Hsu Hsuan-p'ing was born during the first decade of the eighth century in She County, Hsin An, and lived as a hermit in a grass hut on Chengyang Mountain. He paid scant attention to his dress, but he continued to look as though he were only forty years old. His step was light and quick, and he walked like a galloping horse.

He often carried firewood to the marketplace to sell, hanging a gourd from his shoulder pole and bearing a bamboo staff, and he would usually return home only after he had gotten drunk. He wrote a poem about it:

Bearing firewood

I go out in the morning to sell it;

Having bought my wine

I return as the sun sinks west.

Should you ask me

where my home is, I'd reply:

"Through the clouds

and into the green mountain mist."

Kind and benevolent, Hsu Hsuan-p'ing helped people in suffering and hardship for more than thirty years, and his fame spread far and wide. Whenever a gentleman was drawn by his reputation to pay him a visit, however, Hsu would withdraw and disappear, leaving behind a poem on the walls of his grass hut:

I've lived in seclusion for thirty years,

My hut built on a peak of South Mountain.

In the quiet night I enjoy the bright moon;

In the idle morn I sip from jasper springs.

A woodcutter sings amid the fields;

Valley birds sport before the cliffs.

From joy I've lost count of my age;

I call every year the first of a cycle.

　Hsu Hsuan-p'ing wrote a great many poems and left many behind at inns and way stations along the road. During the T'ien Pao period (742-755) of the T'ang Dynasty, the great poet Li Po came across one of Hsu's poems on a trip east and exclaimed, "This is the work of an immortal!" When he learned who had written it, he tried to visit Hsu whenever he came to Hsin An, but he never succeeded in seeing him. Li Po once left a poem behind on the wall of his hut:

Having copied and recited your poems,

I've come to visit the immortal's dwelling.

But your traces are lost in the misty peaks, where cloudy forests part the primal void.

Peering about I see only desolation,

Leaning on my staff I pace in vain.

Transformed into a crane of distant heaven,

You'll return, I suppose, in a millennium.

When Hsu came back, he matched Li Po's poem with his own:

A pond of lotus leaves

yields clothing without end.

Two acres of yellow herbs

provide food to spare.

But here's yet another come trying to find me.

No choice but to up stakes and even deeper retire.

Not long thereafter his grass hut burned down in a blaze. Hsu had vanished without a trace.

More than a century later, in 871, there was a man named Hsu Ming-shu who had a servant girl who used to follow one of his workmen into the mountains to collect firewood. One day on South Mountain she spotted a man sitting on a stone, eating a big peach. "Are you Hsu Ming-shu's servant girl?" he asked her. "Yes, I am," she replied.

"Well, I'm his ancestor!" he said.

"I once heard the master say that an ancestor of his had become an immortal and disappeared," the girl said.

"When you go home, tell Ming-shu that I'm here in the mountains," the man continued. "I'm going to give you a peach now, and you must eat it at once. You mustn't try to carry it out of the mountains, because the god of the mountain keeps strict watch and there are many tigers and wolves about."

The girl bit into the peach. It tasted fresh and delicious, and she gobbled it down at once.

Hsu sent the girl back home with the woodcutter. The load she was carrying on her shoulder pole felt light as air. After she got home she told her master all about how she had gone up in the mountains and met his ancestor Hsu Hsuan-p'ing. . . .

Hsu Ming-shu was enraged at the girl for having spoken his ancestor's given name. He picked up a stick of wood and prepared to strike her, but he had no sooner lifted the stick than the girl vanished.

Later, some people who had gone up into the mountains saw the girl. She had the face of a child and was dressed in tree bark. Her movements were like flying, and she vanished at once into the depths of the forest, leaving no trace.