From Immortal Fairyland to Popular Paradise

The Chinese conception of heaven has been deeply influenced by Buddhism, but the Daoist notion of fairyland-a land of bliss inhabited by deities and immortals, to which all Chinese aspired before the arrival of Buddhism-did not disappear as Buddhism spread, but was repeatedly recreated and revitalized.

Since ancient times, high mountains have been seen as a route up into heaven, and fairy realms are often supposed to be located on misty mountaintops. Looking a t Dongtian Shan Tang （Mountain Hall of Fairy Grottoes） by Dong Yuan （died c. 962） of the Five Dynasties period, we can imagine that above the clouds is a marvelous spirit realm . （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）

From deities and celestial beings eating peaches of immortality at the Queen Mother's banquet as female immortals bearing hibiscus flowers flit among colored clouds, to white-haired immortals playing leisurely games of chess-across the ages, what kinds of world view have been reflected by the fairy realms to which humans have aspired, and what warnings do they hold?

"Past and future are obscure even to sages/ Though close in this life, we may not meet in the next."

In Chapter 116 of The Dream of the Red Chamber, Jia Baoyu follows behind the rolling, staggering monk who brought him his jade amulet as a baby. Somehow, without having gone out through the gate, they arrive at a wild place, where Baoyu sees a ceremonial arch inscribed with the words "A True Blessed Abode." Passing through the arch, they arrive at a palace gate on which is written the couplet quoted above.

As if in a dream, Baoyu enters the "Cave Heaven" inhabited by the female celestial deity Xiao Xiang Feizi. All around he sees towering mansions with finely decorated eaves, and catches hazy glimpses of many palace maidens within. Absorbing this scene with greedy eyes, he is captivated by the rare flowers and unfamiliar plants which abound there, and quite forgets where he is. But suddenly a female immortal yells at him: "Where have you come from, worm, to spy on our herbs of immortality?"

Not of the mortal world

Evidently the treatment accorded Baoyu in this fairy realm fell far short of that bestowed on those who went before him. To pick a few examples at random from early Chinese stories of visitors to fairyland, the ancient historical chronology Zhu Shu Ji Nian relates how King Mu of Zhou "traveled west to Kunlun to see the Queen Mother of the West," and how the Queen Mother invited him to stay in her far-off city, to become an immortal and live forever in the company of immortal cranes and ancient pines. And in the 16th-century epic novel Journey to the West, the Queen Mother's banquet of peaches of immortality is an even more luxurious affair, with an endless supply of such delicacies as phoenix marrow, dragon livers, bear paws and orangutan lips. But sadly life is an inescapable obligation, and King Mu had not finished his duties here below. As he left, the Queen Mother's parting words to him were: "Though the peaks stand as high as the clouds, you crossed mountains and rivers to come from the distant east; may you live to be a hundred, and may we meet again."

Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty was treated no less royally: Han Wu Di Nei Zhuan (Intimate Biography of Emperor Wu of the Han) relates how he met with the Queen Mother of the West, who invited him to eat peaches of immortality. Their flavor far surpassed any peaches found in the mortal world. When the Emperor had finished eating he slipped the peach stones into his sleeve, saying he wished to plant them in his earthly realm. Politely covering her mouth to hide her laughter, the Queen Mother said: "The immortal peach trees take 3000 years to fruit. How could they grow in the world of men?"

Salvation for body and soul?

In the Jewish Torah, God creates the world, but eternal truth resides in his realm, not on earth. The precepts of the Buddhist World of Ultimate Bliss reveal a conception of the universe as infinite, and here, too, heaven is not within this corrupt world. Religious conceptions of paradise encourage believers to regard death as returning home. The death of the flesh is to be accepted with joy, for it frees the spirit to go to another, better world and enjoy eternal life. But from the perspective of the Chinese view of paradise as a fairyland or "realm of the immortals," such a "hereafter" is simply inconceivable.

Other religions regard ancient ideas of immortality as myths, but the Chinese hoped for "the best of both worlds"-as well as wanting eternal life for the soul, they also sought elixirs of physical immortality which would let them transcend birth, aging, sickness and death and no longer be hostages to time. Immortality became a basic theme of our native Daoist religion.

