Le culte de Wangzi Qiao ou la longue carrière d'un immortel

Abstract

Marianne Bujard : The Cult of Wangzi Qiao or the Long Career of an Immortal Wangzi Qiao is famous in ancient literature as a paragon of immortality. In the Biographies of Immortals (Liexian zhuan), attributed to Liu Xiang, he has been granted an "official" biography. Beside one or two references from literary sources, the biography is probably based on legends about an immortal of Goushi mountain, near Songshan, in Henan. During Han times, cults were celebrated to the immortal in these mountains, and Emperor Wu went to the Goushi mountain several times hoping to meet with him. By the end of the second century, a stele copied by Cai Yong reveals another center of the cult to Wangzi Qiao, in Mengxian, near Shangqiu in Henan. There Taoist devotees came from all parts to sing hymns to Taiyi and travel through meditation to their cinnabar fields (dantian). Later, in the fourth century, in the vicinity of Maoshan, we learn from the Zhengao that the medium Yang Xi received many visits from an immortal named Wangzi Qiao, claiming to be the Perfected of Mount Tongbo, in the Tiantai mountains of Zhejiang. From his grotto-heaven he reigned over the five Marchmounts of the Empire and had become an official of the celestial administration. Despite the fact that Wangzi Qiao emigrated to the south, he remained a divinity of Songshan where, in the Tang, Wu Zetian built a new shrine for him. The cult also appeared in Sichuan, where in Chengdu Wangzi Qiao had for a while a statue in the ancestors temple of the Wang royal family of the short-lived Shu Kingdom (907-925). This article discusses the transformations of this nebulous figure of immortality into one or many local divinities and the way the manifestations of Wangzi Qiao adapted to changing conditions of space and time.