementary Records of Famous Physicians and Tao’s own additions appeared in black. The Chinese source describes this natural-category system as a milestone in the history of Chinese materia medica and notes that the classification schemes of the Tang Newly Revised Materia Medica and Li Shizhen’s Ming Compendium of Materia Medica developed from it. Tao also wrote the five-volume Proven Formulas and the three-volume Supplement to the One Hundred and One Emergency Formulas Kept Close at Hand, which supplemented Ge Hong’s Emergency Formulas to Keep Up One’s Sleeve with 101 prescriptions.

Alchemy and Chemistry

Tao conducted alchemical experiments for many years. Emperor Wu of Liang supplied him with gold, cinnabar, azurite, realgar, and other raw materials. Using a “nine-cycle elixir” method, Tao fired furnaces seven times between 505 and 525. The final attempt was said to have succeeded, but he lacked complete confidence in alchemy, had been uneasy about accepting the emperor’s commission from the beginning, and never tested the product by ingestion. He believed that alchemical work on Mount Mao had failed partly because the site was too close to human settlement, and therefore left the mountain in search of more remote places for experiments.

Through alchemy he acquired practical knowledge of chemical processes. He noted, for example, that mercury could form amalgams with certain metals and that such amalgams could be used for coating objects. One account recorded by Tao describes a substance resembling saltpeter that, when strongly heated, produced a violet-blue flame or vapor, an observation identified in the Chinese source as a flame test for potassium nitrate. The source describes this as the earliest recorded identification of a potassium salt by this characteristic in the history of chemistry.

Literature and the Arts

Tao was broadly learned and skilled in many arts, holding that ignorance of even a single subject was a cause for shame. He was accomplished in the qin, board games, calligraphy, and painting. Shen Yue regarded Tao’s Rhapsody on the Water Immortal as profound and difficult to fathom. Tao was skilled at depicting natural scenery in writing; his travel account Record of Seeking the Mountains described the pleasure of leaving worldly society, traveling among mountains and waters, and searching for medicines of immortality, with detailed portrayals of remote valleys and peaks. In response to a Qi emperor’s question, “What is there in the mountains?”, he wrote the poem:

What is there in the mountains?

Above the ridges, many white clouds.

They may delight me here alone,

But cannot be held and sent to you.

In classical learning, Tao retained features of Eastern Han exegetical scholarship. He wrote commentaries on the Preface to the Mao Odes, Zheng Xuan’s prefaces to the Three Rites, the Classic of Filial Piety, and the Analects. His work emphasized philology and chapter-and-phrase explanation rather than the more metaphysical style prevalent in the Southern Dynasties. In historiography he wrote the five-volume Chronological Records of Emperors and Kings, using the Bamboo Annals as a chronological basis; in geography he wrote Record of Prefectures and Commanderies, Ancient and Modern; in military writing he produced the ten-volume True Man’s Water Mirror and the one-volume Grasping the Mirror. He also wrote a four-volume commentary on the Laozi and a three-volume commentary on the Guiguzi.

Tao was also a calligrapher, proficient in clerical script. His writing was said to show the influence of Wang Xizhi and was placed in the sixth of the nine grades in Yu Jianwu’s Grades of Calligraphy. Tang critics described his calligraphy as possessing structural strength and sharpness. Tao was particularly skilled in authenticating works attributed to Wang Xizhi and did so for Emperor Wu of Liang. He reportedly ranked Zhong Yao first, Wang Xizhi second, and Wang Xianzhi third among calligraphers ancient and contemporary. Paintings and calligraphic works attributed to him in the Chinese source include Two Oxen, Dwelling in the Mountains, and Inscription on Burying a Crane.

Astronomy and Other Fields

Tao was knowledgeable in astronomy. He constructed an armillary sphere about three chi high that could rotate automatically and wrote the five-volume Star Classic of Astronomy and the one-volume Essentials of Astronomical Instruments. He also wrote the one-volume Record of Swords, Ancient and Modern and personally forged blades. He presented two prized swords to Emperor Wu of Liang, and Emperor Yuan of Liang, Xiao Yi, reportedly intended to have a sword forged by Tao buried with him. The Chinese source estimates Tao’s total output at seventy or eighty works, many of which are lost. Surviving works listed there include Declarations of the Perfected, Chart of the Ranks and Functions of the Perfected Spirits, Records of Zhou’s Communications with the Netherworld, surviving Dunhuang fragments of Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Materia Medica, Record of Nourishing the Inner Nature and Extending Life, Secret Instructions for Ascending to Perfection, and Collected Works of Tao, the Huayang Recluse.

