Mágū zhuàn 麻姑傳
Account of the Immortal Mágū by 葛洪 (撰)
About the work
A short Daoist hagiographic narrative attributed to Gě Hóng 葛洪 (283–343), recording the descent of the celestial official Wáng Fāngpíng 王方平 (also known as Wáng Yuǎn 王遠) to the household of Cài Jīng 蔡經 during the reign of the Hàn Emperor Huán (漢孝桓帝, r. 147–167 CE), and the subsequent appearance of the immortal Mágū 麻姑. The text is celebrated as the source of the idiom 滄海桑田 (“the blue sea turns to mulberry fields”), expressing the radical mutability of the world across vast stretches of time: Mágū herself declares that since she first began serving at Wang Fangping’s side she has witnessed the Eastern Sea become mulberry fields three times (yǐ jiàn dōnghǎi sān wéi sāngtián 已見東海三為桑田). In the Kanripo corpus the text circulates as a stand-alone item derived from the CHANT database (Chinese Humanities Text Project, CUHK), category @CH2a1523.
The narrative unfolds in a single episode. Wang Fangping arrives in a five-dragon chariot with full celestial retinue; he summons Mágū by messenger, and she arrives in similar splendour. Mágū appears as a young woman of about eighteen or nineteen with long hair and bird claws (niǎo zhuǎ 鳥爪). A supernatural banquet ensues, with golden platters and food that includes lín pú 麟脯 (unicorn dried meat). Magu turns scattered rice into true pearls. When the mortal Cài Jīng privately wishes he could use Mágū’s claws to scratch his back, Wang Fangping reads his mind and orders him flogged by unseen attendants — one of the text’s most famous comic vignettes. Wang then confers a talisman (fú 符) on Cai Jing, who thereafter follows Wang on journeys through mountains and seas and acquires the arts of the cicada-moult liberation (jiě tuō zhī dào 解蛻之道).
Prefaces
No preface in the source. The text opens directly with the narrative.
Abstract
The Mágū zhuàn is closely related to — and likely an independent excerpt from — the biography of Mágū in Gě Hóng’s [[KR5c0052|Shénxiān zhuàn 神仙傳]] (Biographies of Divine Transcendents, ca. 317–330 CE). The same episode is cited in the Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記 (j. 60) under the heading “Mágū” with attribution to the Shénxiān zhuàn. The CHANT database entry “葛洪麻姑傳” treats the text as a separately circulating piece, which may reflect a later anthological tradition of excerpting it as a discrete zhuàn. The Yún jí qī qiān 雲笈七籤 (DZ 1032, j. 105) preserves a variant of the story.
Whether the text is an autograph excerpt made by Ge Hong himself or a later detachment from the Shénxiān zhuàn tradition is uncertain; the content is substantially identical across the different textual witnesses. Ge Hong’s Shénxiān zhuàn was composed ca. 317–330; the Mágū zhuàn cannot predate that context. The dates in the frontmatter (283–343) represent Ge Hong’s lifespan as the implied composition bracket.
The text is of considerable cultural-historical importance: (1) it provided the canonical iconography of Mágū as a young woman with bird-claws, which became standard in later Daoist art and poetry; (2) the 滄海桑田 phrase passed into the common idiom; (3) the episode of Cài Jīng’s flogging became a stock illustration in Daoist texts of the gap between mortal coarseness and celestial purity.
Translations and research
- Campany, Robert Ford. To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Contains translation and study of 107 biographies from the Shénxiān zhuàn, with discussion of the hagiographic tradition.
- Campany, Robert Ford. Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Broader study of the Ge Hong hagiographic corpus.
Other points of interest
The 滄海桑田 episode gave rise to a rich intertextual tradition. Táng poets, including Liú Xīyí 劉希夷 and Wáng Wéi 王維, allude to the phrase. The image of the sea turning to mulberry fields also appears independently in the Liézǐ 列子 and other early texts, but the Mágū zhuàn is the canonical locus for the fully developed idiom. The whimsical episode of Cài Jīng’s flogging by invisible attendants was frequently cited in later Daoist exegetical literature as an illustration of the principle that adepts can perceive mortal thoughts.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0329
- Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記 j. 60, “Mágū” 麻姑 section (cites Shénxiān zhuàn)
- Yún jí qī qiān 雲笈七籤 (DZ 1032) j. 105