Page 483 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

G E HONG 443

The next major event in Ge's life dates to 332 or 333. At that time, "having
heard that in Jiaozhi :x~.1I:: there is cinnabar," he asked the emperor to send
him to that remote southern district. The emperor made him magistrate (ling
~) of Julou 15] ~ (in present-day northern Vietnam), but on the way to his
new post Ge was persuaded to stay in Guangzhou by the regional inspector
Deng Yue ~~1k , and retired again to the Luofu Mountains. The description
of his death bears the stamp of Taoist hagiography. In 343 he wrote to Deng
Yue saying that he would "travel to distant lands in search of masters and
medicines." Deng went to see him, but arrived after Ge had already achieved
"release from the corpse" (*shijie).
Ge Hong's place in the history of Taoism. Besides the Baopu zi, some sixty works
dealing with classical exegesis, dynastic and local history, Taoist thought,
alchemy, medicine, numerology, hagiography, and various other subjects are
ascribed to Ge Hong (Chen Feilong 1980,143--98). No more than a dozen of
these works is extant, and only two of them may indeed have been written
by Ge, namely the *Shenxian zhuan (Biographies of Divine Immortals) and
the Zhouhou beijifang M1!f'fij~,1f (Recipes for Emergencies to Keep at Hand;
CT 1306).
More important, Ge Hong and his family were instrumental in the transmis-
sion of various textual corpora of the southeasternJiangnan iI i¥.f region, part
of which he had inherited from his granduncle, *Ge Xuan. Some of these texts
later became foundations of the *Lingbao school under the initiative of his
grandnephew, *Ge Chaofu. Ge Hong was not a master of any of the related
traditions, however. One gathers from the Baopu zi that his main interest was
the preservation of the religious legacy of Jiangnan and its acceptance by other
aristocrats and literati. This does not decrease the value of his testimony. In
particular, although Ge acknowledges that he had not compounded any elixir
by the time he wrote the Baopu zi (Ware 1966, 70 and 262), his quotations from
alchemical texts have proven essential for reconstructing some features of the
early *Taiqing tradition of *waidan.

Fabrizio PREGADIO
III Barrett 1987a; Bokenkamp 1986b; Campany 2002, 13- 17; Chen Feilong 1980;
Chen Guofu 1963, 95-98; Davis T. L. 1934; Davis and Ch' en 1941; Hu Fuchen
1989, 77- 81; Ofuchi Ninji 1991, 487-35 (= 1964, 67- u6); Sailey 1978, 277- 304

* Ge Xuan; Zheng Yin; Baopu zi; Shenxian zhuan; Taiqing