Southern Song Daoist born Ge Changgeng, styled Haiqiongzi, an inner-alchemy theorist regarded as the effective founder of the Southern branch of the Golden Elixir school and honoured as a patriarch of the Shenxiao school.
Mural guide
In a temple courtyard at dusk, a great bronze bell hangs at the right and incense smoke rises from a bronze urn; monks in orange robes and plainly dressed visitors walk toward a lamplit hall, lotus flowers bloom in a stone basin, and a gold prayer wheel stands at the left.
Bai Yuchan, born Ge Changgeng, took the surname Bai when his mother remarried; his courtesy name was Ruhui, also Ziqing, and his style names were Haiqiongzi and Wuyi Sanren. His family came from Minqing in Fujian and he was born at Qiongshan in Qiongzhou (modern Hainan). A Southern Song Daoist and theorist of inner alchemy who taught the joint cultivation of nature and life, he is regarded as the effective founder of the Southern branch of the Golden Elixir school, counted among the Five Southern Patriarchs, and honoured by the Shenxiao school as well. His writings include the Yulong Ji, Shangqing Ji and Wuyi Ji; disciples compiled the Haiqiong Yuchan Xiansheng Wenji, and thunder-rite texts of his are in the Daofa Huiyuan.
Life and times
UnknownBornSongBirth year given variously as 1134 or 1194; died c. 1229 CE
UnknownDied
Records
Took disciples in 1217 and ended single transmission in the Southern School
Jiading 10 of the Southern Song (1217)
Bai Yuchan, born Ge Changgeng, was a Southern Song Daoist and a theorist of inner alchemy who held that nature and life should be cultivated together. He is generally held to have organized the community of the Southern School of the Golden Elixir. In 1217 he took Peng Helin and Liu Yuanchang as disciples, breaking with the single transmission usual in the school from Zhang Boduan to Chen Nan; the Shenxiao school also honors him as one of its founders.
Poems, rhapsodies and calligraphy, with writings in circulation
Southern Song
Bai Yuchan wrote poems and rhapsodies and was also skilled in calligraphy and painting. His works in circulation include the Yulong, Shangqing and Wuyi collections, and Peng Si compiled his writings as the Collected Works of Haiqiong Yuchan. At twenty-one he said of himself that there was no book of the three teachings he had not studied.
Song