10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China
Part I: The Author's Own True Tales
Chapter 6: Lunch with the God of Immortality---在成都里遇见老寿星
Previous Chapters 前章: Pt. 1: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5-1, Chapter 5-2, Chapter 5-3
Chapter 6: Lunch with the God of Immortality---在成都里遇见老寿星
Previous Chapters 前章: Pt. 1: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5-1, Chapter 5-2, Chapter 5-3
I said in the previous chapter that time travels backwards as well as forwards and asked the question, can we? Well, now we will. We’re going to travel backwards in time from the trip to Wudang because I had to tell you that story first. I had to introduce the Taoist teaching on longevity from an authoritative source and expert in the matter.
Recall that Tian Liyang told us that Zhang San Feng is several hundred years old. He also said that he is the oldest Taoist alive. However, if the story of Lao Shouxing is to be believed, there is one even older, unless he is so old he pre-dates Taoism, in which case, technically, he is not a Taoist. But he is still the champion of longevity. But even having lived for 2000 years or more, it still isn’t even close to immortality.
The figure of Lao Shouxing (老寿星), or Shou Lao, with his bulbous forehead, long white beard, and walking stick is widely familiar to many people outside China. His image is commonly seen in Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants all over the world, and even in fine antique dealers and junk shops alike. Whether it’s a porcelain figurine, plastic figure, or a poster hanging in your favorite carryout, a lot of you have seen this character before.
Lao Shouxing is the god of longevity (寿, or shou, means longevity in Chinese). Like many members of the Chinese pantheon of gods and goddesses, his origin is steeped in mystery and accounts differ on how this god came to be. He is one of the Sanxing (三星), or three stars, that are considered to be physical embodiments of three gods that represent the three characteristics of a good life: Prosperity (福, or Fu), status (禄, or Lu), and longevity. Together they are called “Fu Lu Shou,” or “Fuk Luk, Sao” in Cantonese, the prevailing tongue among overseas Chinese. He is often considered the most important of the trio, since longevity in this case also implies wisdom and the ability to manage affairs.
Shou Lao is associated with the South Pole star in ancient Chinese astronomy and astrology, known to astronomers today as Canopus. Because it appears in the Southern Hemisphere it is very rarely seen in most of China but was known in the south. Although it appears as a bright white star in Southern Hemisphere skies, it appears red on the southern horizon in northern skies due to diffraction from Earth’s atmosphere. It is the second brightest star in the sky.
This star was considered the embodiment of the god of longevity who later manifested as Lao Shouxing here on Earth. For this reason, he is often known as the “Old Man of the South Pole” or 南极老人 (Nanji Laoren) in Chinese. Always depicted with a joyful smile, he is sort of like Santa Claus, but from the South Pole. In fact their names are similar; Lao Shouxing is called Nanji Laoren, and Santa is called Shengdan Laoren (圣诞老人), or “The Old Man of Christmas.” Notice how the last two Chinese characters are the same.
How the star Shou Xing became Lao Shouxing is not exactly clear. The Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji (史记) in Chinese, is the earliest mention of the God of Longevity in the historical records and dates from the first and second century BC. It’s likely the authors (Grand Historian was a hereditary position passed from father to son) drew on earlier sources, but we don’t know what they were. Since they worked directly for the Emperor, they undoubtedly had access to the imperial archives and just about anything else they wanted.
The Shiji, tells us that Shou Xing (or Canopus as it is known in the West) was considered the stellar embodiment of the God of Longevity. How the star took on human form and became Lao Shouxing is not clear. There are two main versions of the story. One version is that one night in the dim past of ancient China, a young woman stood outside her house pondering this star. Her husband came to have a look too. He told her that the star she was looking at was Shou Xing, or the Old Man of the South Pole. He told her that though it is the second brightest star in the sky, it was shining even more brightly that usual that night. As a neighbor who overheard their conversation came out to see too, the star suddenly vanished.
Just then the young woman became ill and had to retire inside to bed. As it turns out, at that very moment the star vanished, she had been impregnated by the Old Man of the South Pole. The star had vanished because it entered her womb! But this was no ordinary pregnancy. That very same night, a small boy woke her up and told her that she was his mother, that he was the Old Man of the South Pole, and that she would carry him in her womb for 10 years!
After nine years of pregnancy, the woman, not as young anymore, was tired of carrying the child and wanted to give birth already. Can you blame her? I mean, isn’t 9 months of pregnancy enough?
