Mao Bodao(毛伯道): The Four Who Waited Forty Years on Wangwu
Paul Peng
They went into the mountain as young men. They came out as immortals. Mao Bodao (毛伯道) lived during the Later Han dynasty. The Seven Slips from a Cloudy Satchel and the Comprehensive Mirror of True Immortals record his story in a handful of sentences. He travelled to Mount Wangwu—the first of the ten great grotto-heavens of Taoism, the primal mountain of the north—and there he found three companions: Xie Zhijian (谢稚坚), Liu Daogong (刘道恭), and Zhang Zhaoqi (张兆期). Together, the four of them practised the Tao for more than forty years. Together, they refined the divine elixir. Together, they took it and ascended. This is the longest continuous group practice recorded in the early Taoist tradition. It is also the most complete. No one was left behind. No one gave up. No one died before the work was finished. Four men entered the mountain, and four immortals left it.
The Mountain of the First Grotto-Heaven
Mount Wangwu stands in present-day Henan Province, at the eastern edge of the Taihang range. In the Taoist geography of sacred space, it is not merely one mountain among many. It is the first of the Ten Great Grotto-Heavens—the shida dongtian (十大洞天)—the highest category of sacred mountains in the Taoist system. The Seven Slips describes it as “the Grotto-Heaven of Lesser Existence and Pure Emptiness”—Xiaoyou Qingxu zhi Tian (小有清虚之天). It is a world within the world, a space where the boundary between the visible and the invisible is thin enough to pass through. Centuries after Mao Bodao, the great Taoist master Sima Chengzhen would compose his Zuowang Lun—the Treatise on Sitting and Forgetting—on this mountain. The Quanzhen tradition would claim it as a sacred site. But when Mao Bodao and his three companions arrived, none of that had yet been written. They were among the first. Four men, on the primal mountain, with no audience and no deadline. They had time. They took it.
The Number Four and the Shape of Practice
Four is the number of the directions. Four is the number of the seasons. Four is the number of the si xiang (四象)—the four emblematic animals that guard the four quadrants of the sky: the Green Dragon of the east, the Vermilion Bird of the south, the White Tiger of the west, the Dark Warrior of the north. In the practice of Taoist alchemy, the number four is operative. The alchemical furnace is oriented to the four directions. The ingredients are classified by the four seasons of their harvesting. The fire is regulated by the four watches of the day and night. The four companions on Mount Wangwu were not merely a group of friends. They were a ritual configuration. Each man stood for a direction. Each man held a season. The work they did together required all four of them to be present, because the elixir they were refining was not only a substance. It was a world. The Seven Slips and the Comprehensive Mirror do not tell us who took which role. But the fact that all four names are recorded suggests that no one was the master and no one was the disciple. They were equals. They were a circle.
The Long Wait
Forty years is a long time to do anything. It is a long time to tend a furnace. It is a long time to share a kitchen and a silence and the unspoken tensions that accumulate between any four people who live together without interruption. Marriages do not always last forty years. Reigns do not always last forty years. The Han dynasty itself, in its final decades of fragmentation, was collapsing around the mountain while the four men on Wangwu continued their work. The Comprehensive Mirror gives us no details of those forty years. We do not know if there were failures—batches of elixir that did not form, ingredients that proved impure, fires that went out during storms. All of that is lost. What remains is the number: forty. And what the number says is that the work was not quick. The divine elixir did not come easily. It required persistence across decades, across the span of an entire adult life, across the slow transformation of four young bodies into four old ones, and then—when the elixir was finally ready—the sudden reversal of that transformation, the old bodies becoming young again, becoming light, becoming immortal.
The Ascension of the Four
The Seven Slips records the end of the story in eight characters: “They successfully refined the divine elixir, took it, and ascended to immortality.” There is no drama in this sentence. No celestial music. No white crane descending. No parting words to disciples, because there were no disciples. The four companions, who had entered the mountain together decades earlier, simply completed the work, consumed the elixir, and departed. The mountain, after their departure, would have been silent. The furnace would have cooled. The tools would have been left where they lay. Perhaps a woodcutter or a herb-gatherer, wandering up from the plains, found the camp and wondered what happened to the four old men who had lived there. The four names were preserved. Not one name, but four. The tradition remembered that the work had been done together, and that the ascension had been together, and that the silence after the ascension was a shared silence. Mao Bodao did not ascend alone. He ascended with Xie Zhijian, with Liu Daogong, with Zhang Zhaoqi. The four directions returned to the source together. The four seasons became one season. The forty years became eternity.
The Three Groups
Mao Bodao and his companions complete a triad of group practices in the early Taoist tradition. Guo Sichao and his three younger brothers had practised together on Mount Gouqu during the Qin dynasty. Their bond was blood. The eldest brother led, and the younger brothers followed. Their practice was the practice of the household, the earliest form of human community, sanctified by the Tao. Yin Changsheng, Ma Mingsheng, and an unnamed third companion had smelted yellow earth into gold on Mount Qingcheng. Their bond was discipleship. Ma Mingsheng was the master. Yin Changsheng was the disciple. Their practice was the practice of the lineage, the transmission from master to student, made visible in the shared work of the furnace. Mao Bodao, Xie Zhijian, Liu Daogong, and Zhang Zhaoqi practised together on Mount Wangwu for more than forty years. Their bond was neither blood nor discipleship. It was companionship. Four equals, four directions, four lives given to a single work. Their practice was the practice of the circle, the community of peers, the longest and quietest of the three models. The Tao is wide enough to contain them all.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Mao Bodao’s group of four represents something fundamental to the life of the Taoist church: the community of practice. The Zhengyi priest does not work alone. The liturgy requires multiple officiants—the gaogong (高功), the high priest who leads the rite; the dujiang (都讲), the cantor who intones the scriptures; the acolytes who prepare the offerings and the musicians who accompany the chants. A Zhengyi jiao ritual requires a community. The four companions on Mount Wangwu are an early image of this communal dimension of Taoist practice. They were not priests. They were not ordained. But they discovered, in their forty years together, what every Taoist community learns: that the work is stronger when it is shared, that the silence is deeper when it is held by more than one, that the elixir of immortality, like the liturgy of the altar, requires a circle.
What the Four Left Behind
Mao Bodao, Xie Zhijian, Liu Daogong, and Zhang Zhaoqi left no writings. No scripture bears their names. No temple commemorates their presence on Mount Wangwu. But the mountain remembers. The first grotto-heaven, the primal peak, the place where Sima Chengzhen would later write the Treatise on Sitting and Forgetting and where generations of Taoist seekers would follow the paths that the four companions had walked—the mountain holds their names in its own way, in the silence of its forests and the persistence of its streams. They were four young men who became four old men who became four immortals. They waited forty years. And when the elixir was ready, they took it together, and the mountain was empty, and the sky was full.
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