Personal Relations

Family

• Tao Jun: seventh-generation ancestor
• Tao Long: grandfather; fought for Emperor Xiaowu of Liu Song and was enfeoffed as Marquis of Jin’an
• Tao Zhenbao: father; rose to administrator of Xiaochang in Jiangxia and was well versed in materia medica
• Tao Yi: nephew; author of Record of the Origins of Master Huayang Recluse

Teachers and Associates

• Sun Youyue: teacher and Shangqing Daoist; Tao became his disciple around age thirty and received talismans, diagrams, scriptures, ritual methods, and revealed instructions
• Shen Yue: close friend; repeatedly invited Tao to leave seclusion, but Tao declined; Shen described Tao’s Record of Seeking the Mountains as “profound and difficult to fathom”
• Tanluan: scholarly and religious associate; a Northern Wei monk later regarded as an early Pure Land patriarch, who according to Buddhist sources traveled south and interacted with Tao; Tao gave him materia-medica texts and methods of immortality and learned the Sutra on the Contemplation of Amitayus from him
• Zhou Ziliang: disciple; Tao accepted him while in Yongjia and later compiled Zhou’s records of spirit communication as Records of Zhou’s Communications with the Netherworld

Rulers

• Xiao Daocheng, Emperor Gao of Qi: summoned Tao as a reader to the imperial princes
• Xiao Yan, Emperor Wu of Liang: repeatedly invited Tao out of retirement; although Tao refused, the emperor frequently sent envoys to consult him on state affairs, leading contemporaries to call Tao the “Prime Minister in the Mountains”; provided gold, cinnabar, and other alchemical materials and ordered the construction of Zhuyang Lodge and the Taiqing Altar
• Xiao Gang: invited Tao to Jingkou for discussions

Historical Assessment

Southern and Northern Dynasties / Contemporary Assessments

• Shen Yue described Tao’s Record of Seeking the Mountains as “profound and difficult to fathom,” according to the Book of Liang.
• Contemporaries called him the “Prime Minister in the Mountains,” referring to his involvement in political consultation despite living in seclusion.
• Emperor Wu of Liang treated him with increasingly generous courtesy and maintained constant correspondence with him; after Tao’s death he posthumously granted him the office of Grand Master for Palace Accord and the title Master Zhenbai.

Tang Period

• Tang calligraphic criticism described his writing as possessing structural strength and sharpness.
• Li Yanshou’s History of the Southern Dynasties included him among recluses and described him as broad-minded, modest, discreet, well attuned to when to enter or leave public life, and clear-minded in understanding whatever he encountered.
• Yao Silian’s Book of Liang gave a similar assessment, describing him as broad-minded, modest, discreet, and clear-minded.

Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Periods

• Chen Zhensun’s Song bibliography Critical Notes on Books from the Studio of Direct Abstinence recorded many works by Tao and treated his broad learning with respect.
• In the Yuan period, the Maoshan tradition posthumously honored Tao as the ninth-generation patriarch of the Shangqing lineage.
• Qing evidential scholars praised his attitude that ignorance of even one matter was a cause for deep shame.
• The Qing General Catalogue of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries recorded works by Tao and assessed his scholarly contributions.

Modern Assessments

• Modern historians including Chen Yinke have praised Tao’s breadth of knowledge and regarded him as one of the most important scholars of the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
• Historians of science have described him as one of the most famous physicians, naturalists, and alchemists in Chinese history, as cited in volumes of Science and Civilisation in China.
• Modern scholars have described him as an encyclopedic scholar and have argued that the botanical classification in Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Materia Medica was more systematic than that of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica in the Roman world.
• Scholars of Daoism generally regard Tao as the founder of the Maoshan tradition and Chart of the Ranks and Functions of the Perfected Spirits as the first systematic Daoist pantheon in Chinese history.