Wáng Fú 王浮
Western Jìn Daoist polemicist, fl. late 3rd – early 4th c. (active roughly during the reign of Jìn Huìdì 晉惠帝, r. 290–306). Career jìjiǔ 祭酒 (libationer) of a Tiānshīdào 天師道 / Celestial-Master congregation; biographical details are preserved almost exclusively in hostile Buddhist sources.
Wáng Fú is principally remembered as the supposed author of the Lǎozǐ huàhú jīng 老子化胡經 (“Scripture on Lǎozǐ converting the barbarians”), the central Daoist polemical text of the Buddhist–Daoist conversion-of-the-barbarians controversy. According to Sēngyòu’s 僧祐 Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (juàn 15) and the early-5th-c. Daoist–Buddhist debate literature (Zhù Dàozǔ 朱道祖, Jìnshì zálù 晉世雜錄), Wáng Fú repeatedly lost debates with the monk Bó Yuǎn 帛遠 (帛法祖) and in retaliation forged the Huàhú jīng by adapting the older Xīyù zhuàn 西域傳, claiming that Lǎozǐ travelled west, became the Buddha, and that Buddhism was therefore a degenerate offshoot of Daoism. The book grew from one to ten juàn over later centuries; the Yuán court ordered all extant copies burned in the 13th c. and the work was lost (Dūnhuáng fragments and a few citations survive). Modern scholarship (Liú Yì 劉屹, Jìngtiān yǔ chóngDào: Zhōnggǔ jīngjiào Dàojiào xíngchéng de sīxiǎng shǐ bèijǐng 敬天與崇道 [2005]; and Liú’s later articles) argues that the attribution to Wáng Fú is itself a 6th-c. Liáng Buddhist construction conflating two originally separate stories, so the historical Wáng Fú’s actual role in the genesis of the Huàhú jīng may be more limited than the Buddhist sources allege.
Wáng Fú was also credited with a zhìguài 志怪 anomaly-account collection, the Shényì jì 神異記 (KR3l0143), reconstructed by Lǔ Xùn 魯迅 in Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沈 from quotations preserved in Lù Yǔ’s Chá jīng 茶經 (where the famous tale of Yú Hóng 虞洪 of Yúyáo meeting the Daoist Dānqiūzǐ 丹丘子 on Pùbùshān 瀑布山 — the earliest extended tea anecdote in Chinese literature — is preserved), and in Tàipíng yùlǎn, Huányǔ jì, Yìwén lèijù and others. Several WángFú fragments are explicitly Daoist in tone (immortals on Dānqiū, divine retribution against an official who tried to cheat a Daoist shrine), consistent with his Tiānshīdào profile.
No reliable lifedates survive. CBDB has no entry; the Shényì jì fragments preserve no autobiographical material.