Insight Editions · No. 432
The Sages of China
The Adepts in the Eastern Esoteric Tradition, Part Three
Manly P. Hall
Hall's 1957 study of China's adept tradition: Lao-tse, Confucius, Mencius, Kuan Yin and the Lohans, the Taoist Immortals, the Eight Immortals, the Hung Society and inner alchemy.
A study guide to The Sages of China by Manly P. Hall (Part Three of The Adepts in the Eastern Esoteric Tradition, The Sages of China, Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, 1957; introduction dated March 1957). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
Hall argues that China had its own Adept tradition, carried by three kinds of illumined beings: the Confucian Sage, the Buddhist Lohan and the Taoist Immortal. Behind the legends, the secret societies and the alchemists' furnaces he finds one conviction, that a hidden school of perfected men works to regenerate the person and restore the Golden Age.
SCOPE
An introduction and ten sections: the three classes of Chinese illuminates, Lao-tse and the Vinegar Tasters, Confucius, Mencius, Buddhism in China (Kuan Yin, Maitreya, the Lohans), the Taoist Adepts and their paradises, the Eight Immortals one by one, early Christian influence, the Chinese secret societies with the Hung League, and Oriental alchemy from the furnace to inner cultivation.
KEY FIGURES
Lao-tse; Yin Hsi; Confucius; Ching-tsai; Mencius; Chuang Tzu; Wang Yang-ming; Kuan Yin (Miao Shan); Maitreya; Bodhidharma; Hsi Wang Mu; Tung Wang Kung; Li T'ieh-kuai; Chung-li Ch'uan; Lu Tung-pin; Lan Ts'ai-ho; Chang-Kuo; Han Hsiang Tzu; Ts'ao Kuo-chiu; Ho Hsien-ku; St. Thomas; Chang Tao-ling; Chang Po-tuan; Sun Yat-sen; J. S. M. Ward; Arthur Waley.
BEST FOR
Readers of Hall's adept series, students of Taoism and Chinese religion who want the esoteric reading stated plainly, and anyone curious about the Eight Immortals, the Hung Society or inner alchemy.
The Book on One Page
China's adept tradition in three costumes: the scholar-Sage, the Buddhist saint and the Taoist Immortal, all serving one hidden school.
This is the third part of Hall's survey of the adepts in the Eastern esoteric tradition, and it turns from India to China. The claim is stated in the introduction and pressed to the last page. The Chinese believed in superior human beings who had perfected their nature by divine arts, who could heal, foresee and teach, and who passed a secret learning to disciples under discipline. Hall calls these beings the Sages of China and treats them as the Eastern equivalent of the Western Adepts.
He sorts them into three classes. The Confucian scholar argued logic in a bamboo grove; the wandering monk or priest gained inner vision from the secret books of his order; and the Taoist Immortal Mortal lived on the border between the seen and the unseen. The book moves through all three, then through the secret societies that dramatised their teaching and the alchemy that tried to work it in the laboratory and, later, in the body.
Two kinds of knowledge exist, the traditional and the esoteric, and the second descends through illumined orders of teachers. That sentence is the book's spine. Every legend in it is read as a veil over this second knowledge.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Introduction | China had cabalism, astrology and alchemy, and its Sages are the Holy Men of India in Chinese dress. |
| 1 | The Sages of China | Confucian Sages, Buddhist Lohans and Taoist Immortals bear witness to one esoteric knowledge. |
| 2 | The Ancient Masters and Lao-tse | The Vinegar Tasters show the triad; Lao-tse leaves the Tao Teh King at the western gate and vanishes. |
| 3 | Confucius | Born amid omens and the Chi-lin, the "throneless king" taught ethics that still rest on Heaven. |
| 4 | Mencius | The "Number Two Saint" made man's nature good and refused salaries to keep his voice free. |
| 5 | Buddhism in China | Avalokiteshvara becomes Kuan Yin, Maitreya laughs, and the Lohans form an invisible empire. |
| 6 | The Taoist Adepts | The Holy, the Perfect and the Immortals live in mountain paradises under Hsi Wang Mu. |
| 7 | The Eight Immortals | Eight lives, each a lesson in detachment, read as initiation stories. |
| 8 | Early Christian Influence in China | St. Thomas, Gnostics and Nestorians may have fed China's esoteric revival. |
| 9 | Chinese Secret Societies | The Hung League claims 1,800 years and a ritual of death, judgment and rebirth. |
| 10 | Oriental Alchemy | Taoist alchemy moves from transmutation of metals to the regeneration of the person. |
Read it as a comparative essay with a thesis already fixed. Hall gathers good material from Legge, Werner, Giles, Ward and Waley, and retells the legends with affection. The useful habit is to separate what Chinese tradition actually says from Hall's equation of it with the Western Mysteries, which is his frame and not the tradition's.
"The Master Adept of alchemy was the just monarch, the Grand Master of the Philosophic Empire." The book ends with the alchemist as ruler, not as goldmaker.