The boy appeared to her again and reminded her that it wasn’t time yet, but that in the 10th year, when the eyes of the stone dragon turn red, he would finally come. The prospective parents consulted with some local wise men who decided it would be a good idea to trick the child. They went to the statue of the stone dragon in the town and painted the eyes red with pig’s blood. The trick worked, and the child was born.
Unfortunately, he was not fully developed. Imagine that! A premature birth after nine whole years of pregnancy! Nevertheless, the legend relates that due to this premature birth the boy was forever bald as a ping pong ball. This caused the other children to ostracize him. He had to find his own way in life and took up Taoist cultivation at an early age which he often did in the peace and quiet of the country outside of town.
One day he was mysteriously called to leave his hometown and wander into the surrounding wilderness in the way Taoist adepts get called by the hidden voice of the Dao. He went to an isolated place that was so deep in the hills no one ever went there. When questioned about where he was going or what he was doing, he just said he would return when the time was ripe.
1000 years later, time ripened. He came back. His hometown was a different place, obviously. China changed a lot in that time, but he knew nothing about that, and China seemed to have forgotten about him too. It was now the Song Dynasty.
Being a short, bald old man with a long white beard and bulbous forehead, carrying a long walking stick with a gourd canteen dangling from a string on it in one hand and a big old peach in the other, it's needless to say he attracted attention.
I’m not really sure what the walking stick was for since no one discusses it. He doesn’t appear to have had trouble walking, but maybe he just liked to cover a lot of ground and liked to have a long walking stick. Maybe it was just because he was old or because he hiked so much in the mountains he’d just emerged from. But if we view this from the alchemical point of view, the walking stick has profound significance as the du mai (督脉), or back channel of the microcosmic orbit, one of the key practices of longevity or immortality. It could also represent the zhong mai (中脉), the ramrod straight core channel that holds the center of the ordinary and extraordinary vessels exercised in Taoist alchemy, and through which the alchemists roots into the Earth and unifies with the upper cosmos. We find exactly the same thing in the ancient Hermetic practices of the West and the Yogic practices of India.
The gourd, it is said, contains the elixir or immortality, which is gathered and stored during the secret alchemical cultivation. The peach is one of the peaches of immortality from the garden of Xi Wangmu (西王母), the Queen Mother of the West. These peaches ripen only every three thousand years. Sound familiar? Consider the golden apples of Ancient Greece.
There is no real account of what happened when he got back to his village, but we are told that he ventured to Emperor Renzong’s (宋仁宗) palace in Bianjing (modern day Kaifeng) shortly afterwards. The Emperor thought he was an awfully curious fellow and invited him in. He asked Lao Shouxing how old he was, but Lao Shouxing only asked for some jujubes and some wine. After drinking seven glasses he left. The Emperor was completely unimpressed, and like Queen Victoria many centuries later, was not amused. However, Renzong was as a benevolent ruler as was possible in that day and let it go. In fact, he has become known to posterity as a just a merciful ruler.
The next day the imperial astrologer came to the Emperor and told him he had seen the star of longevity, Shou Xing, descending on the throne and the old man who had appeared yesterday could very well have been the god of longevity himself!
The Emperor had missed his chance to ask him the secret of long life, so immediately dispatched his men to bring the old geezer back to the palace. But Lao Shouxing was nowhere to be found.
A traveler arriving in the city told the Emperor’s men that he saw Shou Lao walking on the road in front of him, but as he turned a corner behind him, he saw Shou Lao ascending on a cloud to Heaven.
As it turns out though, Shou Lao’s visit may have brought some benefit to Emperor Renzong after all. Although he lived only 53 years, he had the longest reign of any Song emperor, keeping his throne for 41 years until the day he died.
Now this all sounds like an ancient fable or fairy tale, but the truth is that although Shou Lao ascended to Heaven that day after visiting the emperor, he didn’t stay there and is known to have returned to Earth on more than one occasion since then. One of those times was in October of 2002 in Chengdu, the capitol of Sichuan Province.
It was my first trip to China. I was traveling with a group of Western qigong students and instructors from Europe, America and Australia. Our plan was to visit certain key locations for qigong study and practice, and take in some of the sights along the way.
We’d already been to Beijing where we studied a kind of bagua zhan (八卦掌), or circle walking, with a qigong medical doctor at Beijing Hospital of Chinese Medicine. And of course we saw the Forbidden City, Chinese acrobats, the Great Wall, and some people went to the Summer Palace. Somehow I missed that leg of the tour, but I did have my first Chinese foot massage, and let me tell you, that is something you absolutely must do. The details of that, however, are for another book.
