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 ShǔHàn statesman. The Daoist léifǎ tradition, fully crystallised in the SòngYuán 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
- 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 SòngYuán 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.