THE CLOSING IMAGEThe Order of the Builders in China
China absorbed every foreign creed and made it Chinese, and Hall sees the same hidden science of the Immortals running beneath all of them.
A world to itself. The Middle Kingdom, Hall says, transmuted with "patient alchemy" all that was not Chinese into "that which is forever Chinese." It had its own cabalism, astrology, numerology, alchemy and spiritism, and its old writings abound in hints of disciplines meant to awaken extra-sensory powers. It would be inconceivable, he argues, that the Adept tradition should not have arisen there.
The language barrier. Few Western scholars could read Chinese, and fewer were sensitive to its mystical overtones. Even so, enough survives to show that the Chinese believed in perfected human beings who could foresee events, heal the sick and raise the dead, and who shared a secret learning open only to disciples of qualified teachers.
"The Chinese Sages, therefore, belong to the Order of the Builders." Hall casts them as builders of an everlasting house raised without the sound of hammers, the Masonic image he carries through the whole series.
The argument begins from its conclusion: it "would be inconceivable" for China to lack the Adept tradition. That is a premise, not a finding, and it frames every later legend as confirmation.
The Sages of China
Sage, Lohan and Immortal: three Chinese answers to the question of what a human being can become.
The triad of teachers. Chinese moral and mystical life rests on Lao-tse, Confucius and Buddha. Each was surrounded by portents, each founded a school that hardened into a religion, and each was raised by popular regard to a divine or semi-divine estate.
The Confucian Sage. In the strict sense, the Chinese Sage followed Confucius: a sober man devoted to learning and the ethical improvement of society, consulted by emperors, entrusted with the young, much like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. He was often suspected of knowing more than he revealed, but he stressed what served the public good.
Lohans and Immortals. Buddhism and Taoism added orders of transcendentalists. The Buddhist Lohans (Arhats) began as Buddha's disciples and grew from sixteen or eighteen to five hundred and beyond. The Taoist Immortals arose in Taoism's second, metaphysical period, when mystics claimed instruction from earlier saints in dreams and visions.
The projection of man. Hall's key move is psychological. The Immortals, he writes, "were the projection of man himself": the human conviction that spiritual freedom is locked within, and that beings superior to us must exist, much like St. Paul's thrones and dominions. They neither hunger nor thirst and live free of corrupt governments, yet, properly asked, can help improve human conduct.
Every person carries an Immortal Mortal within, "forever striving to outgrow the earth." The legends show the road, and the Immortal is a picture of the human potential fully released.
Chuang Tzu and Wang Yang-ming. Hall quotes Chuang Tzu (4th to 3rd centuries B.C.) through Giles's translation: the Sage's birth is "the will of God," and "the true Sage folds the universe in his bosom." Much later, Wang Yang-ming (1472 to 1529), a monistic idealist, held that every person can know and must perfect that capacity in daily conduct; the Sage "may be compared to heaven."
| Writer | Image of the Sage |
|---|---|
| Chuang Tzu | Shares the passivity of yin and the energy of yang; takes no credit for realities |
| Chi Ch'e in Chuang Tzu | Governs by changing hearts, so the people do not notice his influence |
| Wang Yang-ming | Returns to original intuitive knowledge; omniscient only of natural law |
| Mencius (story of the corn) | Growth cannot be forced by pulling at it |
The canonised dead. The structure kept growing. Nearly every esteemed person was posthumously raised to some dignity: emperors, generals, poets, scholars and ancestors. There were deities of doorways, moats, walls, cellars, inns, bridges and the hearth, and most of them, unlike Greek nymphs and dryads, could be traced to real people once honoured in life. The pantheon, Hall says, swelled "to huge proportions."
The idealistic realist. The typical scholar-philosopher joined strict logic to intuition. He venerated tradition but read it symbolically, lived privately like a Hindu holy man, and wrote with care for reason. Like Plato he affirmed the gods, yet held that every person is responsible for his own destiny.
The summary. All three groups held that traditional knowledge and esoteric knowledge both exist, that the second is superior and has always been in the world, and that it descends through hierarchies of teachers as "a perfect science or method of human regeneration."
The three-class scheme is useful, but it flattens real differences. Confucian thought largely avoided talk of spirits ("not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?"), and Chuang Tzu often mocks the very sage-rulers Hall admires. Calling all of them witnesses to one secret science is Hall's synthesis, not something the sources state.
The Ancient Masters and Lao-tse
Three Masters taste the vinegar of life, and the oldest calls it sweet, then rides west and leaves one small book behind.
The Vinegar Tasters. A well-known painting shows three old men around a vinegar vat. The vat is life. Buddha tastes and calls it bitter; Confucius calls it sour; Lao-tse calls it sweet. Hall reads the joke closely: Confucius states a fact, Buddha finds existence a little more acid than the facts justify, and Lao-tse has transmuted the substance of worldliness by the alchemy of consciousness.
| Master | Verdict | Hall's reading |
|---|---|---|
| Buddha | Bitter | Existence as suffering, perhaps overstated |
| Confucius | Sour | A factual report, neither optimistic nor pessimistic |
| Lao-tse | Sweet | Consciousness transmutes the taste of the world |
Accept all three. The thoughtful Chinese, Hall says, does not choose: "if one belief is good, two are better, and three are best." The three teachers are the "unsceptered sovereigns" of the empire of reality.
