Cantong Qi - Authorship

Authorship

For about a millennium, the authorship of the Cantong qi has been attributed to Wei Boyang, who is said to be a southern alchemist, and to come from the Shangyu district of Kuaiji, in the region of Jiangnan (his birthplace would correspond to present-day Fenghui 豐惠 in Shangyu, about 80 km east of Hangzhou).

The best-known account of Wei Boyang is found in the Shenxian zhuan (Biographies of the Divine Immortals), a work attributed to Ge Hong (283-243). According to this record (trans. Campany, 2002:368-69), Wei Boyang was the son of a high-ranking family. He and three disciples retired to a mountain and compounded an elixir. When they tested it on a dog, the dog died. Despite this, Wei Boyang and one of his disciples decided to ingest the compound, and they also died. After the two other disciples had left, Wei Boyang came to life again. He poured some of the elixir into the mouths of the dead disciple and the dog, and they also revived. Thus Wei Boyang and his faithful disciple attained immortality. With an abrupt change in tone and language, the account ends with a final paragraph, which mentions Wei Boyang’s authorship of the Cantong qi and of another work entitled The Five Categories (Wu xianglei 五相類), criticizing at the same time those who read the Cantong qi as a work concerned with cosmology instead of alchemy.

Several centuries later, Peng Xiao (?-955) gives a different portrait of Wei Boyang in his commentary, dating from 947 CE (trans. Pregadio, 2011:264-65). With Peng Xiao, Wei Boyang becomes a learned master who is competent in prose and poetry, is versed in the esoteric texts, cultivates the Dao “in secret and silence,” and nourishes himself “in Empty Non-being.” At the end of his account, moreover, Peng Xiao gives further details on the early history of the text, saying:

Wei Boyang secretly disclosed his book to Xu Congshi 徐從事, a native of Qingzhou, who wrote a commentary on it keeping his name hidden. At the time of Emperor Huan of the Later Han (r. 146-167), the Master again transmitted it to Chunyu Shutong 淳于叔通. Since then, has circulated in the world.

Elsewhere in his work, moreover, Peng Xiao reveals a different view on the authorship of the Cantong qi:

Some texts on the Dao say that the Cantong qi is in three parts (pian), and that Master Wei, Xu Congshi, and Chunyu Shutong each wrote one part.

While Wei Boyang was a southern alchemist, Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were representatives of the cosmological traditions of northern China. Xu was a native of Qingzhou, in the present-day region of Shandong. His disciple, Chunyu, was a "master of the methods" (fangshi) specialized in cosmology, prognostication, and the related sciences. (See Pregadio, 2011:7-9.)

Sources prior to Peng Xiao show that Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were originally believed to be the main authors of the Cantong qi. To give one example, an anonymous commentary to the Cantong qi, dating from ca. 700, is explicit about the roles played by Xu Congshi, Chunyu Shutong, and Wei Boyang in the creation of the text, saying:

Xu Congshi transmitted it to Master Chunyu Shutong . . . who wrote another part entitled The Five Categories. . . . Chunyu was the first to transmit the whole text to Master Wei Boyang.

Elsewhere, the same commentary ascribes the Cantong qi to Xu Congshi alone. For example, the notes on the verse, “He contemplates on high the manifest signs of Heaven” (「上觀顯天符」), state: “The True Man Xu Congshi looked above and contemplated the images of the trigrams; thus he determined Yin and Yang.”

The passages quoted above reflect contrasting views on the authorship of the Cantong qi, between those who maintained that the text pertained in the first place to the northern cosmological traditions, and those who saw it as a product of the southern alchemical traditions. Taking this point into account, Pregadio (2011:23-25) has suggested that the final paragraph in the Shenxian zhuan's account may have been added at a later time to further the second view.

With the possible exception of Ge Hong, the first author known to have attributed the composition of the whole Cantong qi to Wei Boyang is Liu Zhigu 劉知古, a Taoist priest and alchemical practitioner who was received at court by Emperor Xuanzong around 750 CE. Two centuries later, another alchemist, Peng Xiao, cites and praises Liu Zhigu’s discussion, and becomes the first major author to promote the same view. With the development of the Neidan traditions, this view became established. Since then, there has been virtually unanimous consent that the Cantong qi was not only transmitted, but also entirely composed, within the context of the alchemical tradition.