As well as the rich mythology of the Fairyland of the Queen Mother of the West, the Chinese also had an eastern fairyland which came to be portrayed in increasingly specific detail, and which attracted people of various eras to set out to sea in search of immortality. The success of these adventures was limited: many left, but few returned. However, this only added to the islands' mystery and fascination.

Penglai, isle of the immortals

In Yan and Qi, two states on China's eastern seaboard in the Warring States period, people could look out all day at ocean mirages, and they created the myth of fairy mountains on the sea. Over 2000 years ago, their monarchs sent people out to sea to seek the elixir of life. The Shi Ji (Historical Records) reports that rulers such as King Xuan of Qi (ruled 319-301 BC) and King Zhao of Yan (ruled 311-279 BC) sent voyagers to search for the mountains of Penglai, Fangzhang and Yingzhou. "These three magical mountains are said to be in the Bohai Sea, not far from land."

Legend had it that on these mountains were immortals and elixirs of life, and that everything there was white, including the birds and beasts; the palaces were built of gold and silver. Seen from afar, the immortal island of Penglai had the appearance of clouds, and was always shrouded in shimmering hazes and beautiful mists. But when ordinary mortals approached, the wind and waves would rise up to drive them back, and the islands would sink into the raging sea. These were unapproachable, mysterious spirit mountains.

The first Qin emperor sent Han Zhong and Xu Fu out to sea to look for immortals. No-one knows what became of them, but today Japan and Korea are still arguing over "ownership" of the three magic mountains, each claiming them as its own. In Studies in Daoism, published by National Cheng Kung University, Professor Kwang-Soon Toh of Korea's Hanyang University draws on ancient Korean records to support his view that the Taebaeksan Mountains (Great White Mountains)-of which Korean legends since ancient times have said that all things there were white-are the three magic mountains. Meanwhile Japanese scholars point to the many temples to Xu Fu in Japan (where he is known as Jyofuku), and maintain that Mt. Fuji, whose name implies "long life," is the land of immortals dreamed of by Chinese kings and emperors.

The universe is like an egg

Why could the Chinese not "face up" to physical mortality and develop a belief in another, better life which people could pass into after death? Why would they instead keep hoping to avoid physical death, and spend their lives pursuing the rationally implausible quest of finding ways to fly up to heaven as immortals?

Professor Ke Ching-ming, of National Taiwan University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature, believes the early Chinese conception of the universe can provide an answer. In the creation story of Pangu, which deeply influenced the early Chinese, the universe is egg-shaped, and as Pangu incubates within it for 18,000 years, the light, transparent material floats slowly upwards to form the heavens, while the heavy, opaque material sinks downwards to become the earth. By this slow process, heaven and earth are born. Whether Pangu finally died or-as another version has it-just fell asleep, there was no other universe outside his.

"The internal and external universes were united, and the manifest and transcendent worlds coincided." Ke Ching-ming explains that because of this world view of an internal universe, the idea of another heaven and earth outside the present world did not arise in early China. Hence if there were spirits in the world, they must be within heaven and earth; this world was not made by a creator from outside it.

The book Le destin de l'univers (The Destiny of the Universe) by Trinh Xuan Thuan, published in France, also claims that for the Chinese, all concepts of a god or the idea of god-given laws regulating the universe are absurd, because everything within the universe is the result of the interaction between yin and yang; Chinese science, too, "developed in accordance with people's ideas about the universe."

Heaven and man united

In ancient times the Chinese believed that the universe, which had evolved out of primeval chaos, had no end, and that everything was within nature. The ancients' understanding of the universe was that changes in all things were like the movement of waves. Although waves rose and fell, the amount of water in the sea did not decrease. The universal sea was like the movement of qi. Birth was the condensation of qi, while death was its dissipation. Eternal, ultimate qi subsisted within the universe, neither increasing nor decreasing in quantity. Hence heaven, earth and man were one, and nothing separated the mayflies, which hatched in the morning and died at dusk, from the eternal mountains and waters. Influenced by this philosophy, the Song dynasty literary giant Su Dongpo (1037-1101) wrote: "Looking at that which changes, there has never been one instant when heaven and earth were not changing; looking at that which does not change, all things, including myself, have no end." However material things change, they remain a part of the universe, so when people die and become ghosts their qi is returned to heaven and earth.