An obscure life. Lao-tse was born, by tradition, about 604 B.C., a contemporary of Pythagoras, under a peach tree and amid comets. Translated literally, his birthplace was "Oppressed Benevolence" in the "Parish of Cruelty," the "District of Bitterness" and the "State of Suffering." Hall notes the allegory but warns that each name can be read more than one way.
Many incarnations. Taoist tradition made his life under the Chou his tenth incarnation, perhaps echoing Vishnu's tenth avatar. About A.D. 1230 a series of paintings of his eighty-one incarnations, including Buddha, caused a quarrel with the Buddhists. Gordon even read texts on his "rebirth in the land of Hu" as pointing to Jesus.
"There is an Infinite Being which was before Heaven and Earth. How calm it is, how free! ... I know not its name. I call it Tao."
LAO-TSE ON TAOThe waif. Hall quotes the strange self-portrait of section XX: "I am but a waif, a stray, a child without a home ... I alone am dull ... but I glory on the breast of my mother!" And the closing lines: "Sincere words are not grand ... The learned do not know it." Such a teacher, he says, could not be easily understood by the worldly. Church Fathers, he adds, saw in Lao-tse a primitive Christianity, and his saying that Tao is "revealed to babes" sounds close to Jesus.
The meeting with Confucius. In 517 B.C., by Sze-ma Ch'ien's account, the young Confucius visited the old curator of the royal library at Lo-yang. Lao-tse told him the ancients were dust and only their words remained, and to "put away your proud air and many desires." Tao, he said, cannot be handed on through eyes and ears; it is received only by "the heaven-loving." Confucius later said: "Today I have seen Lao-tse, and can only compare him to the dragon."
The city of the Adepts. Mystics said Lao-tse sought the garden of the wise by Mount Kwen Lun. Hall quotes Maurice Magre's novel, in which Lao-tse foresees two brothers joining him in a hidden valley: the man from India and the man from "the marble temples at the edge of the blue sea," Pythagoras. In the 7th century the T'ang canonised him as "The Emperor-God of the Dark First Cause," later simply "The Ancient Master."
Lao-tse's followers drifted from his simple way, and their commentaries obscured the original. Hall still calls Taoism China's principal school of indigenous mysticism, an escape from the formality of the Chinese life-way that survives in the arts.
Hall uses Magre's novel as if it were a mystical witness, and Gordon's Lao-tse-as-Jesus reading rests on a text Hall himself could not check. Modern scholarship treats the Lao-tse biography as largely legendary and the Tao Teh King as a layered compilation. The meeting with Confucius is, as Hall admits, probably doctrine dressed as history.
Confucius
A birth announced by a unicorn, a life spent reviving the rites, and a death foretold by the same unicorn slain in a hunt.
The birth legend. His mother Ching-tsai was seventeen; her husband was nearly seventy. She prayed on Mount Mi, and the leaves bowed to her. A black deity promised a sage born in "a hollow mulberry tree." In a trance she saw five old men, the essences of the five planets, leading a one-horned, scaled creature that dropped a jade tablet: "The son of the essence of water shall succeed to the decaying Chou, and be a throneless king." She tied a ribbon on its horn.
Signs at the birth. Two dragons kept watch, two spirit ladies poured fragrance, a warm spring rose and dried, and heavenly music sounded. The child bore the forty-nine marks of a noble body and on his breast the words "the charm of making ceremonies and setting the world in order." The Shantung tablets at the temple of Chufu picture these scenes.
The unicorn and the Adept. Hall links the Chi-lin to Pliny's monoceros, the Hebrew reem and European alchemy, and to Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. Like the Adept, the unicorn "can neither be tamed nor captured, but will follow docilely those of perfect faith and gentleness."
The career. His father died when he was three; his mother shaped his reverence. At seventeen he was inspector of the corn-marts, then of pastures and flocks. When his mother died he revived the old law of resigning office and mourned three years, spent in study. He then taught through the states, at one time with five hundred mandarins among his followers.
| Teaching | Analects |
|---|---|
| "What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to them." | 15:23 |
| Virtue in government is like the pole star, round which all stars turn | 2:1 |
| From fifteen bent on learning to seventy following the heart without transgressing | 2:4 |
| "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." | 2:15 |
Against Legge. Hall disputes Dr. Legge's charge that Confucius was unreligious. A man who said "he who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray," who revered the I Ching and performed the rites as if the spirits were present, was a theist whose aim was perfect virtue in this life. The seven steps of the Great Learning run from investigating things to governing the state.
At sixty-seven he retired to Lu and founded a school, refusing to become a recluse: "I am a man, and cannot exclude myself from the society of men." He had over three thousand students and seventy-two disciples. In 481 B.C. a slain beast was brought to him; he knew it as the Lin, still bearing, legend says, his mother's ribbon, and cried, "The course of my doctrines is run." He died in 479 B.C., calm, believing he had failed.
