Eight immortals across the sea
The story has been circulated in China for thousands of years, and almost everyone in the folk knows and knows, especially Lü Dongbin, who is the core figure in the Eight Immortals, who is revered as the ancestor of the Quanzhen Sect, and the Taoist temples that enshrine him are all over the country, but there has always been a lot of speculation about whether Lü Dongbin and his people really exist.
In 1959, one of the Soviet aid projects - the Three Gorges Reservoir was officially launched, when the predicted water level was as high as 350 meters above sea level, which meant that the Yongle Palace on the north bank of the Yellow River was likely to sink to the bottom, in order to protect the cultural relics, the central government decided to relocate the Yongle Palace as a whole!
Unexpectedly, at the beginning of the relocation project, a strange stone stele suddenly appeared, only to see the book
"Tomb of Lü Chunyang of the Tang Dynasty"
These seven words made the experts present ecstatic.
As everyone knows
Lü Dongbin Pure Yangzi, in the nearby Jiufeng Mountain, is the veil of the immortals about to be lifted here?
Lü Dongbin
Lü Dongbin is the only real figure in history among the Eight Immortals, his name can be said to be a household name, even weak children know the saying of "dog bites Lü Dongbin", so who is he? How did he ascend to the throne as a mortal and be worshipped and enshrined by the general public?
There have always been many records of Lü Dongbin, and the earliest appearance was in the Early Song Dynasty's Taiping Huanyu Chronicle, which records:
"Lü Yanzi Dongbin, after the Tang Libu Waiter Wei, the late Tang Dynasty did not raise the jinshi."
However, after the dialectical examination of the "Complete Biography of Liexian" and the "Lü Family Ride" of Xin'an in Henan, Lü Wei should be Lü Dongbin's grandfather, and his father was Lü Rang, Yuan he and Ten Years of Jinshi.
According to the Book of Tang, Lü Wei was born in 759, Lü Rang was the fourth in the family, and Lü Rang had five sons, and Lü Dongbin was his third son.
From this, it is inferred that Lü Dongbin was born after 810 AD.
Lü Dongbin was born in Xiangmendi, had an extraordinary family, and learned the way of a gentleman since childhood, so he would have the image of a white robe and a long sword in later legends.
However, Lü Dongbin was obviously not a studious person, he was famous for Sun Shan many times when he was young, and then he gave up his career, fought in the sword world, traveled around the famous mountains and rivers, and later met a Taoist monk on the way, that is
Zhong Liquan
After being ordained by him, he decided to become a monk and cultivate immortals.
At the age of 50, Lü Dongbin and his family lived in seclusion in the Zhongnan Mountains.
He was armed with swordsmanship and was familiar with medical codes, often helping the poor and the needy, and was happy to be charitable throughout his life, and the number of people who received his favor was unknown, and later the local people built an ancestral hall called it to thank him for his kindness
"Lü Gong Ancestral Hall"
。
Lü Dongbin was also quite successful in his cultivation, and he liked to refine Dan medicine, saying that he used the furnace of heaven and earth and the peak of creation to reconcile medicines and match yin and yang to obtain divine qi and thus live forever.
Later, Taoist disciples spread his Dan Dao ideas to other places.
Lü Dongbin gradually gained a large group of fans among the Taoist community,
More and more people in the folk began to believe in Lü Dongbin, and he was called
Ancestor of the Danding Sect,
Its image also began to be implicated in mythology.
After Kublai Khan occupied the Central Plains in the Yuan Dynasty, how to rule became the top priority for him to solve, and when he learned that The Taoism of Lü Dongbin's lineage was quite popular among the masses, he planned to use religion and Lü Dongbin's prestige to consolidate his rule.
Later, the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty not only built a large number of buildings and Taoist temples throughout the country, but also further improved the status of Lü Dongbin, honoring him as The Fuyou Emperor and Miaodao Tianzun, and the image of Lü Dongbin was further deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and many literati also created a large number of stories based on him.
However, only his name is heard and his body is not seen, and for thousands of years, tomb robbers have searched everywhere for Lü Dongbin's tomb, but every time they have returned home.
It wasn't until 1959, when the Yongle Palace relocation project was launched, that a tombstone caught people's attention.
Dig out the tomb of the immortals
The management of the Yellow River has been a major problem that has plagued people for thousands of years, and it is recorded that in the more than three thousand years before the founding of New China, the Yellow River flooded nearly 1,600 times and changed its course more than 20 times, which once caused tens of millions of ancestors to be displaced and forced to leave their hometowns.
In 1953, at the insistence of Premier Zhou and the leaders of the water conservancy department,
Sanmenxia Reservoir
Construction projects were also included in the list of 156 Soviet-aided projects.
Sanmenxia Reservoir is bordered by Shanxi to the north and Henan to the south, and the three natural canyons in the middle are deep and long, capable of accommodating 16.2 billion cubic meters of water.