By the same reasoning, qi which condenses with sufficient harmony may be unchanging and maintain its form eternally. Humans live between heaven and earth, and can participate in the processes by which heaven and earth are nourished and life created and changed. The Yi Jing (Book of Changes) lays great stress on the continuous burgeoning of life within the vast universe. Thus we can see that there is a historical background to the continuous emergence of ideas concerning elixirs of immortality and fairylands peopled by immortals.

From early legends and the Chu Ci (Songs of Chu, a Han-dynasty anthology of Warring States period poetry) to the literature of the Han (221 BC-220 AD) and the Six Dynasties (220-589), a comprehensive set of ideas emerged based on the belief that above the world there was a fairyland where life was better than in this world and where all things could live on in their worldly form.

Qu Yuan's "journey to the west"

Modern researchers of legends divide early Chinese fairyland myths into two main groups: those involving the Queen Mother of the West's Western Fairyland of Kunlun, and those involving the Eastern Fairy Mountains on the Sea.

"The sources of the Yellow River, up among the white clouds of the western heavens, and the place where the Yellow River flows into the ocean in the east, are where the ancients believed fairylands lay," says Wang Hsiao-lien, a scholar of Chinese mythology. He explains that people often saw the sources of rivers, which played such an important role in their lives, as mysterious realms of the immortals. For instance, the River Ganges in India is seen as a sacred river, and the River Nile in Egypt was once regarded as a paradise.

Kung Peng-cheng, president of Fokuang University, has interpreted the idea of fairyland according to the special cultural connotations of the points of the compass. The Han dynasty theories of yin and yang and the five elements accorded each point of the compass its own special significance. The North represented death, and the East, where the sun rises, represented vitality. Even in earlier times, the West had been seen as an idyllic place of beautiful people and things.

In an article on travel literature, Kung Peng-cheng writes that in his "Distant Journey," poet Qu Yuan (c. 340-c. 278 BC) three times describes his travels to the fairyland of Kunlun. "When people met with difficulties in real life, all they could do was to go on an [imaginary] journey west to Kunlun. A journey to the west was a quest for hope and the realization of one's ideals," writes Kung. The Book of Songs, China's earliest poetry anthology, includes the lines: "In the west are people of virtue, I think of them." The Song-dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) wrote: "'People of virtue' in the west is another way of saying the great kings of Zhou."

The theme of yearning for the west recurs in many later songs. Says Kung Peng-cheng: "Of course these were intimately connected with King Mu of Zhou's westward journey, stories about the Queen Mother of the west and legends of the fairy cities of Kunlun, so the west was also seen as a magical place of immortality." In his view, the fact that belief in the Buddhist Western World of Ultimate Bliss became so powerful among the Chinese common people is not unconnected with the Han-dynasty predilection for the west.

The Queen Mother moves house

Within China's vast territory, different peoples in different areas had different mythologies, revealing different ways of thinking. As well as the legends of Kunlun and the Queen Mother to the west, and of fairy islands to the east, in China's interior there were also myths concerning ancient kings and emperors, and a plethora of legends about Mount Tai.

Although in the minds of the ancients fairylands were extensions of the real world, the more distant and unattainable they were, the more scope they left for the imagination. The island of Penglai was hazy and indistinct, and the mountains of Kunlun vague and remote. "But Mt. Tai was real, visible and close at hand. However, although its majestic breadth and height and its status as the first among China's mountains made it appear magical, it was not as mysterious as Penglai or Kunlun," says Liu Tseng-kui, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology, who has researched Han-dynasty beliefs concerning Mt. Tai.

As larger and larger unified states gradually emerged in what is now China, the myths and legends of different regions were gradually amalgamated together. Seafaring was a highly dangerous activity; many who set sail in search of immortality failed to return, and this dampened enthusiasm for such endeavors. Also, from the Eastern Han (25-220) onward, the political center gradually moved from north China to south of the Yangtze. This geographical shift brought with it a gradual change in spatial attitudes. The limestone geology of southern China has endowed it with many deep and mysterious caves which nature has fashioned into remarkable shapes, and these constantly fired human imaginations.