The birth miracles come from late Han and post-Han legend, not from the Analects, which show a teacher who "did not speak of prodigies." Hall is fair to Confucius against Legge, but his Confucius is built partly from the sources Confucius himself would have kept at arm's length.
Mencius
In an age of cynics, Mencius declared human nature good and kept his independence by never taking a salary.
The setting. After Confucius came the Warring States: princes fought, scholars served tyrants, and a disillusioned humanism neglected the old teachings. Mencius (Mang-tse, about 371 to 288 B.C.), a contemporary of Aristotle and Zeno, set out to rescue them.
Metaphysician and reformer. Where Confucius was the practical philosopher, Mencius was the metaphysician, the "Number Two Saint." He went from ruler to ruler for twenty years seeking one prince who would hand him the government. None did, partly because he was outspoken to the point of violence and frightened statesmen.
Independence. He refused questioners who presumed on rank, talent, age or old acquaintance, and told a would-be neighbour: "The way of truth is like a great road ... Do you go home and search for it." Because he never took a salary, he could speak freely and leave when he chose.
Every Chinese schoolboy's primer, the Three Character Classic, opens: "Man's nature is originally good." That is Mencius. "The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart."
- Programme. Make the people prosperous and see that they are well educated.
- Lineage. "Although I could not be a disciple of Confucius myself," he learned from those who were.
- Honour. Han Yu said that without him "we should have been buttoning the lappets of our coats on the left side," that is, living as barbarians.
Hall gives Mencius little that is esoteric, and that is honest. The chapter fits the Adept thesis only through the claim that a Sage seeks a ruler to transform the state, a reading that suits Mencius's politics better than any secret doctrine.
Buddhism in China
Buddhism became Chinese: Avalokiteshvara turned into the mother goddess Kuan Yin, Maitreya into a laughing monk, and the Lohans into an invisible empire.
Arrival. Buddhism came, by tradition, under Emperor Ming Ti about A.D. 67, and slowly took on a Chinese complexion. Taoism stressed spirits, Confucianism ancestors; Buddhism offered a teaching centred on the individual and his needs. Confucianism, on its intellectual level, was least affected.
Justice and mercy. The Chinese, Hall says, "live in a universe in which justice and mercy parallel each other, but do not always meet." Early monks built temples in Chinese style and wore Chinese robes, as Christian missionaries later would.
Avalokiteshvara to Kuan Yin. The male or androgynous bodhisattva of mercy, emanation of Amitabha, giver of Om Mani Padme Hum, became by T'ang times the queen Kuan Shih Yin, "the One Who Hears" the prayers of all mortals. Werner: "As Mary is the guiding spirit of Rome, so is Kuan Yin of the Buddhist faith."
Princess Miao Shan refused the marriage her ambitious father demanded. He punished her and ordered her death, but the Immortals had the earth god, in the form of a tiger, carry her to P'u T'o Island, where she lived nine years and reached perfection. They proclaimed her the "Very Merciful and Very Compassionate Pu-sa," sovereign of the Southern Seas. P'u T'o still holds nearly a hundred monasteries.
Maitreya. The Buddha to Come, nearest Buddhist equivalent of a Messiah, waits in the Tushita Heaven to appear five thousand years after Gautama. In China he became Pu Tai, the rotund "calico-bag monk" with children around him. The Lama Temple in Peking holds a sandalwood Maitreya about seventy-five feet high.
| Figure | Indian origin | Chinese form |
|---|---|---|
| Avalokiteshvara | Male bodhisattva of mercy | Kuan Yin, mother and protector |
| Maitreya | Future Buddha in Tushita | Pu Tai, the Laughing Buddha |
| The Arhats | Disciples of Gautama | Eighteen Lohans with T'ang likenesses |
| Patriarchs | Indian lineage | Bodhidharma, 28th, then five more to 33 |
The Eighteen Lohans. The circle is essentially Hindu: Pindola, Kanaka, Nandimitra, Rahula the son of Buddha, Nagasena, Ajita who is Maitreya, and others. China's contribution was the likenesses, painted by T'ang artists, so that the saints took on Chinese features and dress. Each carries his own traditional symbols, and in Hall's reading the Hung ritual's "man who is waited for" is probably Maitreya.
The invisible empire. Each Lohan has a station and a retinue of 500 to 1,600 lesser saints. The Arhats stand on the third to fifth of ten levels of attainment. Hall concludes that they form "an invisible empire of meditating monks," citizens of a Philosophic Empire and servants of the King of the World beyond the snowy mountains, no different from the Hindu Mahatmas and Rishis.
Several details are shaky. The Miao Shan legend took its standard form in the 12th century A.D., not the 7th century B.C. of its plot, and Maitreya statues "as early as 390 B.C." have no support, the earliest being Gandharan, around the 2nd century A.D. The "King of the World" is a Theosophical figure, not a Chinese Buddhist one.
