Buddhist Tales of Lü Dongbin

Abstract

During the early thirteenth century, a story began to appear within texts associated with the Chan 禪 Buddhist movement, which portrays an encounter between the eminent transcendent Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓 and the Chan monk Huanglong Huiji 黃龍誨機 that results in Lü abandoning his alchemical techniques of self-cultivation and taking up the practice of Chan. This article traces the development of this tale across a number of Buddhist sources of the late imperial period, and also examines the ways in which later Buddhist and Daoist authors understood the story and utilized it in advancing their own polemical claims. Au début du treizième siècle apparaît dans les textes du bouddhisme Chan un récit qui met en scène une rencontre entre le célèbre immortel Lü Dongbin et le moine Chan Huanglong Huiji. Au terme de cette rencontre, Lü abandonne ses pratiques alchimiques de perfectionnement de soi et adopte celle de la méditation Chan. Le présent article retrace le développement de ce thème narratif au travers des sources bouddhiques de la fin de l’époque impériale, et examine la manière dont des auteurs bouddhistes et taoïstes ont compris le récit et l’ont manipulé en fonction de leurs propres objectifs polémiques.

Ritual, Legend, and Metaphor: Narratives of the Willow in Yuan Zaju

“…Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein (1986) has clarified some basic aspects about him in early legends that were created in the Northern Song dynasty, which were mainly hued with the color of Daoism. Other studies have, from different perspectives, showed that stories about Lü were tapped by other beliefs, for example, Buddhism (Capitanio 2016). Artistic and literary representations of Lü are so abundant and complex (as partly shown in (Katz 1999)) that the figure can be viewed as a cultural symbol for the expression of various ideas, mostly associated with religion and folk beliefs alike.…”