Guàndǒu zhōngxiào wǔléi Wǔhóu mìfǎ 貫斗忠孝五雷武侯祕法
Marquis Wǔ’s Secret Method of the Five-Thunders, Loyalty-and-Filiality, Piercing the Dipper by 吳昇 (撰)
About the work
A late-Yuán single-juǎn manual of wǔléi 五雷 (Five-Thunders) ritual magic, attached by its preface to the cult-figure of Wǔhóu 武侯 (Marquis Wǔ = Zhūgě Liàng 諸葛亮), the Three-Kingdoms-era Shǔ-Hàn statesman. The Daoist léifǎ tradition, fully crystallised in the Sòng-Yuán period, attached its talismans to a variety of historical or quasi-historical patrons; the Zhūgě Liàng patronage is one of the more distinctive variants. The author Wú Shēng (吳昇) styles himself Xùyáng Bǎoguāng zhēnshì 旭陽葆光真士.
Abstract
The preface narrates a revelatory tale: in the Yuán zhìyuán era (元至元 — either 1264–1294 or, more likely given internal evidence, the second Zhìyuán 1335–1340), the Jīngmén 荆門 tribute scholar Zhāng Huīqí 張暉齊 was teaching the Classics in his home town when a fisherman of the local guǎnrén 館人 household, fishing in the river, retrieved a round stone, gleamingly clean and lovely; he picked it up and put it in his hall-corner; that night Zhāng was seated in vigil and observed the stone radiating brilliant light; he gave up his official salary, bought the stone, brought it home, broke it open; within was a square stone like iron with seal-script graphs on both faces; cleaning and rubbing made the characters bright as ink-print; printing it gave several hundred sheets; lifting fire to it, smoke and qì erupted; Zhāng was astonished; falling asleep, he saw a spirit — magnificent in posture, in yǔróng lúnjīn 羽𣰉綸巾 (feather-pleated robe, lúnjīn turban — the iconography of Zhūgě Liàng) — striding forward and waving an iron rúyì sceptre.
The text proceeds with the talisman-and-incantation corpus of the Wǔléi Wǔhóu tradition: five thunders, twelve gates of the léichéng 雷城 (thunder-city), the nine-and-six positions of the Dipper-handle (dǒubǐng liè jiǔliù zhī wèi 斗柄列九六之位), and the inner-cultivation correlates of the zhìrén wò zàohuà zhī shūjī 至人握造化之樞機 (“the realised person grasps the pivot of creation and transformation”).
Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 3: 1192–1193, Vincent Goossaert) treat the work as a late-Yuán léifǎ manual, witness to the proliferation of patron-figure-based variants of the thunder-magic tradition.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Vol. 3: 1192–1193 (DZ 585, Vincent Goossaert).
- Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987 — chapter on léi-fǎ traditions.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the relatively few Daoist manuals to attach itself to Zhūgě Liàng as patron-deity — most Sòng-Yuán léifǎ manuals favour patrons such as Wáng Wénqīng 王文卿 (Língbǎo dàfǎshī), Sà Shǒujiān 薩守堅, or other Sòng Daoist masters. The attachment to Zhūgě Liàng draws on the jièyán 戒嚴 / bāzhèn 八陣 strategic traditions also attached to him in the popular and Daoist imagination.