The Taoist Adepts
The Taoists ranked their supernatural Sages in three grades and housed them in mountain and island paradises ruled by the Royal Mother of the West.
Real persons. Ferguson writes that the Immortals look human, wear ordinary clothes and, at death, rise "to the immortal ether." They have fixed abodes, know one another and communicate by what the West now calls extra-sensory perception. Hall calls them "citizens of an over-state" with their own rulers, accepting a few qualified disciples. Ferguson adds the plain reading: they were "persons who retired to the mountains for study and meditation."
The Lohans of Kashmir. About the beginning of the Christian era, Lohans from Kashmir brought "the Doctrine of the Heart" to China and, like the Taoist hermits, retired to the mountains, where many believe they still live. Hall adds that Abbé Huc had trouble with his church for describing the powers of Mongolian and Tibetan mystics, and that impartial witnesses describe the Immortal as a real person versed in yogic, vedantic and tantric disciplines.
The paradises. Hindu Mount Meru gave China the idea of a Mountain of the Gods ringed with hermitages. Taoism had "The Mountains of the Immortals" and the Three Isles of the Blessed in the Eastern Sea, reachable only with the Sages' help; those who sought without invitation lost their way or died.
Bishop Delaplace reported that emperors sent deputations in times of danger to the Sheu and Kiuay, genii of the mountains whom missionaries called Satanic. Blavatsky concluded they were Lohans or Adepts living in solitude. Hall adds Yao's five old men, spirits of the planets who flew to the Pleiades, and Marco Polo's oath that he had told "not one half" of what he saw.
Hsi Wang Mu. The Royal Mother of the West, born of the pure essence of the western air, reigns on Mount K'un-lun in a golden palace 333 miles round. Her peaches of immortality ripen once in three thousand years, and their ripening calls the Peach Assembly, which DuBose called "a great ecumenical council of gods." Her consort Tung Wang Kung, the yang principle of the East, keeps the register of the Immortals.
| Paradise | Ruler | Parallel Hall draws |
|---|---|---|
| Western Paradise, K'un-lun | Hsi Wang Mu | Sumeru, Juno, the Queen of Sheba |
| Eastern Heaven | Tung Wang Kung | The yang principle, registrar |
| Buddhist Western Paradise | Amitabha and Kuan Yin | The Mother of Mysteries, the Alma Mater |
| Hung legend | Boat to the west, bridge to the City of Willows | The Mother Lodge |
The soul's octave. Hall ties the Eight Immortals to the eight principles of the soul taught in Egypt and Greece and to the eight trigrams, yin and yang with three sons and three daughters. The journey to the golden palace of beauty and compassion is the soul's search for itself.
Behind the king and queen of the Immortals stands, Hall suggests, a veiled reference to the Hierophants or Adept-princes of the Secret Schools. The Taoist paradise is the lodge drawn in clouds.
Hall treats missionary rumour, Blavatsky and Marco Polo as converging witnesses, though they are of very different kinds. Hsi Wang Mu also has a documented history he mentions only in passing: she began as a fierce goddess of plague and became the gentle queen of longevity in the Han period.
The Eight Immortals
Eight characters from every walk of life, each finding the Way by a different door, read by Hall as eight lessons of initiation.
The Pa Hsien. The name joins the characters for man and hill: they are the "men of the mountain." They can raise the dead, vanish, transmute metals and protect devotees, yet have no temples. The group took its present form in the late Sung or early Yuan, about A.D. 1200. In the Hung ritual, a candidate must name them and their attributes.
| Immortal | Emblem | Patron of |
|---|---|---|
| Li T'ieh-kuai | Iron crutch and gourd | Astrologers and magicians |
| Chung-li Ch'uan | Fan that revives the dead | Alchemists and chemists |
| Lu Tung-pin | Magic sword and fly-whisk | Scholars, barbers, the sick |
| Lan Ts'ai-ho | Basket of flowers, reed pipe | Florists |
| Chang-Kuo | Paper mule and bamboo drum | Artists and scribes |
| Han Hsiang Tzu | Flute and basket of peaches | Musicians |
| Ts'ao Kuo-chiu | Court tablets | The theatre |
| Ho Hsien-ku | Lotus or peach | The household |
Li T'ieh-kuai. A handsome scholar meditated forty years and was taught by Lao-tse to leave his body. He told a disciple to burn his body if he did not return in seven days. The disciple, called to his dying mother, burned it on the sixth. Li returned to find only a lame beggar's corpse available and entered it. Lao-tse told him to stay and "perfect his attitude of total indifference," and gave him a golden headband and an iron crutch.
Chung-li Ch'uan. A Han marshal, or a defeated vice-marshal, or a Taoist priest who made silver to feed the poor in famine. The wall of his stone house split to reveal a jade casket of scrolls on immortality; his room filled with coloured light, and a stork carried him away.
Lu Tung-pin. Born, by record, in A.D. 798, a top examination scholar who met a fire dragon and won a magic sword. Taught by Chung-li, he passed ten temptations, which Hall reads as initiation. As an oil-seller he searched a year for one customer who did not haggle, found an honest old woman, and turned her well to wine.