Also on the itinerary were trips to Xi’an and Hua Shan, where we were to spend five days living at a monastery and meditating in caves. We also had Yangshuo on the schedule which was just a quaint backpackers’ hangout for some R & R and Western food.
But the first stop after Beijing was in Chengdu. Chengdu is home to Qing Yang Gong, or Green Goat Temple, where we would link up with monk Li Hechun for lessons and tours. It was also a base for our trip to Qingcheng Shan (青城山), a Taoist mountain just outside of Chengdu, for more lessons and a special focus on women’s training from the nuns there.
We checked into the Tibet Hotel and almost immediately headed out for lunch at the vegetarian restaurant at Wenshu Monastery (文殊院). It was a warm, pleasant autumn afternoon, though as an ardent meat eater, I wasn’t looking forward to a vegetarian meal.
Oh, it’s ok for compelling health or medical reasons, but I do not see the least bit of moral supremacy in it. I despise the self-righteousness of most of the vegetarians I’ve met, who aren’t as bad as vegans when it comes to moral hubris, but it’s an inauthenticity you have to deal with every time you sit down with vegetarians it seems.
Here’s a perfect example of the false morality underlying the vegetarian community. I was trekking in Nepal with a group that was recommended to me for a unique perspective—a recommendation that was admirably fulfilled with a marvelous adventure in the Himalayas. But there was one episode with this group of New Age-inclined adventurers that chafed me.
At the outset of the trek, the leader asked if, since we were in a Hindu and Buddhist country, we should have a vegetarian diet on the trail. Everybody looked expectantly at everybody else for validation as they nodded tenuously and approved as people do when fearing judgment from groupthink. I was a hardened bike messenger at the time (perhaps the most fiercely independently minded profession on the face of the earth excepting freelance assassins) which I didn’t get to be on a diet of vegetables, and I was not given to groupthink. Still, I knew I had to confront their false sense of moral superiority head on.
Conveniently I have an Italian last name and the trip leader was a medical doctor, or at least was becoming one when she dropped her internship. I told the group that I was one of those unfortunate ones of Mediterranean descent that suffered from Thalassemia minor which caused an iron deficiency and that I needed to eat red meat at least a few times a week.
Of course, immediately you saw that reversal that New Agers are famous for when they realize they’ve offended someone unwittingly and have to change principles on the spot—the classic Groucho Marx move: “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.” So they nodded and choked and affirmed meat a few days a week wouldn’t be a problem.
We ate it everyday thanks to the cook staff. But this one night after a particularly grueling hike that took us over a threshold in altitude, a new elevation that affected us all with weariness, the kitchen boss bought some yak meat and barbecued it to delicious, tender perfection.
We were sitting in the mess tent for warmth around a long table the porters somehow schlepped along the entire time (these Sherpas truly have superpowers of one kind or another, but that’s another story). The large aluminum serving bowl that had previously been stacked with the juicy morsels of yak now had but a single shaving of meat submerged in small puddle of savory, fatty broth.
I beheld that shaving of meat and looked at the others all engaged in friendly banter and profound discourse. “Well, they’re all vegetarians, I guess,” and I plunged my fork into that strip of meat and quickly transferred it to my mouth, smiling with every chew.
“Hey!” protested one of the vegetarians angrily. “You can’t just take the last piece of meat without asking anyone!”
I forced myself to swallow a little, and with the remainder still in my mouth, I responded unapologetically. “Y’all are vegetarians I thought.”
John, a man who had spent the last 20 years in the pursuit of wisdom and truth, and my favorite person on that trip, unabashedly guffawed. His deep thundering laughter practically shook the mess tent from its poles.
Immediately, they backed down from their hypocrisy, somewhat resentful that I’d pointed it out, to John’s intense amusement no less. “Oh, well.” “Well, anyway.”
I left the tent to go smoke a bowl of hash with the Sherpas.
I can think of about 3 exceptions to this rule that I know: a family in Maryland who will happily cook venison for their guests along with their vegan dishes. They understand that it’s a choice for them, but maybe not a choice for you. Here’s your delicious savory barbecued wild meat. Would they were all like that.
But I digress. Being at a Buddhist temple in Chengdu made the whole thing tolerable. Chengdu was not like Beijing that was accustomed to foreign tourists and was a fully modern 21st Century city. Chengdu was still up and coming, as it were, and didn’t have all the modern conveniences or crowds of tourists that Beijing had. And though Wenshu was locally famous and even attracted a fair amount of Chinese tourists, there weren’t many Westerners there, not in 2002 anyway.