According to the plan at that time, the dam was 713.2 meters long and 106 meters high, and once the maximum carrying capacity was reached, the water level would be as high as 350 meters, so residents in the flood discharge areas on both sides of the river had to be relocated to other places, as were the cultural relics.
Yongle Palace is also known
Da Chun Yang Wanshou Palace
It is a huge wooden complex located at the southwestern end of Ruicheng County, only about ten kilometers from the Yellow River, which happens to be included in the flood discharge area delineated by the Yellow Committee.
Yongle Palace was built in the Yuan Dynasty, covering a vast area, square pattern, grand scale of construction, took more than 100 years to finally complete, although it has experienced more than 600 years of wind and frost, but the building and murals are still very intact.
The axis of Yongle Palace is more than 500 meters long, and there are five buildings arranged in turn, except for the palace gate, which was added by the Qing Dynasty, the rest have obvious architectural characteristics of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, with soaring eaves and huge arches, which have unparalleled value for the study of ancient Chinese traditional architecture.
In addition, Yongle Palace also has a total area of more than that
960 square meters of Yuan Dynasty murals
The immortals in the painting are all dressed with rags, there is a fluttering state that moves against the wind, and the painter's brushstrokes are fine, even if there are many characters in the painting, but the immortals look different and have no sense of homogeneity, which can be said to be a rare huge work in the world.
In order to preserve this large piece of precious cultural relics, Premier Zhou personally gave instructions -
move!
In 1959, the Central Ministry of Finance issued 2 million yuan of cultural relics relocation protection funds, and summoned hundreds of experts and students in cultural relics restoration, architecture and painting from all over the country, all of whom camped and camped by the Yellow River, overcoming all difficulties and devoting themselves to this project.
However, not long after the relocation project of Yongle Palace started, everyone encountered a confusing thing.
Strange cemeteries, inexplicable stone tablets,
It shocked everyone present and set off a wave of speculation in the historical research community.
It was a day in December, and several migrant workers were digging in the northwest corner of the Yongle Palace according to the instructions of the technicians, about two meters deep.
One of the migrant workers' shovels suddenly got stuck into a hard stone and couldn't pull it out.
Several others rushed to help, and after cleaning up the dirt around the shovel, they fixed their eyes on it and found that what stuck the shovel was not a stone, but like a cracked tombstone.
The migrant workers present were relatively young and curious, so they dug out the tombstone in its entirety, swept away the wet soil and saw that there were seven big characters written on it——
Everyone realized that this was most likely an ancient tomb, so who was "Lu Chunyang"?
One of the migrant workers invited the cultural relics protection expert who was studying the Yuan Dynasty Dou Arch to the scene, and the expert was stunned when he heard that it was the cemetery of "Lü Chunyang" and that it was also the Tang Dynasty.
Isn't this the legendary tomb of the Immortals?
According to experts, people are well known
Lü Dongbin called himself Pure Yangzi, also known as Pure Yang Laozu
，
Modern historical research has confirmed that he died in the Tang Dynasty.
Lü Dongbin is a branch of Taoism-
The Grandmaster of the Quanzhen Sect,
As the ancestral court of the Quanzhen Sect, Yongle Palace not only enshrines the statue of the Three Qing Gods, but also has a Pure Yang Hall dedicated to the statue of Lü Dongbin.
Is this tombstone related to Lü Dongbin?
Was Yongle Palace built because of this?
A series of questions whizzed through the minds of experts, in order to find out the truth,
He hurriedly reported to the Shanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau and requested that the tombs of the Yongle Palace be excavated.
The Cultural Relics Bureau also attaches great importance to this, and immediately dispatched technicians to help, there was no excavator at that time, archaeology was all based on experts and workers digging down little by little, after several days of surveying, everyone found here
The burial chamber is not large, covering an area of ten acres at most, and it does not look like the treatment that an ancestor should have.
Sure enough, after digging it up, everyone was disappointed.
The burial chamber is in a north-south direction, the space is extremely small, there is only a decaying pine coffin, through the coffin can see two dead bones, the man on the left and the woman on the right, are lying there straight.
The female corpse's mouth and body were scattered with seven copper coins, including 4 Kaiyuan Tongbao, two Xiangfu Tongbao and one Tiansheng Tongbao, and on the west side of the skull was a small clay pot with a plain round tire.
A three-colored porcelain pillow was placed horizontally at the leg bone of the man's corpse, and apart from that, the tomb was empty.
In addition to Lü Chunyang's burial chamber, there are also well-known figures of the Quanzhen Sect in the tomb group
Song Defang
and
Pan Dechong
The burial chamber.
These two places are slightly luxurious, not only with a fine mud and white ash roof, but also paved with checkered stone bricks at the bottom of the tomb. The coffins of the two men are painted with red and white tones and renderings, drawing the pattern of cloud dragon patterns, and the stone piers inside the tomb are carved with intricate character story pictures.
