Huì Xiānnǚ Zhì 會仙女志
Record of an Encounter with a Fairy Woman by 酈琥 (撰)
About the work
The Huì Xiānnǚ Zhì 會仙女志 is a short prose-and-verse composition in 1 juǎn by the Míng author Lì Hǔ 酈琥, recording (ostensibly) a personal encounter with a female immortal (xiānnǚ 仙女) during a night-time meditation retreat in the Xuányáng Grotto (Xuányáng dòngtiān 玄陽洞天). The work comprises a preface (xù 序) and a single extended text titled “Wèn rì-yuè jiāoshí” 問日月交蝕 (“Questioning [the fairy] on the eclipse of sun and moon”), which records a dialogue between the author — who calls himself Xuányáng xiānshǐ 玄陽仙史 (“the Xuányáng Immortal Recorder”) — and the fairy woman on cosmological topics (yin-yang theory, stellar origins of celestial beings, the nature of human souls).
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
The preface is dated Jiājìng rénzǐ 嘉靖壬子 (1552), the third day of the third month, and signed by “Huìjī Xuányáng xiānshǐ Lì Hǔ” 會稽玄陽仙史酈琥, placing the composition at Huìjī 會稽 (modern Shàoxīng 紹興, Zhèjiāng 浙江). The preface recounts that the author, then in his “weak-capped” youth (ruòguān 弱冠, i.e. around twenty suì), had earlier dismissed stories of fairy encounters as nonsense, until the Jiājìng xīnmǎo 辛卯 year (1531) when he experienced the encounter himself while studying the Yì 易 alone in the Xuányáng cave hermitage. The encounter inspired him to compose twenty-four tiānwèn 天問 (“Heavenly Questions”) verse pieces, together with a prose “Ode to the Fairy Woman” (Xiānnǚ fù 仙女賦) and a “Song of the Immortal Recorder” (Xiānshǐ gē 仙史歌), all collected under the title Huì Xiānnǚ Zhì.
Lì Hǔ 酈琥 is otherwise obscure. CBDB does not record an entry for him. He presents himself as a Confucian scholar of Huìjī who was nonetheless fascinated by Daoist cosmology and wàidān 外丹 / nèidān 內丹 themes. The work sits in the tradition of the yùnǚ 遇女 (“fairy encounter”) subgenre going back at least to the Táng chuánqí, but its primarily cosmological content — the dialogue covers the origins of immortals from stellar essence, the cosmic significance of solar and lunar eclipses, and the interpenetration of yīn and yáng in the human body — distinguishes it from purely romantic fairy-tale accounts. The style mixes formal four-word verse with looser prose dialogue.
The work is a minor curiosity of mid-Míng Daoist literary culture. No standard bibliographic catalog (《千頃堂書目》, 《四庫全書總目》, 《明史·藝文志》) is known to list it under Lì Hǔ, suggesting it circulated only in limited manuscript form.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Links
- No Wikipedia or Wikidata entry identified for Lì Hǔ 酈琥.