Content created: 2025-02-19
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HÁN Xiāngzǐ 韩湘子 = also called HÁN Xiāng, a young immortal
LÍN Yīng 林英 = His wif
LǙ Dòngbīn 吕洞宾 = a more senior immortal (story 4), HÁN Xiāngzǐ’s Daoist master
Emperor Xiànzōng 宪宗 = a fervent Buddhist, but not a tolerant one
Storytellers have often created additional tales about individual members of the eight immortals group, sometimes contradicting each other. Some embody the widespread trope of Daoist magicians as counter-cultural figures with supernatural powers subverting greedy and exploitative merchants and corrupt officials, or even challenging imperial indifference to the suffering of ordinary people.
Here two examples of such tales about Hán Xiāngzǐ. In the first he is represented as having a caring but puzzled wife, and in the other he deceives the callous but rather dim emperor.
Once he had become an immortal, Hán Xiāngzǐ 韩湘子 had not returned home for three years and his wife, named LÍN Yīng 林英, began to miss him and feared he might be even dead.
First she went with her mother-in-law, Hán Xiāngzǐ’s mother, to the back garden and burned incense to call his spirit and beg that he return home, whether in physical form or, if he was dead, then as a spirit.
Hán Xiāngzǐ, like gods and immortals and even ordinary people, was always attracted to incense, and he came down from the clouds to see why incense smoke was rising from his back garden. There he saw his wife casting oracles and offering sacrifices. (Artists ofen show him holding a basket of altar flowers or a plate of sacrificial buns.)
Learning of his wife’s distress at being separated from him, he thought he ought to appear and carry her back to the land of immortals with him. But he was afraid such a direct approach would displease his Daoist master, the immortal LǙ Dòngbīn 吕洞宾 = story 4), so he turned himself into an ugly monk.
Some people say he naively hoped to slip her into the land of immortals looking like him, with himself beside himself beside her looking like the ugly immortal Lǐ Tiěguǎi 李铁拐 Accordingly artists tended sometimes to represent him as looking like the immortal Lǐ Tiěguǎi 李铁拐?)
Lin Ying, unfortunately, had no idea what Han Xiangzi was doing. All she saw was an ugly monk hanging around trying to get his hands on her, so she had her maid drive him away. As more and more time passed, it seemed ever more likely that her husband was dead.
When the Qingming festival came, when people visit graves to clean them and present offerings, Han Xiangzi turned himself into a boat on a lake near the cemetery. Somehow, Lin Ying was persuaded to board, and once she had boarded, he ferried her, willy nilly, into the sky and the land of immortals, finally achieving their reunion their reunion.
A great drought troubled the land, and many people died of cold or illness or starvation. However, the emperor and his court continued life as usual, wearing magnificent clothes and enjoying poetry and painting and beautiful music. They dined on mounds of rare dainties and watched beautiful dancing girls, who filled them with lust, and drove from their minds even the tiniest vestige of a thought about the suffering of the common people.
The emperor’s birthday was celebrated with special extravagance, and Hán Xiang, now an immortal, hoped to use it to startle some sense into these foolish lords, so he appeared at the door of the palace during the festivities in the guise of a mendicant beggar. He made so much noise asking for alms that the emperor ordered him beheaded.
“But I came to wish you long life,” cried the beggar. “And I have a present for you.” This piqued the curiosity of the emperor. What could a shabby beggar possibly have worthy of an emperor?
With great politeness the beggar Hán Xiang presented his majesty with a seed. Everyone laughed as the emperor considered whether he needed to repeat the order for a beheading. But Hán Xiāngzǐ quickly pushed the tiny seed into a small crack in the floor and poured a tiny bit of water over it. Instantly the seed sprouted. Up came a thick vine, and on the end of it a melon that grew larger and larger.
The whole court marvelled, and the melon was cut up and served all around. Then the emperor, now far more friendly, commanded a new magical performance, something different.
So Hán Xiangzi took a handful of chopsticks and shouted “Come, palace maidens!” Instantly the chopsticks turned into the most beautiful dancing girls anyone had ever seen (for they were of course celestial fairies) and they performed a birthday dance.
(The phrase he spoke at the chopsticks was “Gōng’é-měinǚ lái!” 宫娥美女来, but no one else has ever been able to turn chopsticks into dancing girls with these words, for it requires a very, very deep study of the Way, beyond what most people are able to accomplish.)
In delight, the emperor offered a rich reward in gold and silver to the beggar (or magician or Daoist or whatever he was). In fact he commanded that the imperial treasurer fill the begging bowl —some people say it was a basket— with gold and silver from the imperial treasury.
Hán Xiāngzǐ followed an imperial treasurer to the treasure room, where the treasurer put more and more gold and silver ingots into the begging bowl (or basket), but the vessel never filled up.
The treasurer was very worried. It was obvious that this miserable beggar (or magician or Daoist or whatever he was) was draining the treasury with his outrageous bowl. But an imperial command was an imperial command, and even if it was seriously misguided, one disobeyed at risk of losing one’s head.
Eventually the emperor became suspicious of the time it was taking to give the visitor his payment and headed to the treasury to investigate. He was astonished and enraged when he saw that his treasury was depleted. The kneeling, trembling treasurer, who knew he was about to lose his head, told his majesty about the magical begging bowl, and reported that the visitor had flown out the window and into the sky with it just as his majesty had entered the room.
The outraged emperor, having ordered that the treasurer be beheaded, trudged back to the banquet hall, hoping at least for the consolation of his beautiful new fairy dancers. As he entered, the fairy dancers instantly became chopsticks once again.
Meanwhile, outside the palace Hán Xiāngzǐ was distributing the gold and silver to the suffering people.
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