The supposed location of the mysterious fairylands gradually "shifted" inland from the sometimes floating, sometimes sinking fairy mountains on the sea, and the far-off mountains of the West, to China's interior, and the Jade Pool of the Queen Mother of the West also moved to Mt. Tai. The Han ballad Bu Chu Xia Men Xing (Walking Out Through the Gate of Xia) written in 207 by Cao Cao, says that Mt. Tai, where "ancient white elms grow and osmanthus trees line the paths," is separated from heaven by a distance of only four or five li, and when men become immortal they go there to pay homage to the Queen Mother of the West.

Fairy realms throughout the land

The worship of mountains was widespread among primitive peoples. Mountains tower up into the sky, and were seen as pillars both supporting heaven and linking it to the world of men. Hence the kings and emperors of the Shang and Zhou dynasties regularly offered sacrifices to great mountains and rivers. The first and second Qin emperors both made sacrifices to Mt. Tai, and Confucian scholars even suggested that they wrap their chariot wheels with rushes to avoid harming the mountain's earth, rocks and plants.

Religious Daoists always had a particular affinity for great and majestic mountains, and for caves. Ge Hong (284-364) of the Jin dynasty wrote in his alchemical work Bao Pu Zi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity), "The masters of the Dao all wander unseen in remote mountains and forests." As well as the mountains being suitable places for contemplation and self-purification, the lingzhi (Ganoderma) fungus and stalactites to be found there were valuable resources in Daoist alchemists' attempts to create elixirs of life and achieve immortality.

Combining ancient beliefs in mountains and mother earth, and ideas about suitable places for life as hermits, Daoists organized caves in great mountains throughout the land into a system of "fairy grottoes" comprising ten major "cave heavens," 36 minor cave heavens and 72 "blessed abodes," each governed by a different spirit or immortal. The idea of deities and immortals roaming the mountains, marshes and fairy grottoes gave birth to the Chinese notion that "what gives a mountain its power is not its height, but the immortal associated with it."

Looking from afar at great rivers and mountains rising ridge upon ridge, shrouded in swirling mists, where temples loom out of the clouds and precarious bridges and twisting paths wind among the haze, people might feel despite themselves that their bodies had become light, and imagine themselves being borne up by the winds and carried through a fairy realm. Disgruntled literati who had failed in the world of officialdom, not to mention impoverished commoners, had an even greater need to construct fantasy stories to make up for the inadequacies in their own lives.

In particular, Daoists' choice of places to identify as fairy grottoes, apart from being suitable places to refine elixirs in the hope of transcending death, also responded to the mood of the times and to practical needs. Hence rich, fertile soil suitable for growing rice, and locations out of reach of natural disasters and human wars and turmoil, became essential requirements for the blessed abodes.

Fairylands for fishermen and woodcutters

As the locations and characters in stories of fairyland moved closer to real life, the characteristics of fairyland also became more similar to those of the human world. Those fortunate enough to visit fairy realms were no longer only monarchs and nobles-ordinary folk could blunder by chance into the happy lands of deities and immortals. In the hands of the literati, various different interpretations of the fairyland tradition appeared which gradually departed from the Queen Mother of the West's "far-off, beautiful, hazy paradise." In the literary sketches of the Wei (220-265) and Jin (265-420), a woodcutter working in the mountains might enter fairyland in an instant, and a literatus might go there in his sleep. Scholars call the fairy realms of such stories "fairylands of fishermen and woodcutters." Li Feng-mao, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, divides Chinese stories of fairyland into many categories such as watching chess, food and clothing, hermits, love affairs between mortals and immortals, and so on.

Kung Peng-cheng notes that in the Han and the Six Dynasties (up to the 6th century AD), apart from a few scenic descriptions and itineraries, worldly travelogues describing local color in the mortal world had not yet come into vogue: They would only begin to take off with Yongzhou Ba Ji (Eight Accounts of Yongzhou) by Liu Zongyuan (773-819) of the Tang. But stories of journeys through fairy caves, dragon palaces and the like had long been highly popular.