Chang-Kuo rode backwards on a white paper mule that went thousands of miles a day and folded into his wallet. The court magician Yeh Fa-shan revealed that he was "a white spiritual bat which came out of primeval chaos," fell dead, and was revived only when the emperor went barefoot to beg Chang-Kuo's pardon. When his disciples opened his tomb, it was empty.
After the crutch. Li's first act in his new body was to go to the house of the careless disciple and restore his mother to life with medicine from his gourd. He chose friends among the poor, slept each night inside his hung-up gourd, and at last stepped onto a leaf on the water and floated away to the land of the Immortals. A scroll of vapour rising from his gourd shows the spirit free of the body.
Lan Ts'ai-ho. A singer of disputed sex, in a tattered blue robe and one shoe, who slept in snow and scattered coins for the poor. The songs mocked worldly pleasure; Hall compares them to the troubadours whose ballads hid the teachings of the Mysteries.
Han Hsiang Tzu. Nephew of the T'ang statesman Han Yu, who scorned magic. Under a pot he grew two peonies bearing a poem that foretold his uncle's exile, and later gave him a remedy and the promise of return. Falling from the peach tree of the genii, he reached immortality while passing through the invisible worlds. His flute drew animals, like Orpheus.
Ts'ao Kuo-chiu and Ho Hsien-ku. Ts'ao, ashamed of a dissolute royal brother ("you can never elude the net of Heaven"), went to the mountains. Asked which Way he followed, he pointed to the sky, and the seven Immortals gave him the eighth grotto. Ho Hsien-ku, the one woman, ate powdered "mother of pearl" stone, floated from peak to peak, needed no food, and was given the gentle task of sweeping fallen flowers at the South Gate of Heaven.
Each Immortal "came in the end to the fulfillment of his quest," like the knights of the Grail. The legends are initiation stories in folk dress, read by each reader according to his own mind.
These are folk and theatrical legends shaped over a thousand years, and Hall reads every test and gift as a veiled degree. A slip shows the looseness: Ts'ao Kuo-chiu was by tradition the brother of Empress Ts'ao, consort of Emperor Jen Tsung, not of an "Empress Jen Tsung."
Early Christian Influence in China
St. Thomas, the Gnostics and the Nestorians may have carried Western Mysteries east at the very time China's own esoteric orders took shape.
St. Thomas. Eusebius gave Parthia to the apostle Thomas, a vast region in Hall's reading. The Malabar breviary says "by St. Thomas was the Kingdom of Heaven extended even to China," and Syrian Christians said he preached at the Great Khan's city before his martyrdom about A.D. 68.
Ming Ti's dream. The emperor's vision of a golden figure recalled the saying "the Holy One is in the West," and he sent envoys who brought back Buddhist teachers. Kesson suggested Christians could have been among them.
The timing. The Acts of Thomas was branded heretical in the 4th century for Gnostic and Manichaean colouring. Hall's point is coincidence of dates: in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., Chinese religion changed deeply, Mahayana rose, Taoism entered its magical phase, and the secret societies trace their origins to the same years. Ward, he notes, saw Chinese society symbolism as derived partly from outside China.
Gnostics and Manichaeans taught a two-fold division of sacred knowledge: ancient traditions hide spiritual truths under allegory, and keys are needed to unlock them. Hall finds the same pattern in every school in this book.
Hall admits "the necessary records are imperfect," and that is the chapter's whole problem. Christianity's documented arrival in China is Alopen's mission of A.D. 635, recorded on the Nestorian Stele of 781. The Thomas mission to China is pious legend, and coincidence of dates does not show influence.
Chinese Secret Societies
The Hung League, called the Freemasonry of China, claims 1,800 years of descent and stages the soul's journey through death, judgment and rebirth.
Old and many. Secret societies existed "from time immemorial," spiritual in one century, political in the next. Historians divide: were they many short-lived bodies, or branches of one fraternity surviving beneath the surface of Chinese culture? Hall leans to the second.
The Hung League. Conventional history dates it to the late 17th century; the candidate is told it has existed at least 1,800 years. Ward and Stirling open their study with the claim that, like Freemasonry, it is "a lineal descendant of the Ancient Mysteries," and that its ritual deals with what befalls a man after death: the Hung Boat recalls the solar barque of Ra, and the soul is weighed as in the Book of the Dead.
| Society | What Hall reports |
|---|---|
| Red Cap Rebels and Red Eyebrows | Scholar and peasant risings against the Han |
| White Lily | Monks and lay members sworn to restore the Ming |
| Golden Orchid | Young women sworn never to marry |
| Queen of Heaven | Spread to Cochin China, Siam and Korea |
| Hung League (Triad) | "Flood the earth," led by an elder brother and two younger |
Initiation. Lodges are governed by five Masters. The candidate enters the Hall of Fidelity under a bridge of swords, takes the oath, has his queue cut, puts on a white robe, and receives a diploma and a manual of signs. A brother could make himself known by how he entered a house, held his umbrella or picked up a cup of tea.
