Guō Xiàn 郭憲
Eastern-Hàn loyalist and reputed fāngshù 方術 adept, zì Zǐhéng 子橫. Native of Sòng 宋 county in Rǔnán 汝南 commandery (modern Hénán). Fl. late Wáng Mǎng — early Guāngwǔdì 光武帝 reign, c. 9–40 CE. His biography stands in HòuHànshū j. 82A (Fāngshù lièzhuàn 方術列傳).
Guō Xiàn refused to serve Wáng Mǎng’s Xīn 新 dynasty, burning the official robes Mǎng had bestowed on him and going into hiding on the sea-shore (海濵). After the Eastern-Hàn restoration he was summoned to court by Guāngwǔdì and rose to the office of Guānglù xūn 光禄勲 (Superintendent of the Imperial Household, one of the Nine Ministers); he repeatedly remonstrated openly with the emperor, earning the contemporary saying “Guāngguāng Guāndōng Guō Zǐhéng” 觥觥關東郭子橫 (“brilliantly outstanding Guō Zǐhéng of the East of the Pass”). The fāngshù episode for which Fàn Yè 范曄 placed him in the Fāngshù zhuàn — that he once spurted a mouthful of wine westwards to extinguish a distant fire — is the same anecdote also told of Luán Bā 欒巴, and the Sìkù compilers already doubted its historicity, treating Guō Xiàn as essentially an upright Confucian remonstrator rather than a fāngshì.
The four-juàn zhìguài mythography Dòngmíng jì 洞冥記 (KR3l0097), an exotic HànWǔdì / Dōngfāng Shuò mythography in ornate Six-Dynasties parallel diction, is traditionally attributed to him; modern philology (the Sìkù compilers themselves, then Lǐ Jiànguó and Campany) treats the attribution as a Six-Dynasties pseudepigraph and assigns the received recension to c. 300–500 CE. Guō Xiàn’s name appears in CBDB only via four Sòng / Míng homonyms (ids 37578, 243150, 445040, 492084); no entry exists for the Eastern-Hàn figure. The dates “1014–1080” sometimes attached to him in modern bibliographic databases are simply a confusion with one of those Sòng homonyms and have no application to the Hàn loyalist.
Links
- HòuHànshū 後漢書 j. 82A, Fāngshù lièzhuàn 方術列傳.
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/郭憲