Hao Datong

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A man who reads fortunes for a living spends his days telling other people where their roads bend. Hao Datong (1140–1212) had spent his on exactly that — casting the stalks, ranging the trigrams, working the calendar — before he turned the whole apparatus inward and asked it a different question. He became one of the Seven Perfected of Quanzhen Daoism, the senior disciples of Wang Chongyang who carried the “Complete Perfection” teaching out of its founder’s brief ministry and into an order that still ordains; and within that circle he was the one who held the Book of Changes, the master of the Yijing.

The diviner of Ninghai

He was born in 1140 to a comfortable family of Ninghai, on the Shandong peninsula — the seacoast district around present-day Muping that, in the same generation, gave Complete Perfection more than one of its founders. His given name was Lin; the courtesy name Taigu — Remote Antiquity — is the one that attached to him for good and that his collected writings would carry. Before any of the religious names, he was a literate man of the divination arts. The accounts have him versed in Laozi and Zhuangzi and, above all, in the Yijing — skilled at milfoil divination, at the eight trigrams, at the yin-yang and calendrical reckoning that a working diviner of the period commanded. This is not the standard opening of a Quanzhen hagiography. The other Perfected come to the founder as scholars, landowners, soldiers, a wealthy couple; Hao comes as a technician of the hexagrams, a man whose trade was already the apparatus that his mature work would repurpose. A diviner in twelfth-century north China was a practitioner of an old and respectable discipline — the Yijing had been first among the classics since the Han, with the milfoil count and the trigram correlations forming a craft handed down in manuals and almanacs. Hao did not arrive ignorant of the Changes and learn them in religion; he arrived a master of them and brought the whole tool-kit through the conversion intact.

What changed him was the arrival, in 1167, of Wang Chongyang in Shandong. The founder had abandoned a failed examination career and an interval of ecstatic seclusion in Shaanxi — the episode the order remembers as a meeting with immortals at Ganhe and a retreat in a pit he called the Tomb of the Living Dead — and had come east to gather disciples and plant the lay associations from which the school grew. Hao gave up the trade. He took the religious name Guangningzi, Master of Expansive Tranquility, and is also remembered under the style Tianranzi; the diviner of Ninghai became an ascetic of the new movement, and the name Hao Taigu is the one his anthology still bears.

Among the Seven Perfected

Wang Chongyang died in 1170, on a journey back west, after a ministry in Shandong of only three years. What he left was not yet a school but a knot of disciples and a handful of lay congregations. The order as later generations would know it — the monasteries, the ordination ranks, the lineage genealogies — was built by the disciples and by the disciples’ disciples across the decades that followed, and most decisively under Mongol patronage in the thirteenth century. The canonical group of senior figures, the Seven Perfected of the North (Bei qizhen), did not crystallize at the founder’s deathbed either; the configuration of exactly seven settled later, after the death of the most politically consequential of them, and an earlier reckoning had counted a smaller circle of masters.

The seven, as the tradition fixed them, are Ma Yu and his wife Sun Bu’er — the one female Perfected and the figurehead of a later women’s inner-alchemy literature — together with Tan Chuduan, Liu Chuxuan, Wang Chuyi, Qiu Chuji, and Hao Datong. Each came to be remembered for a register of his own. Qiu Chuji is the statesman, the one who crossed Central Asia to meet Genghis Khan and returned with tax exemption and oversight of the empire’s clergy. Wang Chuyi is the cliffside ascetic received at the Jin court. Ma Yu is the patriarch of the early order. Hao Datong is the diagrammatist — the one who, where the others left songs and discourses, left charts.

Six years under the bridge

His hagiography is organized around a single feat of endurance, and it is worth reading as what it is: devotional literature, shaped to fix a reputation, not a deposition. After the founder’s death the disciples scattered into years of mendicancy, grave-tending, and extreme self-denial — the register early Complete Perfection prized, the same register that put Wang Chuyi on a cliff edge through the nights and Tan Chuduan on the road with a begging bowl. Hao’s portion was a bridge. The accounts have him seated in meditation beneath it for six years, silent and unmoving through cold and flood, taking what passers-by set down and answering nothing, enduring abuse and weather alike, until the realization he had gone there to find arrived.

The bridge is a literary image as much as a place: the man who once sat at a stall and told strangers their futures now sits under the road itself, below the traffic of fortunes, asking nothing and predicting nothing. Whether the six years are six is beside the point of the genre. The episode did its work — it made him a byword for austerity within the order, the one whose endurance the others measured themselves against — and it set the frame for the only part of his life that survives in his own hand.

The Taigu ji: divination turned inward

What survives of his thought is particular and strange. His anthology, the Taigu ji — the Collection of Remote Antiquity — preserved in the Ming recension of the Daoist Canon, the Daozang compiled in the fifteenth century — is filled with cosmological diagrams. Where the writings of his fellow Perfected run to verse and exhortation, Hao’s run to figures: arrangements of the eight trigrams and the sixty-four hexagrams, the Hetu and Luoshu number-charts, circular and square diagrams of the kind the Song Yijing cosmologists had drawn, and a Diagram of the Great One, the Taiyi tu, that gives one of his charts its name.