Names that teach. Hall lists the society names: The Family of the Queen of Heaven, The Society of Heaven and Earth, The Incense Burners, The Pill of Immortality, The Non-Acting, The Pre-Celestial, The Perfect Intelligence. Each points back to Buddhist, Taoist or Confucian ideas, and each carries a social or political charge drawn from some old precept.
Elder Brothers. Ward suggests the "Elder Brothers" may once have meant beings far higher in spiritual evolution who act as "overseers" of humanity. Hall seizes on this: the Hung Lodge is an island of integrity, a model like More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun and Bacon's college.
Hall notes that Sun Yat-sen, a Christian and a modern man, belonged to the Hung Society and resigned only on becoming president. The League, he says, "certainly contributed to the establishment of the Chinese Republic."
The 1,800-year claim is the society's own legend, and the Qing records place the Heaven and Earth Society's founding in the 1760s. Hall also blurs several things: the Red Eyebrows rose about A.D. 18, not 185; the White Lotus tradition is medieval, and his "five monks" are the Triad's own founding legend; the Hung societies were also, at times, protection rackets and criminal networks.
Oriental Alchemy
Taoist alchemy began at the furnace and ended in the body: the true lead and mercury, Hall says, were always within the alchemist.
The first Taoist Pope. Chang Tao-ling, born about A.D. 35, read Lao-tse's deepest books by age seven, refused imperial honours and retired to the western mountains. Lao-tse appeared in a vision with the formula of the elixir; a genie led him to the stone house on Po-sung Mountain and the writings of the three ancient emperors. He could walk among the stars and command winds and thunder. Having made the pill, he took only half, to stay until his disciples were taught, and departed at 123. His heirs, each a reincarnation of the last, still headed the sect.
East and West at once. Western philosophical alchemy appears with Zosimus, Synesius and Olympiodorus in the 3rd to 5th centuries; a Roman embassy reached China under Marcus Aurelius. Obed Simon Johnson thought Chinese ideas may have travelled west by caravan, reaching the Arabs and, through Spain, Europe.
The split. The early Taoists cared little for gold. Then "practical" alchemists won court favour with elixirs and promises, alchemy shrank to goldmaking and bodily immortality, and the search "usually ended in poverty and death." The true Adepts withdrew, and philosophical Taoism had virtually vanished by the 8th century. Some found common ground with the Buddhist Arhats: "man himself was the laboratory in which the experiment of transmutation or regeneration must be perfected."
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Yang, the unbroken line | Heaven, sun, the male dragon, the rational soul |
| Yin, the broken line | Earth, moon, the female dragon, the sentient soul |
| Dragon and tiger | Lead and mercury, the sun and moon of the West |
| Phoenix | The volatile principle |
| Toad or tortoise | True earth, primordial matter |
| Crow and rabbit | Sun and moon |
| Unicorn | The universal spirit to be captured |
Yin and yang. Behind the symbols lies the I Ching, which Paul Carus called more mysterious than the pyramids and older than the Vedas. Their first union produced "the imperial heaven," an infinite sphere of mind, clothed at once by yin in an ethereal body. Yang became the rational soul of the world and of man, yin the sentient soul. In the laboratory the alchemist forces an artificial union of the two, as European adepts spoke of the marriage of sun and moon.
The poem decoded. Chang Po-tuan wrote: "The dragon comes from the eastern sea. The tiger rises up in the western mountain. The two creatures fight a battle and change into the marrow of heaven and earth." Waley confirms that from the 10th century outer alchemy gave way to inner, and by the 11th the transcendental metals were parts of the body: "a system of mental and physical re-education."
"I must diligently plant my own field. There is within it a spiritual germ." Hall's key: the field is the body, the germ the seed of the soul, the central palace the heart, the soil virtue, the higher fountain Tao, the nine years the degrees of discipline.
The goal of the art was the Golden Age. The same formulas that perfect a metal perfect a government and a society, and the master alchemist is the just monarch of the Philosophic Empire.
Hall defends Chang Tao-ling against the "deceiver" charge by noting that his miracles match those of other Adepts, which shows a shared legend pattern, not that the miracles happened. He also passes over the most documented fact of Chinese elixir alchemy: several T'ang emperors died of mercury and arsenic poisoning from the pills meant to make them immortal.
What the Book Adds Up To
One school in Chinese dress: Hall reads Sage, saint, Immortal, secret lodge and alchemist as stages of a single science of human regeneration.
Master Takeaways
- Two kinds of knowledge. Traditional learning and esoteric learning both exist; the second is higher and descends through teachers.
- Three classes of illuminates. Confucian Sage, Buddhist Lohan and Taoist Immortal bear witness to one belief.
- The Immortal is within. The Immortals are the projection of every person's latent freedom.
- Alchemy is regeneration. From the 10th century the furnace moved into the body, and Hall reads all alchemy that way.
- The secret societies staged the Mysteries. The Hung ritual of death, judgment and rebirth parallels Egypt and Masonry.
