Yíxiān zhuàn 疑仙傳
Biographies of Presumed Immortals
by 隱夫玉簡 (撰)
About the work
A late-Táng / Five-Dynasties hagiographic anthology in three juan, compiled by the otherwise unknown Yǐnfū Yùjiǎn 隱夫玉簡 (“Hidden Husband, Jade Tablet”), preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0299 / CT 299 = TC 299), 洞真部 記傳類. The collection contains twenty-two short biographies of figures believed — but not confirmed — to be immortals. Where ordinary hagiography asserts deification, Yǐnfū Yùjiǎn frames his subjects as ambiguous, hence the title’s yí 疑 (“presumed, doubted”). The biographies — for example, the Lǐ Yuán 李元 of Huáshān, the unnamed Pútiánzhōu 蒲州 medicine-pedlar Mr. Cures-All, the wine-loving Mr. Five Pecks, and the rest — combine chuánqí 傳奇 narrative conventions (didactic dialogues, miraculous healings, vanishings on white deer, riddling refusals to give a surname) with the conventional Daoist topoi of mountain residence, herbal diet, and elusive disclosure to the worldly questioner.
Prefaces
The compiler’s preface: “The matter of spirit-immortals has existed since antiquity; mingled with ordinary tracks they cannot easily be measured. I — chancing among friends to record these affairs — having added no embellishment, would not dare to call them spirit-immortals; today, putting these various biographies together to form three juan, I title the work Yíxiān zhuàn 疑仙傳 (‘Biographies of Presumed Immortals’).”
Abstract
Florian C. Reiter, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:428 (§2.A.6, Sacred History and Geography), observes that the author of these twenty-two biographies has not been identified, and that the work was compiled after the Tiānbǎo 天寶 era (742–756). The Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目 10.9a entry lists the Yíxiān zhuàn in one juan, but the present three-juan arrangement corresponds to the indications in the author’s own preface. The twenty-two biographies — didactic dialogues, stories about healers, visionary encounters and experiences — are best understood as specimens of chuánqí 傳奇 literature rather than straightforward hagiography. The frontmatter brackets composition broadly to the late Táng / Five-Dynasties (ca. 757–960), the latest plausible window before the work is registered in the eleventh-century Chóngwén zǒngmù.
Translations and research
No full translation. Standard scholarly entry: Florian C. Reiter, “Yixian zhuan,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §2.A.6, 428. See also Florian C. Reiter, “Studie zu den ‘Überlieferungen von mutmaßlichen Unsterblichen’ (Yixian zhuan),” Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques 41/2 (1987), 132–169.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0311
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §2.A.6, 428.