Taoist Characters
While killing an afternoon in Henan last week I decided to go with my father to a Daoist temple. The photo below is from the temple, called 中岳庙 / 中嶽廟 (Zhong Yue Miao) and found at the rather wide-reaching foot of Mt. Song 嵩山. Note the five glyphs/characters/symbols at the top.
The part that interested me is the five glyphs on the top. Here’s a closer look.
These five images are all over the temple. They’re little gold cards with images of various deities. They’re on steles. They’re carved into bricks. And in many cases, they’re right up there with standard characters occupying the same space. I was half tempted to submit this to the Omniglot blog for one of their “what language is this” challenges, but only for a moment, until I realised there was a really good chance it wasn’t language at all. But then, that middle character does look a little like 國…
So today I went to see a professor I know at the university where I’m completing my graduate studies. He’s a widely published scholar in classical Chinese philosophy and despite his being more about 道學 (Daoism as philosophy) and not 道教 (Daosim as religion), I figured he might have an idea. Turns out he did.
These are, he tells me, symbols representing five mountain gods. Daosim (religion) has a lot of gods (my favourite being a three-eyed red-haired fiery Irish looking god giving the finger. Photo available on request.). I buy that. The question then is how did these symbols come about? They’re clearly standardised, at least within the context of the rather large temple and the literature/cards they have available, though there wasn’t anything specifically about them. The circles within a circle on the top-left image makes me think it’s a modern creation.
Thoughts?
I don’t know anything about these symbols, but they also caught my attention while I was in Xi’an in 2001. Here’s my photo:
They match pretty much exactly.
Hmmm, the image doesn’t appear to be embedding. Here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpasden/45910109/in/set-1003190
Interesting. The top line of characters I’m reading as 中嶽真形圖. Whether it says that or not, it’s exactly the text and style that appears on the deity trading cards they sell, which also have the 5 glyps. I wonder if the object in your picture comes from my temple.
Please do post the picture of the Irish God. From my little experience with Chinese Gods, I know it is a funny lot and their pictures are rarely disappointing.
Here you go:
I’m pretty sure this is actually Zhu Rong 祝融.
LOL
John’s picture says 五嶽真形圖 not 中嶽真形圖, but the point stands.
Thanks Matt. 五 makes much more sense. I tried to fit old versions of 中 with the hourglass shape, mostly because I was at 中嶽 when I first saw it. Didn’t even think about 五. Shows what I know about old character forms.
Feeling rather stupid, I just realised something thanks to Matt’s comment.
The five mountains would be the 五岳, the five sacred mountains in Taoism. Hua Shan 华山 near Xi’an 西安 would be one, Song Shan 嵩山 where the temple I went to was would be another. Each of the five has a cardinal direction, Song Shan being Center 中. It also makes me reconsider if I understood him correctly when he said “five mountain gods”.
So that explains what the symbols are, the middle one likely representing Song Shan 嵩山. Hua Shan 华山 is top-left and has the circle containing two smaller circles.
That leaves the question of where these symbols actually came from, and when. It looks like they may be as old as the Han Dynasty. They’re also supposed to be representative of elements, as well as being characteristic of the mountains which they represent. And like everything else, there’s mythology surrounding their creation.
Images and explanation (in Mandarin) can be found here and here.
The Wuyue zhenxing tu is a very old set of protective talismans, mentioned in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi. They are supposed to be worn or carried on the body when one enters the mountains to collect alchemical ingredients, to protect one from malicious animals and spirits. There are several texts in the Daoist canon that describe these talismans, although the forms found in those texts don’t match the icons in the pictures above. If you look around, you can find various explanations for what they signify, see for example: http://hi.baidu.com/hbyuehua/blog/item/ddb72a9b8f109bb6c9eaf4d7.html
Thanks Josh. This has proven to be an interesting bit of learning experience for me. That link you gave is the same as the first in the previous comment. It’s interesting to see the modified versions of it, or maybe just more amateur versions. I’d be curious to see the earliest forms if such records exist. These forms seem pretty standard at this point.
Here’s an example of some of the diagrams from the text 洞玄靈寶五嶽古本真形圖 (CT 441), which is presented as a Han work but believed by most scholars to be of much later origin.
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/466/wyzxt.jpg
and a close up of another one; as you can see, it’s much more of an actual “map” than the stylized images above:
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/3725/wyzxt2.jpg