Li Sheng 李升 — Scholar, Prophet, and Daoist Friend of Bai Juyi
Paul PengLi Sheng (李升) could compose essays extemporaneously. He had an extensive knowledge of various books. He was, by any measure, the kind of person who could have had a distinguished literary career in the Tang Dynasty — the kind of career that Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, his closest friends, actually had.
He chose something else. He found a Daoist master from Mount Shaoshi and studied with him. He learned to take elixirs, to practice bigu (辟谷, grain abstention), to refine his vital energy, to nourish his body through cultivation. And he developed the ability to predict future events accurately.
The sources record this last detail without elaboration. His predictions were often proven accurate. That is all they say. It is enough.
Key Takeaways
- Li Sheng 李升 (courtesy name Yunju 云居) was a native of Jiangxia (江夏, now part of Hubei Province) during the reign of Emperor Dezong of the Tang Dynasty (r. 779–805)
- Intelligent and perceptive from childhood; as an adult, he had extensive literary knowledge and could compose essays extemporaneously
- He studied under a Daoist master from Mount Shaoshi (崧山少室, one of the peaks of Songshan), learning elixir-taking, bigu (辟谷, grain abstention), qi refinement (炼气), and body nourishment
- He was a transcendental friend (方外之交) of Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831) and Bai Juyi (白居易, 772–846) — two of the greatest poets of the Tang Dynasty
- He possessed Daoist arts and could predict future events accurately
- Primary source: Comprehensive Mirror of Real Immortals and Practitioners Through the Ages (历世真仙体道通鉴), Volume 46
Li Sheng (李升, courtesy name Yunju) of Jiangxia — Tang Dynasty Daoist scholar who studied under a Shaoshi Mountain master, practiced bigu and qi refinement, befriended Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, and was known for accurate prophecy.
Note on “transcendental friend” (方外之交): The term fangwai zhi jiao (方外之交) literally means “friendship beyond the square” — friendship that exists outside the ordinary social world, bound by spiritual rather than secular ties. In Tang literary culture, this term was used to describe the relationship between literati and Daoist practitioners who were understood to inhabit a different order of reality. That Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen maintained this kind of friendship with Li Sheng tells us something about how seriously the Tang literary world took Daoist cultivation.
Mount Shaoshi and the Cultivation He Learned
Mount Shaoshi (少室山) is one of the peaks of Songshan (崧山), the Central Sacred Mountain of China, located in present-day Henan Province. It is best known in the West as the location of the Shaolin Monastery, but it has been a site of Daoist practice since antiquity — the mountain where the Yellow Emperor is said to have cultivated the Dao, and where generations of Daoist practitioners have sought seclusion.
The master Li Sheng studied under taught him four things: elixir-taking (服餐), bigu (辟谷, grain abstention), qi refinement (炼气), and body nourishment (养形). These four practices form a coherent system: elixir-taking and bigu work on the body’s nutritional foundation, withdrawing from ordinary food and replacing it with more refined substances; qi refinement works on the body’s energetic system, cultivating and circulating the vital energy that animates it; body nourishment integrates these practices into a sustained discipline of physical and spiritual care.
Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, and the Tang Literary-Daoist World
Bai Juyi (772–846) and Yuan Zhen (779–831) are two of the most celebrated poets of the Tang Dynasty. Bai Juyi in particular is one of the most widely read Chinese poets of any period — his poems were copied and circulated across East Asia during his lifetime, and his influence on Chinese literary culture has been continuous for over a thousand years.
That Li Sheng was their “transcendental friend” — bound to them by spiritual rather than secular ties — places him at the center of the Tang literary-Daoist world. The mid-Tang period was one in which the boundaries between literary culture and Daoist practice were unusually permeable. Poets took Daoist ordination. Daoist practitioners wrote poetry. The two worlds were not separate but overlapping, and the people who moved between them — like Li Sheng — occupied a distinctive and valued position in both.
Bai Juyi himself was deeply interested in Daoist and Buddhist practice, and his poetry frequently engages with themes of cultivation, withdrawal from the world, and the relationship between literary achievement and spiritual development. His friendship with Li Sheng was not incidental to his literary life. It was part of it.
The Prophecies
The sources say that Li Sheng possessed Daoist arts and could predict future events, and that his predictions were often proven accurate. This is a brief statement, but it is not a casual one. In the Daoist biographical tradition, the ability to predict future events accurately is understood as a consequence of genuine cultivation — the practitioner whose inner refinement has reached a sufficient level develops a sensitivity to the patterns of events that ordinary consciousness cannot perceive.
The connection between Daoist cultivation and prophetic capacity has deep roots in the tradition. The practitioner who has refined the body’s vital energies and stilled the mind’s ordinary activity develops a kind of perceptual clarity that extends beyond the present moment. Li Sheng’s accurate predictions were not understood as supernatural gifts but as natural consequences of what he had practiced.
What This Kind of Life Looks Like from the Inside
Li Sheng’s biography sits at the intersection of two worlds that the Tang Dynasty brought into unusually close contact: the world of literary achievement and the world of Daoist cultivation. He had the gifts for the first — the intelligence, the literary knowledge, the ability to compose extemporaneously. He chose to develop the second. And the friendships he maintained with Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen suggest that the choice did not require him to leave the literary world behind. It simply changed his relationship to it.
The Zhengyi (正一) tradition at Longhu Mountain (龙虎山) has always understood this kind of engagement — the practitioner who moves between the cultivated interior life and the world of human relationships and culture — as one of the legitimate expressions of the Daoist vocation. The priest who can speak to poets, predict events accurately, and maintain friendships that cross the boundary between the secular and the sacred is fulfilling the tradition’s understanding of what genuine cultivation produces in a person.
If you find yourself drawn to the Tang Daoist world at its most culturally rich — the intersection of poetry, cultivation, and prophetic insight — Li Sheng’s brief biography is a window into that world from an angle that the more famous figures do not provide.
Related Concepts
- 辟谷 (Bìgǔ, Grain Abstention): the Daoist practice of withdrawing from grain-based nutrition toward subtler forms of sustenance; one of the four cultivation practices Li Sheng learned from his Shaoshi master
- 炼气 (Liànqì, Qi Refinement): the Daoist practice of cultivating and circulating the body’s vital energy; understood as a means of refining the practitioner’s energetic constitution and extending vital capacity
- 方外之交 (Fāngwài zhī Jiāo, Transcendental Friendship): friendship that exists outside the ordinary social world, bound by spiritual rather than secular ties; the term used to describe Li Sheng’s relationship with Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen
- 少室山 (Shāoshì Shān, Mount Shaoshi): one of the peaks of Songshan, the Central Sacred Mountain of China; the mountain where Li Sheng’s Daoist master practiced and where Li Sheng received his cultivation training
Source Texts
- Comprehensive Mirror of Real Immortals and Practitioners Through the Ages (历世真仙体道通鉴), Volume 46 — compiled by Zhao Daoyi in the Yuan Dynasty.