The point of the diagrams is the alchemy inside the body. Daoist inner alchemy — neidan — had, across the Song, taken over the entire lexicon of the older laboratory art: furnace and cauldron, lead and mercury, dragon and tiger, the timed cycles of the fire. It relocated all of it from the bench to the practitioner, reading the body as the vessel and the directed attention as the flame, and it organized the whole reversal on the scaffolding of the Yijing. The two working trigrams are Kan (water) and Li (fire): Kan, outwardly yielding, holds a firm line at its center — the true yang hidden in yin; Li, outwardly firm, holds a yielding line at its center — the true yin hidden in yang. The labor the diagrams chart is the inversion that draws the hidden line out of one and restores it to the other, returning the postnatal figures toward the prenatal purity of Qian and Kun. This is the cosmology Hao’s charts set out: not a procedure to be followed line by line, but a map of the work and its stages, the imagery of the Changes laid over the interior of the one who studies it.

Here the diviner’s training is fully visible. The image-and-number tradition of Yijing interpretation — the xiangshu school, which reads the hexagrams through their graphic structure, their constituent and nuclear trigrams, their line-changes and numerical correlations, rather than through the moral sense of the written text — was the older and more technical of the two great Yijing hermeneutics, and the one closest to the text’s divinatory roots. It ran through the Han cosmologists into the Daoist alchemical classics and was revived at the highest level in the Song. Hao Datong is Complete Perfection’s link to that lineage. The same apparatus a diviner used to read a client’s situation off a cast hexagram, he turned to read the situation of the refining self — the figures no longer telling a fortune but charting a transformation, the question moved from what will happen to what is becoming. Scholarship reads his contribution as exactly this graft: the xiangshu machinery carried whole into neidan and made the structural backbone of a meditation cosmology. He and his successors paired it, the records add, with a doctrine of mind and inner nature drawn partly from Chan Buddhism and from the rationalist Confucian thought of the day — the triad of mind, nature, and Dao — so that the diagrams sit inside a teaching about consciousness, not only about cosmic mechanics.

Lineage made after the fact

Later tradition gave the Seven a tidy architecture that the order’s actual growth did not have. Each Perfected was made the ancestor of a distinct lineage, and Hao was assigned the Huashan line — named for the western sacred peak, Mount Hua. Historians generally read this scheme as an order imposed backward onto a messier reality: a way of organizing thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Quanzhen into seven branches with seven founding ancestors, rather than a record of how the master-to-disciple ties actually ran in the decades after 1170. The recent study of how these lineages were constructed — Jinping Wang’s work on the elaborate reburials and assembly-funerals through which Quanzhen communities built ancestor-worship around their founders and asserted ownership of a founder’s legacy — shows the genealogical scaffolding being raised, stone and ritual and stele, as deliberate institutional work rather than inherited fact.

The court completed the canonization. The thirteenth century was Complete Perfection’s high season: after Qiu Chuji returned from the Khan’s camp with tax exemption and authority over the empire’s clergy, the order absorbed temples across the north and its founders became objects of state honor. In 1269 the Yuan throne raised the Seven to the formal rank of Perfected (zhenren); Khubilai’s reign added honorific titles for Hao among the rest, the diviner of Ninghai enrolled by imperial decree among the realized. From there the figures passed out of the records and into popular imagination — the late-imperial novels, and in the twentieth century the martial-arts fiction that turned the austere circle into a band of sword-masters and gave the Huashan name a second, fictional life on the page and screen, far from any diagram. Behind the legend the charts remain in the canon: the quiet residue of a diviner who decided the Changes pointed somewhere other than the future.

The textual record and its scholarship

The base layer of Hao’s record is biographical and textual: the Taigu ji in the Daozang, the stele inscriptions and hagiographic compilations of the Yuan that fixed the Seven Perfected as a group, and the reference apparatus that organizes all of it. The standard one-stop entry on Hao, his names, and his works is the FYSK Daoist Culture Centre database, which records him as a master of the Yijing skilled in milfoil and eight-trigram divination, native of Ninghai (Muping, Shandong), converted to Complete Perfection in 1167 and founder of the Huashan branch — and the biographical datawiki of the Chinese Text Project, which gives the names and the 1140 birth.

The serious modern study of early Quanzhen begins with Stephen Eskildsen’s The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters (State University of New York Press, 2004), which reads the surviving writings of the founding generation — Hao among them — for their actual program of asceticism, meditation, and self-cultivation rather than the later legend (SUNY catalog; De Gruyter Brill DOI). Louis Komjathy’s Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism (Brill, 2007) and his annotated anthology The Way of Complete Perfection: A Quanzhen Daoist Anthology (SUNY Press, 2013) supply the translations and the institutional history. Fabrizio Pregadio’s Encyclopedia of Taoism (Routledge, 2008) is the standard reference for the order, the Seven, and the neidan vocabulary the diagrams encode. On the specifically image-and-number character of Hao’s Yijing — the xiangshu context his charts inherit — Richard J. Smith’s Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing and Its Evolution in China (University of Virginia Press, 2008) maps the commentarial tradition into which the diagrams fit. On how the lineages that named Hao the Huashan ancestor were actually assembled, Jinping Wang’s “Reburials of Eminent Masters: The Construction of Quanzhen Daoist Lineages in North China under Mongol Rule” (Journal of Chinese History 8, 2024) is the recent treatment (Cambridge Core). The Quanzhen masters’ own scriptures reach English late and partially; the nineteenth-century point of entry to Daoist text remains James Legge’s The Texts of Taoism (1891), which carries the philosophical classics the founders read but not the order’s own corpus — a measure of how recently the study of Complete Perfection began.

→ In the library: Legge — The Texts of Taoism (1891)

→ Related: Quanzhen · Daoist Neidan · Southern Lineage Nanzong · Divination · I Ching · Taoism · Alchemy · Asceticism · Meditation · Tan Chuduan · Liu Chuxuan · Wang Chuyi