Ge Hong

The Baopuzi comes in two halves that are usually read separately and were meant to be read together. The inner chapters argue that transcendence is real, attainable and technical. The outer chapters discuss government, conduct and the ordinary business of a gentleman's life. Ge Hong states plainly that he wrote both, and the pairing is his central claim rather than an accident of compilation: the Daoist pursuit is the root and the Confucian one the branches.

The inner chapters are the reason the book is famous. They rank the methods available. Breathing exercises, gymnastics, dietary restriction, sexual technique and herbal drugs all extend life, but none of them confers transcendence; only the alchemical elixirs of gold and cinnabar do that, and the cinnabar that can be cycled through nine transformations is the highest. He is scathing about practitioners who master one technique and imagine it sufficient, and scathing about the popular cults that promise results for a sacrifice.

His argument for the possibility of transcendence is empirical in temper if not in method. Strange things happen in nature, he says, and a man who has never seen them will deny them on no better ground than that he has not seen them. The reasonable position is to test the recipes. That combination, a defence of the marvellous conducted in the tone of a sceptic, is what has made the Baopuzi readable for seventeen hundred years.

Ge Hong was not a hermit and did not write as one. He belonged to a southern gentry family in Jurong, held military command against a rebellion, was offered and accepted official rank, and applied late in life for a magistracy in the far south specifically because he had heard that cinnabar was available there. The application was granted, he got as far as Guangzhou, and he stayed on Mount Luofu instead.

He is careful about where his knowledge came from, which makes him unusually useful to historians. He names a line of transmission running from Zuo Ci to his own great-uncle Ge Xuan to Zheng Yin, from whom he says he received the alchemical scriptures directly, and he complains that his teacher tested him for years before handing anything over. He lists the titles in the libraries he consulted. Much of what is known about the texts circulating in the south in the third and fourth centuries comes from those lists, and several works survive only as his summaries.

His posthumous career took two directions. Chinese pharmacological and medical literature drew on him steadily, and his Zhouhou beiji fang, a handbook of emergency prescriptions, was mined by later compilers. Meanwhile the Shenxian zhuan gave the growing Daoist religion a gallery of exemplars, and Ge Hong himself was absorbed into it as a transcendent. The man who insisted that transcendence had to be worked for became one of the figures other people worked towards.