The story "Wang Zhi and the Rotten Axe-Handle," in Shu Yi Ji (Tales of the Extraordinary) recounts how Wang Zhi of the Jin dynasty goes into the Shishi Mountains in Xin'an Prefecture to cut wood and sees a group of young boys playing chess, singing as they play. One gives Wang a fruit like a jujube; when he holds it his mouth, he feels no hunger. Before the game is finished, the boys ask: "Shouldn't you be getting home?" Wang grasps the handle of his axe to pick it up only to discover it is rotten, and on returning home finds that everything has changed beyond recognition and his family are all long since dead.

A day in the mountains, a century on earth

In later stories, phrases like "on watching the game to the end, he found his youthful hair had turned white," implying that an instant in fairyland is an age in the mortal world, were often used to express the passing of time there. The story of Wang Zhi also hints that mortals waste too much of their short time on earth. In the story Nanke Yi Meng (A Dream of Nanke), Chunyu Fen enters the land of Huai'an through a termite hole. There he marries a princess and becomes a minister. But in the end he loses a war, his wife dies, and he is sent into exile. At the moment Chunyu awakens from this dream, the author comments: "Rank and riches, power over cities-to enlightened eyes, how do they differ from a swarm of termites?" To someone who has realized the vanity of the dusty world, rank and power are worth no more than in the land of Huai'an, which after all was just a termites' nest. Striving after wealth and position in the world of men is no different than trying to be King of the Termites.

The fairy realms portrayed in literature have many established features. A common plot element is that if a visitor to fairyland stays there, he can live there as an immortal forever. But usually the hero is stricken with homesickness and leaves; once back among the distracting, vulgar pleasures of the mortal world, he never finds his way into fairyland again. In a Six Dynasties story, Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao lose their way in the mountains on the way to Mt. Tiantai. They meet two women and stay with them through the winter. When spring comes, Liu and Ruan say they want to go home, and the two fairy women tell them the way out of the mountains. But on returning home they find "friends and relatives scattered, town and houses changed, nothing as they had known it." At this they try to return to the fairy realm they have left, but cannot find their way back there.

Variations on these fairyland plot elements are used in abundance in later romantic fiction.

Qiuran Ke Zhuan (The Curly-Bearded Stranger) is a Tang-dynasty romance set in the late Sui, written by Du Guangting (850-933). In it, Curlybeard's friend Liu Wenjing, a Daoist master, plays a game of chess with Li Shimin (599-649), the future founding emperor of the Tang. Seeing Li's kingly poise and countenance, the Daoist says sadly: "This match is quite lost!" He resigns the game and asks to be excused, and tells Curlybeard to give up the idea of competing with Li Shimin for imperial power. Later, Curlybeard goes to the land of Fuyu where he becomes ruler in his own right. The message that it is better to lose a piece and win the game than to try vainly to hold on to what one cannot keep is a lesson both for the chessboard and for life.

It has been said that later romances moved away from the fairyland structure, and even that The Peach-Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming (365-427), in which descendants of people who fled Qin rule live in a utopian fairyland, was an escapist fantasy about "a small country with few people" (recommended by Laozi as the ideal unit for enlightened rule) concocted by the author in the face of the political events of a turbulent age. But whatever additions, omissions or changes the author makes to embellish the original significance of fairyland, and although unlike the realms described in earlier works the utopian Peach-Blossom Spring is not filled with the drifting strains of fairy music, the basic form of the story clearly still does not depart from the formula of a chance encounter with a fairy realm. The Peach-Blossom Spring was included in the collection Sou Shen Hou Ji (Sequel to In Search of the Supernatural), and in his poem A Walk Through the Peach-Blossom Spring, Wang Wei (701-761) writes that its inhabitants "were first isolated from the mortal world by remoteness, but after becoming immortals, did not return"-there is no doubt in his mind that it is indeed a fairy realm.

Paradise lost

Western literature has also produced some apparently similar stories in which time and space in the real world are looked at from an "outside" dimension. In a story by 19th-century American author Washington Irving, based on a German folk tale, the hero Rip Van Winkle goes hunting alone in the Catskill Mountains of New York. There he meets some dwarves playing nine-pins, and drinks of their liquor, after which he falls into a deep sleep. When he awakes, 20 years have passed, and on returning to his village he finds that his wife is dead, his daughter is married and America is an independent country.

