Gao Biao(高彪): The Eastern Han Taoist Who Dwelled in the Great Emptiness
Paul Peng
He could write words that made an emperor weep. But he could barely speak them aloud.
Gao Biao (高彪) of the Eastern Han was a man of painful contradictions. He was born into poverty and rose on the strength of his brush. He served at the Eastern Prospect Library, the Dongguan Academy, where his rhapsodies and hymns so moved Emperor Ling that the monarch ordered his portrait painted on the academy walls—an honour meant to inspire the empire’s scholars to greater heights.
And yet, all his life, he was slow of speech. A stutterer. A man whose inner world was a torrent, but whose tongue was a locked gate.
Perhaps that is why, when he finally wrote down what he truly believed, he spoke not of glory but of disappearance. He wanted to wash everything away, to dissolve into an emptiness so deep that even emptiness dissolved.
His surviving poem, the Qing Jie (《清诫》, “Exhortation to Clarity”), is one of the most radical statements of Taoist naturalism from the Han dynasty. And it came from a man who had climbed the ladder of worldly honour—and then, quietly, stepped off.
From Bare Poverty to the Emperor’s Favour
Gao Biao’s beginnings gave him nothing. He was from Wuxi in Wu Commandery—what is now Jiangsu province—and his family was, the history records, “humble and poor.” No illustrious ancestors. No political connections. Just a boy with a talent for language and a mouth that could not keep up with his mind.
He was recommended by his county as “filial and incorrupt,” sat the imperial examinations on the classics, and placed first. The title Langzhong (郎中), a gentleman attendant, was his reward. He worked at the Dongguan Academy, producing fu (rhapsodies), song (hymns), and essays. Emperor Ling was stirred enough to grant a rare honour: an edict commanding that a portrait of Gao Biao be painted on the library walls, to stand as a model for scholars throughout the empire.
Later, Gao Biao was appointed magistrate of Waihuang. A man born with nothing was now an imperial official, a celebrated writer, a face on a wall. And it was exactly then that he began to dream of vanishing.
Washing Away the Dust
The poem he wrote—the Qing Jie—survives only in fragments preserved in a Tang dynasty encyclopedia. But those fragments are enough to reconstruct something luminous and severe. It opens with a line that could serve as his epitaph:
“Wash away filth and accumulated burdens. Let go, and follow nature.”
The Chinese he uses for “follow nature” is ren ziran (任自然)—literally, to entrust oneself to the spontaneous. This is not the “nature” of mountains and trees. It is the fundamental self-so-ness of the Way, the pattern that unfolds when human artifice stops imposing itself.
Gao Biao was not describing a weekend retreat. He was describing a total orientation of life—one that stood in direct opposition to everything the Dongguan Academy represented. The library was a world of texts, commentaries, examinations, and imperial praise. And Gao Biao, painted on its walls, was writing from inside that heart to say: none of this is real. The real lies in washing it all away.
Into the Emptiness Within Emptiness
Then he goes further. Much further.
“Retreat to cultivate purity and stillness. I dwell within the Great Emptiness within Great Emptiness.”
The phrase is taixu zhi taixu (太虚之太虚)—the Great Void within the Great Void. To speak of the “Great Emptiness within the Great Emptiness” is to reach for something even more fundamental: an emptiness that is not just the background of existence, but the essence of one’s own being. “I dwell,” he says—not “I meditate upon it.” This is not philosophy. This is a practice.
“Cleanse the heart and sever thought. Be so clear that no dust clings.”
“When wisdom and deliberation are exhausted, the spirit of the valley—the Gushen—lives on without end.”
The “spirit of the valley” is a direct echo of Laozi, chapter six: “The valley spirit never dies. It is called the mysterious female.” Gao Biao was saying that when you let go of every thought, every plan, every vestige of intellect, what remains is not blankness but an undying, fertile stillness.
“Within the vast and hazy there is something. Within the dark and subtle are beginnings.”
He is paraphrasing Laozi chapter twenty-one: “The Way is something elusive and evanescent. Elusive and evanescent, yet within it is an image.” Emptiness is not empty. The void is not a dead end. Inside the silence, something begins.
Wine, Beauty, Thought: The Three Thieves
If the first part of the Qing Jie maps the ascent into stillness, the second part maps the threats that make that ascent impossible for most people. Gao Biao names four enemies:
“Wine harms my nature. Thought damages my spirit. Beautiful features cut down my life. Desire confuses my true self.”
This is not puritanism. It is precision. Each of the four attacks a different layer of the person. Wine is the body’s undoing. Excessive thinking drains the spirit. Desire for beauty cuts down life like a blade. And desire in general—the endless wanting—obscures the true self, the quiet core that cannot be found when appetite is shouting.
Gao Biao’s solution is not repression. It is the same as his opening command: let go and follow nature. When you stop interfering with yourself, the wine loses its appeal, the thoughts quieten, the desires loosen their grip. This teaching would later flow directly into the Taoist monastic tradition—the precepts of the early Celestial Masters, the quietistic practices of the Shangqing school, and the inner alchemy of later centuries.
The Portrait and the Void
A man stands in the Dongguan Library, beneath his own portrait, painted by imperial command. Scholars pass him in the corridors and bow. The emperor remembers his name. And inside his mind, he is already gone—dissolved into a void so deep that even “void” is too heavy a word.
He did not flee the court in disgrace. He did not stage a dramatic resignation. He simply wrote a poem in which the entire edifice of worldly achievement was revealed as dust, and then he lived accordingly. This is a different kind of Taoist life: not the dramatic withdrawal of Jie Ni at the plough, nor the conflicted exile of Wei Mou in the cave, but the quiet, inward disappearance of a man who stayed exactly where he was and yet was not there at all.
The Living Legacy
Gao Biao’s Qing Jie is not widely known. Most of his writings are lost. But his vision—of a clarity so profound that thought itself falls away, of a stillness that reveals something alive at the core of emptiness—continues in the meditative and liturgical traditions of living Taoism.
The Zhengyi priest who quiets the mind before ritual, who “cleanses the heart and severs thought” before approaching the altar, walks the path that Gao Biao mapped in words. His “Great Emptiness within Great Emptiness” is not a philosophical abstraction. It is an invitation. It still waits for anyone willing to wash away the dust.
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