Records of Plum Immortal Abbey 梅仙观记

Authored by Yang Zhiyuan, a Taoist priest of Xiantan Abbey.

Completed in the late Southern Song Dynasty.

Records of Plum Immortal Abbey

One volume, included in the Biographies category of The Dongxuan Section in the Daozang.

This book compiles dozens of poems and prose works from the Tang and Song dynasties, narrating the life deeds of Mei Fu at the end of the Western Han Dynasty—including his official career, practice of the Dao, elixir refining and attainment of immortality—as well as the remaining historical relics of Mei Fu on Meixian Mountain and the conditions of the Taoist abbeys there. It opens with Facts of Immortal Mei, an anonymous work written in the second year of the Zhenyuan reign of the Tang Dynasty, which details the events of Mei Fu encountering demons during elixir refining and meeting his master to attain immortality. It then includes Stele of Mr. Mei by Luo Yin, a poet at the end of the Tang Dynasty, and inscriptions by Song Dynasty scholars. Next are six imperial edicts from the Song Dynasty that confer honorific titles on Mei Fu and order the construction of Xiantan Abbey. Finally, it collects more than forty poems and odes about Mei Fu and Meixian Abbey by Song Dynasty literati, including masterpieces by renowned writers such as Su Shi and Huang Tingjian.