ailiet | watching clouds arise

Sometime back in the spring I read an interview with Bill Porter/Red Pine, which touched on a few of his books. I picked up a copy of his Poems of the Masters (Tang and Song Dynasty poems, great notes, includes the original Chinese), and thanks to a belated loan I just finished Road to Heaven, a short history/travelogue about the hermit tradition in China, focusing on the Zhongnan Mountains. Another good read! And one I found personally useful, wrt xianxia/wuxia novels. Previously, when I thought about hermits I'd automatically think about anchorites and early Christians, and that's probably coloured my understanding of some characters.

This bit clarified something that I'd been vaguely aware of, but needed to see put in words:

If you’ve never been alone with your practice, you’ve never swallowed it and made it yours. Now I can see the part it’s played in the history of China. If you don’t spend time in solitude, you don’t have either profundity or understanding — you’ve just carried on somebody else’s tradition.

Notes & quotes behind the cut.

the smile of the moon/ the glory of the sun/ the age of Nanshan/ by change untouched (prayer from the Book of Songs)

Some retired to achieve their ideals; some bowed out to maintain their principles; some chose quiet to still their passions; some chose escape to preserve their lives; some to shame others into changing their ways; some to cleanse themselves (from the History of the Later Han Dynasty)
-found on Huashan: Solomon's seal, ginseng, asarum, acorus
-medical genius Hua T'uo, lived on Huashan, died around 207 A.D., "used hemp-based anesthetics to perform surgery," "credited with devising five forms of exercise that were later developed into the basic styles of Chinese martial arts"
-water/fire/wood/metal/earth, black/red/green/white/yellow, north/south/east/west/middle

Blue Dragon for the east, Black Turtlesnake for the north, White Tiger for the West, Red Bird for the south
-Huashan's east peak chess pavilion is stunning

Huashan pines are a special species native to the summits of the higher peaks of the [Zhongnan] Mountains [...] Their seeds, pollen, and even their needles were a staple in the diet of Taoists

[eight major Buddhist schools formed in China] Three Treatise, Mind-Only, Precept, Pure Land, Huayen, Tantric, and Zen [all formed around Zhongnan] The eighth major school was the Tientai school [begun in southern and eastern China]

ling-chih, a type of fungus found on the shady sides of cliffs and trees. Taoists include it in most of their recipes for immortality

The Pachiao Bridge (Pachiao means 'Pa bridge'):

was where everyone who could afford the time came to see off their friends and colleagues heading east. Over the centuries it also became known as Heartbreak Bridge- the most famous place in ancient China to say goodbye and the backdrop to a million poems about willows.
Until modern times, their hanging catkins lined both shores of the Pa River for several kilometres in either direction. In late spring, the fuzz of the catkins filled the air like snow, creating another of Shensi's eight wonders. In Chinese, the word for 'willow' is a homophone for 'stay,' and those who stayed broke off a catkin to give to those who left.

-near the village of Hungchingpao is found Kueikou (Ghost Gully), supposedly the site of a mass grave of scholars killed by the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty
-Lishan has open-air jade-lined hot springs (called 'star baths'), including Huaching Pool, which was favoured by Yang Guifei
-Taipaishan has 1700 species of plants, 600 of which have medicinal uses (thuja cedars have needles which can be used as an astringent, and seeds which can be used as a sedative)
-an account of Taipai from a Qing dynasty official:

The weather is dramatic. The God of Thunder rumbles in the gorges below, and a rainbow spans the slopes. A sudden whirlwind threatens to blow away a wooden hut, as if it were an autumn leaf. Below, fog locks up the world. Above, the sun looks like it's at the bottom of a well. Then the sky suddenly clears, and all of creation appears.

-the 'Chungnan shortcut': "the conscious use of retirement in the countryside as a means of social advancement"