When Chinese people read this story, it seems very familiar. The Christian heaven and the Buddhist Pure Land are also similar in that they express the hope that people can cast off their physical bodies and achieve spiritual transcendence. But ordinary mortals have their own, different way of thinking. Do not people in the West also pursue earthly Shangri-Las? According to Judaism, God promised the Jews a land on which to build his country; when Columbus discovered the New World, some Jews believed that the American continent was this promised land.

Finding paradise is a dream which humans have cherished since time began. Professor Hu Wan-chou of National Tsinghua University explains that the reason people always feel that moral values are in decline is that in their hearts humans always have a sense of loss, a belief in a past paradise better than the present.

Attachment is a bitter sea

Kung Peng-cheng cites the poems about journeys through fairyland by the Six Dynasties poets Guo Pu (276-324) and Ruan Ji (210-263) as examples of how in troubled times, it was only by venturing into fairy realms that poets could release their pent-up emotions and escape the fear of death. But, says Kung, "The search for paradise and a yearning for immortality have their background in mythology and religion, and cannot be explained simply in terms of troubled times."

In literature, fantasy journeys through fairyland often ended in tears when the realization that the fairy realm was unattainable only made the real world more difficult to bear. But in Ke Ching-ming's view, although the concept of fairyland amplified Chinese people's sense of disillusionment with real life, it also provided an escape from the distress of the mortal world, thus relieving the crisis of real existence.

Cause and effect (karma) in the mortal world often cannot explain random suffering, so how do people go about explaining the sin and suffering in this world? Christianity holds that everything outside the Garden of Eden is a world of defilement cursed by God, and because Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the forbidden fruit, it is only natural that their descendants must suffer. But beyond this world there is a heaven to look forward to, in which angels sing eternal songs of praise. Furthermore, the Last Judgment will deal with mankind's greatest worries and provide a perfect explanation for the suffering of the innocent and all kinds of ethically or emotionally unacceptable actions. The Buddhist way, taken from Indian religion, says plainly that this life is one of suffering resulting from karma, and in it people constantly do wrong and suffer the pain of samsara, the cycle of birth-and-death.

The Chinese fairyland represents the Chinese attempt to explain such matters. The characteristic of transcending time which appears in descriptions of fairyland from the Six Dynasties onward is intended to contrast with the brevity of mortal life. Looked at from this perspective, human life is too short for pettiness and bickering.

From stories about fairyland we can see clearly that human life is a microcosm of the changing universe in which everything is in flux. No one stays rich and powerful forever, life always brings conflicts, and everyone has their own cross to bear. But if happiness is not everlasting, neither is misfortune. If one looks at things from this wider perspective, one can transcend change and not become fixated on the gains and losses of minor events. Then one can live in this world with contentment and accept change without undue sorrow. If one sees life's blows as the will of heaven, one will be mentally healthier and able to get on with the rest of one's life with a more positive attitude.

Just as heaven stands in opposition to hell, fairyland stands in distant opposition to the mortal world. "When we look at things from the perspective of the fairy realm, that is to say on a large scale, the smaller scale of the mortal world becomes unimportant," says Ke Ching-ming. He feels that imagining fairy realms is a way of observing the basic nature of the world from a unusual angle, in order to defuse problems. It provides a relativistic perspective, breaking down blind insistence on the absolute nature of values, and this enables humans to be more relaxed and natural in many ways.

Spirit mountains in the soul

For those able to comprehend their message, fairy realms do not so much provide a blueprint of paradise for humanity, as a "reality check" with the same head-clearing effect as a cool mentholatum balm.

"The enlightened are in fairyland, the unenlightened remain in the mortal world." From Kunlun in the west and fairy mountains in the sea, to cave heavens and blessed abodes spread throughout the land, the specific location of fairyland has not only moved ever closer to the human world, it has also returned to within the self. What is important is not fairyland itself, but whether one has the perception and insight to discover it.

Evidently, just like the Peach-Blossom Spring which is found only by chance, and not by those who deliberately seek it, fairyland is not something which unenlightened mortals can grasp just by stretching out their hands; it can only be glimpsed by those whose hearts, minds and spirits are open to the secrets of creation. In other words, says Kung Peng-cheng, "The key to finding the Peach-Blossom Spring is not the location of a particular mountain peak or lake shore, but something within one's own heart."