What is the hidden story of the hugely different burial chambers?
Is it Lu Dongbin's bones in the double tomb?
There has been a fierce debate in the field of historians.
True and false conjecture
The simple double tomb in Yongle Palace, whether with the legend
Lü Dongbin, the head of the Eight Immortals
relate?
Many historians have been on this subject
Objecting,
There are two main reasons for this:
First, not all the copper coins in the coffin belonged to the Tang Dynasty.
Among the three copper coins, the Kaiyuan Tongbao was issued in the fourth year of Tang Gaozu Wude (621), far before the birthday of Lü Dongbin, while the Kaiyuan Tongbao and Xiangfu Tongbao were issued in the Northern Song Dynasty Zhenzong and Renzong era, and did not appear until 1023 AD at the earliest, assuming that Lü Dongbin lived to be 90 years old, it would take more than 100 years to appear in these two currencies.
And after the investigation of experts, in addition to the decay and broken coffin lid, the connections around the two coffins are intact, and no signs of secondary opening were found, and it is certain that the two bones and copper coins inside should have been put in at the same time.
From this, it can be inferred that the two corpses in the tomb were not owned by the Tang Dynasty.
Second, the form of male and female burial is contrary to Taoism.
Although Lü Dongbin in the legend story is affectionate and has three plays of white peony gossip anecdotes, as a real Quanzhen Sect ancestor, Lü Dongbin is one
Self-sustaining calm people
He believes that desires and emotions will affect the human body, causing the yin and yang of the kidneys to enter the top and thus cause heating in the upper valley, so the cultivation should start from eliminating the seven emotions and six desires, discarding the turbid qi accumulated in the heart and concentrating its essence and spirit.
The Quanzhen Sect is advocated
Abstinence from monasticism, can not marry and have children, and cannot eat meat and drink alcohol,
Therefore, successive Generations of Taoist celebrities such as Qiu Chuji, Wang Chongyang and others have no descendants of their own.
From this point of view, Lü Dongbin's tomb should be a single tomb in line with common sense, and the Tomb of Lü Zu in Yongle Palace is just a mistake or forced by posterity.
However, some scholars believe that the bones in the double tomb should be
It was Lü Dongbin and his wife
They also gave a few comments on this:
First, according to the Yayan Miscellaneous, Lü Dongbin was only enlightened by Zhong Liquan decades after he was married, and he was determined to cultivate into an immortal, he
At the age of nearly half a hundred, he abandoned his fame and fortune in the world and went to jiufeng Mountain with his wife to practice in seclusion
Jiufeng Mountain is located in the southern foothills of the Zhongtiao Mountains in Ruicheng County, where they practiced while saving people, and after their death, the local people built a Lügong Ancestral Hall for them near the town of Yongle.
In view of this, the tomb of Lü Dongbin and his wife should be in the territory of Ruicheng County, which may also be the reason why Qiu Chuji chose to build Yongle Palace here.
Second, Yongle Palace is a Taoist resort,
For thousands of years, incense has been continuous, and its identity can be buried in the view after death, and its identity can obviously not be underestimated.
Moreover, when the Yongle Palace was built, the quanzhen sect was extremely prestigious, and its subordinates had to be ordained to enter the temple, and there would be no situation in which the husband and wife were buried together.
Therefore, the husband and wife in this double tomb obviously existed before the formation of the Quanzhen Sect.
When Taoism developed to the Northern Song Dynasty, it had already seen a decline, and tribes appeared one after another, and in the seventh year of Jin Dading (1167), Wang Chongyang founded the Quanzhen Sect and took Ma Danyang, Qiu Zhiji, and others as disciples.
The rules of monastic abstinence were laid down.
After the Yuan Dynasty unified Jiangnan, the Quanzhen Sect enshrined Lü Dongbin as one of the Five Patriarchs and built a temple to enshrine his idol.
If the Taoist monks of the Quanzhen Sect had found the tomb of Lü Dongbin and his wife nearby and moved their bones to the Yongle Palace for burial again, it would also explain why the copper coins in the tomb were later than Lü Dongbin's death.
In addition, there are many other voices, such as conspiracy theorists who say that the cemetery was deliberately forged by people in the Taoist temple to improve the fame of Yongle Palace to attract more pilgrims, and some people say that the bones in the tomb are Ma Yu and Sun Buji, who became married and then became a family, and so on.
In short, there are many opinions about this strange burial chamber
It is still impossible to determine the identity of the owner of the tomb.
Today, the Changle Palace, which has been relocated twenty miles away, has long since regained its former style, and tourists and believers come and go. Whether it is true or false, the tomb of Lü Gongzu has become a signboard of the scenic spot and is worshiped by thousands of people.