- The goal is political as well as personal. The perfected person serves the philosophic commonwealth.
- China makes everything Chinese. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam were absorbed without breaking the old descent.
- Take all three teachers. The Vinegar Tasters teach accepting Buddha, Confucius and Lao-tse together.
- Tao cannot be handed over. It is received only by the heaven-loving heart.
- The unicorn follows the gentle. Truth, like the Chi-lin, cannot be captured, only followed.
- Confucius was religious. Heaven, the I Ching and the rites make him a theist, not a materialist.
- Man's nature is good. Mencius gave China its first primer.
- Mercy and justice run parallel. Buddhist mercy and Taoist justice rarely meet.
- Kuan Yin is the Mother of Mysteries. Her paradise stands for the school itself, the Alma Mater.
- The Lohans form an invisible empire. Ranks, stations and retinues mark an organised hierarchy.
- Paradises are lodges. The Royal Mother's court veils the Adept-princes of the Secret Schools.
- The Eight Immortals are initiation stories. Each life is a different door to the Way.
- Western heretics may have gone east. Gnostics and Nestorians fit the timing of China's esoteric revival.
- Goldmakers killed philosophical Taoism. When alchemy turned mercenary, the Adepts withdrew.
- The alchemist is the just ruler. The same formula perfects a metal, a person and a state.
Frameworks & mental models
| Framework | What it says | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Two kinds of knowledge | Traditional learning above, esoteric learning beneath | 1 |
| Three classes of illuminates | Scholar, monk, Immortal Mortal | 1 |
| The Vinegar Tasters | Bitter, sour, sweet as three readings of life | 2 |
| The throneless king | Authority by virtue rather than office | 3 |
| Justice and mercy in parallel | Two religious logics coexisting | 5 |
| Three Taoist grades | The Immortals, the Perfect, the Holy | 6 |
| Paradise as lodge | Mythic courts veil the secret schools | 6 |
| Outer and inner alchemy | Wai tan to nei tan, metals to the self | 10 |
| The body as laboratory | Lead, mercury and the elixir are inner faculties | 10 |
Hall's strengths are sympathy and range. He takes Chinese legend seriously, quotes the best translators of his day, defends Confucius against Legge's missionary prejudice and sees clearly that inner alchemy turned the laboratory into a discipline of mind and body, a point modern scholarship confirms. His weakness is the fixed frame. Every source becomes a witness to one Adept school, so missionary rumour, Blavatsky, a novel by Magre and Ward's speculation stand beside Legge and Waley. Dates slip (Miao Shan, Maitreya, the Red Eyebrows, the Hung founding), and the darker sides of his subjects, from elixir poisonings to Triad crime, barely appear. Read it as a lucid map of how a Western esotericist saw China in 1957, and check each link against Chinese scholarship.
Who's who
| Figure | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Lao-tse | The Ancient Master, author of the Tao Teh King |
| Yin Hsi | Keeper of the western gate who asked for the book |
| Confucius | The throneless king, teacher of virtue and the rites |
| Ching-tsai | Mother of Confucius, visionary of the Chi-lin |
| Mencius | The Number Two Saint, teacher of man's good nature |
| Chuang Tzu | Allegorical Taoist critic of Confucian materialism |
| Wang Yang-ming | Ming idealist of intuitive knowledge |
| Kuan Yin (Miao Shan) | Bodhisattva of compassion in Chinese form |
| Maitreya (Pu Tai) | The Buddha to Come, the Laughing Buddha |
| Bodhidharma | 28th patriarch from Buddha, first in China |
| Hsi Wang Mu | Royal Mother of the West, keeper of the peaches |
| Tung Wang Kung | King of the Immortals, registrar of the East |
| The Eight Immortals | Li, Chung-li, Lu, Lan, Chang-Kuo, Han, Ts'ao, Ho |
| St. Thomas | Apostle said to have preached in China |
| Chang Tao-ling | The first Taoist Pope, maker of the elixir |
| Chang Po-tuan | Author of the dragon-and-tiger alchemical verses |
| Sun Yat-sen | Hung member and founder of the Republic |
| J. S. M. Ward | Historian of the Hung Society |
| Arthur Waley | Translator who traced alchemy's turn inward |
| James Legge | Translator of the Classics, Hall's foil on Confucius |
Connect it
- Outer and inner alchemy in AI. The shift from wai tan to nei tan matches the move from buying AI tools to changing how people think and work. Firms that chase the "gold" of instant automation often repeat the court alchemists' fate.
- The Vinegar Tasters as an architecture review. One reviewer finds a system bitter, another sour, a third sweet. Enterprise architecture works best when all three readings sit at the table, as the Chinese accepted all three teachers.
- Mencius and independent risk functions. Mencius refused a salary so he could speak freely. Bank risk and audit teams need the same independence from the business lines they challenge.
- Signs of recognition and identity. The Hung brother proved himself by how he held a teacup. Behavioural biometrics in banking fraud detection rests on the same idea: identity shows in habitual gesture.