In Journey to the West, the monkey king, an earnest seeker after the Dao, tells us: "In yonder mountains lives an old immortal; his age is 18,000 years. I asked him to be my master, to teach me the way of longevity. He said the elixir of life is within your own body; to seek it elsewhere is a waste of effort." The fairy grottoes of the Fruit and Flower Mountain-Heart Cave and Spirit Mountain-are not so far away: Place your hand on your chest-are they not within?

Form is finite, mind infinite

The late philosopher Fang Tung-mei once said that the Chinese regard space as a vague and abstract state of mind, and are not fixated on the material form of the universe. The space in which we find ourselves is a gift of heaven to our imaginative powers. This fascinating idea is strikingly reminiscent of these lines from Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072): "An immortal on the King of Chu's tower/ I catch his eye, and his meaning is clear to me/ Yet a moment later it all seems a dream/ Though sitting close, he's as far away as heaven." The temporal and spatial structure of fairyland is rich with hidden meaning and full of emotional color.

Today, "fairy realms" are to be found all over China. Isn't Immortal's Footprint Rock in the Taipei suburb of Chingmei so named because Lu Dongbin left his footprint there? And when the U Theatre troupe practice their dance routines on mountaintops to absorb the spiritual energy of the universe, when old ladies go to Heaven Lake in the Hsuehshan Mountains to practice qigong and calm their spirits, or when classic kungfu novelist Jin Yong writes of a Peach-Blossom Island far removed from the discord of the martial arts world, is not the shadow of the cave heavens and blessed abodes behind them all?

As for fairy mountains on the sea, the name of one, Fusang, became another name for Japan, and Penghu, the name of the island group in the Taiwan Strait, is a corruption of Penglai, the most famous fairy mountain. Before Taiwan became famous as a pigsty studded with mountains of garbage, it too was once considered to be the fairy island of Penglai.

Fairyland really isn't so far away!

[Picture Caption]

Immortals playing chess is the most commonly depicted scene in Chinese portrayals of fairyland. Mortals who return to earth after witnessing such a game generally find that many years have passed during their absence.

From far-off mountains, fairyland has been gradually pulled back into Ch ina. In Miaoli County there is a Fairy Mountain where the female Daoist deity Jiu Tian Xuannu is venerated. The water which flows from a clear mountain spring beside her temple is much sought after.

Since ancient times, high mountains have been seen as a route up into heaven, and fairy realms are often supposed to be located on misty mountaintops. Looking a t Dongtian Shan Tang (Mountain Hall of Fairy Grottoes) by Dong Yuan (died c. 962) of the Five Dynasties period, we can imagine that above the clouds is a marvelous spirit realm . (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)

Although the Peach-Blossom Spring described by Tao Yuanming is a utopia, the spatial sense of a close-by yet hidden place of peace and beauty has been interpreted by some as having its origins in the Daoist notion of "fairy grottoes" (mountain caves inhabited by immortals). (drawing by Lee Su-ling)

The idea of fairyland grew out of Chinese people's attachment to life, s o portrayals of it often include motifs of auspicious beasts and rare fruits, symbolizing happiness, rank, longevity and pleasure.

Standing in Heaven Lake in the Hsuehshan Mountains, far away from city dust and bustle, breathing in ethereal forces--apart from strengthening one's body, may one not also experience the common essence of heaven and earth and the unity of all things in nature?

Although the Peach-Blossom Spring described by Tao Yuanming is a utopia, the spatial sense of a close-by yet hidden place of peace and beauty has been interpreted by some as having its origins in the Daoist notion of "fairy grottoes" （mountain caves inhabited by immortals）. （drawing by Lee Su-ling）

The idea of fairyland grew out of Chinese people's attachment to life, s o portrayals of it often include motifs of auspicious beasts and rare fruits, symbolizing happiness, rank, longevity and pleasure.

Standing in Heaven Lake in the Hsuehshan Mountains, far away from city dust and bustle, breathing in ethereal forces--apart from strengthening one's body, may one not also experience the common essence of heaven and earth and the unity of all things in nature?