We entered a gate into a kind of garden courtyard. Several of us lingered in the garden for a minute or two. It had a splendiferous bucolic quality to it even though it was in the heart of the city. It reminded me of rural restaurants back in America that seem to be in the middle of nowhere but that city and suburban dwellers will drive an hour to in order to relax and enjoy a spectacular meal.
There was a rack of some kind out front and a fish pond along the front, I think. We paused here momentarily to take in the aroma and the sight. It was difficult being rushed to meals when practically everything in the country was interesting, strange, or unusual to a first time visitor. Just walking down an everyday, ordinary street in China was a spectacle for us at that time, the same way such a walk down a plain old ordinary street in America could be for a first time visitor from China.
Finally, our tour guide, Lixiao, came out to tell us and hurry up because lunch was about to be served. One of my best friends, Rob, was on the trip with me as well as my mom. The three of us turned to join Lixiao and the others inside. We entered the restaurant, saw our table and started moving towards it.
But then, suddenly, strangely, in the most immediate yet gentle and mysterious way possible, the atmosphere changed. And there beyond the tables, as if stepping into our world from another dimension, came Lao Shouxing!
Rob and I looked in bewilderment at one another and then at my mom. As if the whole place were in slow motion, the restaurant staff—hostesses, waitresses, bus boys, managers—turned and gaped to see this little fellow coming. Their eyes swelled with astonishment and wonder at what was happening.
Lao Shouxing strolled right over to me and Rob as if running into old friends (遇见, in Chinese) and greeted us silently. He place his hands on us, smiled jovially, and never spoke once. He didn’t speak a word of Chinese nor English nor make any sound except to let out a joyful squeal every few minutes. He was carrying an old style tobacco pipe of wood and brass, the equivalent of the old 18th century clay pipes back home, instead of his staff and peach.
He sat down at the table next to Rob and I. Someone, I don’t remember who, tried to take our picture. He stopped them. Then he reached into his robe and pulled out two perfectly laminated photos. He held one and insisted I hold the other while our picture was taken.
Some of the ladies on the tour came around to our table. He kibitzed with us a while, joking particularly about our cameras. When someone would try to take his picture, he’d cover his face. Or he’d take someone else's camera and hold it up as if to take a picture, and gesture to us to take a picture of him taking a picture. His head rocked back with laughter, but no sound came out. It was bizarre, confounding, strange, and yet, a mysteriously joyous occasion.
This whole time the restaurant staff had stopped working and stared in bovine amazement at the scene unfolding around them.
Lao Shouxing got up and wandered outside with some of the group members in pursuit. Rob and I got up to see what was going on out there. It was more posing, picture taking and kibitzing. The old god of longevity was laughing and smiling the entire time.
“Who is that guy?” I asked Lixiao.
She was still staring with crazed bewilderment at him and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t he work here? Is he like some actor they hire for the tourists?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been here a lot of times and I’ve never seen him.”
“Does the staff know who he is? It looks like he might have come from the back in the kitchen or something.”
Lixiao inquired of the staff. They exchanged words back and forth with that pleading, confused look on their faces that begs for sense and reason from someone! Shrugging of shoulders; shaking of heads; fearful, pleading expressions. I knew the result before the answer was given.
“They never saw him before. They don’t know who he is or where he came from.”
The ladies came back in from outside. We looked outside and didn’t see the guy anywhere.
“Where’d that guy go?” we asked.
“Oh we just left him there by the……” They’re voices trailed off as they turned to point and saw no one where they knew he should be. He had disappeared as mysteriously as he’d arrived.
They shrugged their shoulders and went towards the table to eat. “I guess he just left.”
Rob and I, who have seen and done things just as strange and mysterious as this, if not more so, knew all too well what “just left” could mean in this case. We'd seen the ghosts of Lenape Indians in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, we'd seen a shaman shapeshift before our very eyes, we'd seen people go invisible while looking right at them, and done it ourselves, then walked right through a crowd of people who were looking for us without being seen.
We viewed each other with big, shit-eating grins on our faces. No words were necessary. We didn't know Lao Shouxing by name at the time, but we recognized the funny little old guy from paintings and figurines and knew we had just took part in something remarkable. We nodded to each other and went and sat down again to eat, with those big shit-eating grins on our faces the whole time. Just another magnificent adventure for Thorny and Rob in the bigger adventure of the Universe. Glad Mom was there too.
