The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 2 (85 page)

16
. Jade-browed:
yuaho
, the jade-white curls,
ūrnā
, between the eyebrows of Buddha himself from which he beams forth to all the world his illuminating light, but here, the poem has given this physical mark of sacrality to Guanyin as well.

17
. A self which can do:
youwei shen
. This line is supposed to depict a Buddhist deity, but it actually invokes Quanzhen language. Building from their understanding of Laozi’s famous doctrine on no- or nonaction,
wuwei
, the Quanzhen masters went on to emphasize in their teachings the ability to do and to act:
youzuo, youwei
,
, because so much of their alchemical activity consisted in galvanizing
the mental and physiological processes. Thus the patriarch Zhang Boduan wrote in Poem 42 of the “Wuzhen pian
” in
Xiuzhen shishu
(DZ 263, 4: 733–34): “
,
(If you only see not doing as most marvelous, / How could you know doing is the foundation?).”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

1
.
Haitong
: Chinese flowering apple,
malus spectabilis
.

2
. A quotation from
Analects
4. 19.

3
. “Magic of Releasing the Corpse”: the XYJ text uses perhaps a deliberately modified term of “
jieshi fa
,” which simply inverts the common term,
shijie
. This nomenclature most familiar to students of Daoism is also one of the most puzzling, and its meaning has yet to be completely explored and understood in ongoing scholarship. The term may be translated as “release or deliverance by means of a corpse [or something like a corpse],” and the general meaning stems from the long-held conviction by Daoists that when a transcendent departs this world, his true spirit may leave but the corporal form left behind may or may not be his physical body. It may look like a corpse, but it may also be something else (i.e., a transformed object) used or appropriated by the person attaining realized immortality. As Ge Hong (283–343 CE) wrote in
Baopu zi
,
j
2, 6a (SBBY), the term has to do with the meaning of how the human body is “exuviated or sloughed off (
shuiyi
).” The creature frequently implicated in the metaphor is the cicada that casts its shell (i.e.,
chanshui
), invoked to indicate how death separates the form from the spirit (
xingshen fenli
) or in different transformation (
fenhua
). See SCC, 2 (1974): 141; 5/2 (1983): 106; Campany, pp. 52–60, and entry on “
shijie
” in ET 2: 896–97. The different interpretations of the concept runs through many texts of the Daoist Canon, but the most extensive discussion of the term in medieval Daoism I know of is found in the relevant sections of
Yunji qiqian
,
j
84–86 in DZ 22: 593–608, where the various substitutes for the physical body range from artifacts like a sword and a staff to natural elements like fire and water. This group of texts so titled in the Canon was compiled by Zhang Junfang
(961–1042?) as a tribute to the Song emperor Zhenzong.