暨齐物 Ji Qiwu — The Daoist Who Built a Library on the Mountain
Paul Peng
Origins and Formation: A Student of Zhu Junxu
Ji Qiwu was a native of Hangzhou — a city in the Zhejiang region that, during the Five Dynasties period, fell within the territory of the Wuyue Kingdom, one of the more stable and culturally productive of the ten southern states. He studied under Zhu Junxu (朱君绪, courtesy name Faman), the Tang Dynasty Sandong Fashi whose sixteen-volume Yaoxiu Keyi Jielü Chao had systematized Taoist ritual and precepts. To study under Zhu Junxu was to receive training from one of the most rigorous Taoist scholars of the preceding generation.
From Zhu Junxu, Ji Qiwu received not only textual learning but also the transmission of Taoist ritual tallies and divine talismans (fu, 符) — the sacred documents that authorize a Taoist priest to perform specific rituals and establish his connection to the celestial hierarchy. This transmission was not merely symbolic; it was the formal act that made Ji Qiwu a legitimate heir to the lineage and authorized him to teach and transmit in turn.
Mount Dadi and the Jingsi Courtyard
After his formation under Zhu Junxu, Ji Qiwu entered the Jingsi Courtyard (定思院) on Mount Dadi (大淌山) — a sacred mountain in present-day Zhejiang Province with deep Taoist associations. Mount Dadi had been a site of Taoist practice since at least the Eastern Jin period, and its caves and forests had sheltered generations of practitioners seeking the conditions that mountain seclusion provides: clean air, natural silence, and distance from the noise of political life.
The Jingsi Courtyard was a place for intensive practice — the kind of focused, sustained cultivation that requires extended periods of withdrawal from ordinary social life. Ji Qiwu’s decision to settle there was a statement about where he believed the real work of his life was to be done: not in the courts of the competing kingdoms, but on the mountain, in the company of texts and disciples.
The Chuixiang Pavilion: A Library in the Mountains
On Mount Dadi, Ji Qiwu built the Chuixiang Pavilion (垂香阁, also called the Book Pavilion) — a three-room structure that became the center of his scholarly and teaching life. He accumulated thousands of volumes of Taoist scriptures and classical texts there, creating what was, in effect, a private library of Taoist and classical learning at a time when such collections were rare and vulnerable.
The name Chuixiang (垂香, “Hanging Fragrance”) evokes the atmosphere of a space where incense drifts upward and the boundary between the mundane and the sacred is gently permeable. A library with this name is not merely a repository of information — it is a place where reading is understood as a form of spiritual practice, where engagement with the texts of the tradition is itself a way of cultivating the mind and refining the qi.
Ji Qiwu devoted himself to writing every day. The historical record notes that when he instructed Taoist disciples and expounded on the Dao and its metaphysical dimensions — the core philosophical concepts of the tradition — all those who listened were filled with admiration and conviction. This is the language the tradition uses to describe a teacher who has genuinely internalized what he is teaching: the effect on listeners is not merely intellectual persuasion but something closer to recognition, a sense that what is being said is true in a way that goes beyond argument.
Scholarship as Preservation
Ji Qiwu’s library-building on Mount Dadi was, in the context of the Five Dynasties period, an act of cultural preservation as much as personal cultivation. The political fragmentation of the era had disrupted the institutional networks through which texts were copied, transmitted, and kept safe. Private collections like the one Ji Qiwu assembled on Mount Dadi played a crucial role in ensuring that the Taoist textual heritage survived the turbulence of the period intact.
This kind of work — patient, unglamorous, sustained over decades — is the infrastructure on which the tradition’s continuity depends. The Zhengyi (正一) lineage that continues today from Dragon Tiger Mountain in Jiangxi carries forward a textual heritage that survived precisely because people like Ji Qiwu were willing to build libraries on mountains and spend their lives filling them. The ordained Zhengyi priest who performs ritual today draws on a body of knowledge that was preserved, in part, by scholars who understood that keeping the texts alive was itself a form of service to the Tao.
Sources and Historical Record
Accounts of Ji Qiwu’s life appear in Volume 89 of the Spring and Autumn Annals of the Ten Kingdoms (十国春秋) — a historical record of the ten regimes of the Five Dynasties period — and in Volume 5 of the Dongxiao Tuzhi (洞霄图志, Illustrated Records of Dongxiao Palace). His appearance in both a secular historical chronicle and a Taoist institutional record reflects the dual nature of his significance: he was a figure of the Taoist tradition who was also recognized by the broader historical community as someone worth remembering.
Ji Qiwu built his library during one of the most politically chaotic periods in Chinese history, and the books survived. That is not a small thing. The Tao that he studied and taught on Mount Dadi was the same Tao that had been transmitted through the Tang Dynasty masters before him and would continue to be transmitted through the Song Dynasty scholars who came after. He was a link in a chain that has not broken.
