LIFE IN TRANSITION

The following year—from the winter of 744 to the spring of 746—has often been skipped or sparingly depicted by Li Bai’s biographers, mainly because few written records of his life from this period have survived. However, 745 seems to have been a crucial year for Bai and is deserving of more attention.

Shangqiu, Henan, where Li Bai, Du Fu, and Gao Shi had just parted ways, was less than two hundred miles from Bai’s family home in Yanzhou, Shandong. Bai could have made a trip to see his children in just a handful of days, but instead he traveled to Hebei to request help from a Daoist master for his induction. The master, Gai Huan, agreed to recommend him and wrote a letter on his behalf to Grand Master Gao Rugui in Jinan, the head of the Daoist society in the Qi region who was in charge of the induction there. Li Bai had known Gai Huan for some years and was delighted that he was willing to be his endorser, which was required for the induction. Master Gao Rugui then planned the schedule for Bai’s induction and agreed to guide him through the process, which would be elaborate and arduous. Why didn’t Bai go home to see his children first? Why was he so tardy in returning to his family? We can only surmise that he must have held deep trust in the woman of Lu and understood that his children were in safe, caring hands.

After visiting Hebei, Bai finally returned to Yanzhou to join his family. By this time his pockets were well lined with the cash given him by the emperor and by prefectures and counties along the way. He also brought with him plenty of gifts. His daughter, Pingyang, and son, Boqin, were thrilled to see their father return as a rich man. By now, his pageboy Dansha and his wife had left to start their own household elsewhere, and so they were no longer with the Li family.

Soon Du Fu and Gao Shi arrived, and the three poets resumed their drinking and sightseeing. Together they visited Stone-Gate Mountain twenty miles north of Confucius’s hometown, Qufu. Eventually they reached Jinan, the city of one hundred springs, where Li Bai was to have his Daoist induction. The ceremony was long, complex, and physically challenging. Many inductees did not make it through the process, and so Du Fu and Gao Shi wanted to be there to support their friend.

During the ceremony, the inductees were required to stay for seven days on different levels of a terrace constructed for the occasion, eating only meager vegetarian meals, most of the time with their hands tied behind them. In addition to reciting scriptures and chanting incantations, they had to remain on their knees and were not permitted to stand until the end of the day, when they could take a quick towel bath on the spot.

If an inductee went through the induction successfully, he would become a member of the Daoist society, fully recognized as a holy man who no longer held any earthly attachment and was no longer subject to suffering or grief. By the custom of the time, neither the powerful nor the rich could harm such a man, because he existed in the religious order and posed no threat to anyone. For Li Bai, the induction was a way to escape his enemies, enter a domain of peace and security, and start another life.

Now, after four days’ arduous training and instruction, the last and hardest part of the induction began. Led by his master, Li Bai joined dozens of other inductees on the terrace, surrounded by ropes and yellow banners. The master wore a long black cloak and raised a rapier to direct the disciples, who appeared like criminals on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs. After reciting Daoist mantras and lines from the Tao Te Ching, they were ordered to move around the terrace. The routine was repeated several times a day. The first two days went by without incident, though by the end of the second day Li Bai was already pale and exhausted and a little delirious. From the third day on, the inductees, one after another, began to faint, some passing out from sunstroke. Many became too depleted to remain on their knees any longer and were carried away into the tents pitched in a pine wood nearby. Strong-willed, Li Bai managed to keep himself from losing his mind and balance. His friends weren’t permitted to go up the terrace to help him, and he had to endure the fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst, and scorching sun alone. Dehydrated yet drenched in sweat, he couldn’t help groaning when he chanted incantations with the remaining inductees. The master, donning a black skullcap, ascended the terrace more often to encourage them to bear with the final part of the ceremony. Drums, cymbals, and gongs boomed and clashed and clanged more frequently now. From time to time Bai hallucinated, his vision blurred, but he managed to stay on his knees to the very end.

When the master called him to receive the certificate, Bai was already in a state of semiconsciousness and hardly able to get on his feet. He couldn’t hear clearly the instructions the master told him. But they were the same words that every new member was to repeat after the leader: “All Daoist fellows must regard the Dao as Father, the divine as Mother, the emptiness as Teacher, Nature as Friend….You must be careful with your words, moderate with food, more diligent in physical training, abstain from all desires so that you can preserve the purity of your complexion and let your strong body last forever.”1 Two young disciples supported Bai, holding his arms, as the master handed him the certificate, a piece of white silk inscribed with words. Bai could no longer lift his hands, so one of the young men helped him, tying the silk around his upper arm.

Now Bai had become a Daoist fellow. For the newly inducted, this was a turning point in their lives. For some, such an induction also meant practical gains in the future. An inducted Daoist was exempt from taxes and corvées and could obtain wealth and recognition from believers. His livelihood was secured. Of course, Bai was much more earnest than other inductees and sincerely aspired to a spiritual ascent. He would not exploit the system, which the central government had tried to take control of lest too many men get inducted and become tax evaders.

After the induction, he slept for days to recuperate. Some scholars believe that Bai, who was already forty-four, never fully recovered from that tormenting ceremony. Still, he was happy about his success, which he felt enabled him to finally turn a new page in his life and become more independent.

It happened that Jinan City’s vice mayor, Li Zhifang, was a friend of Du Fu’s and Gao Shi’s. He had just erected a large bridge in a nearby suburb and was preparing to hold a days-long celebration. An admirer of Li Bai, he invited the three poets, along with other local literary figures, to the party and banquet. Among the guests was Li Yong, Zhifang’s uncle, who had refused to help Li Bai back in Sichuan more than two decades before. At the time, Li Yong had been impressed by the energy and audacity of Bai’s writing but unnerved by the young man’s arrogance and wild vision. Now Li Yong was an old man with white hair and bleary eyes, but he knew so much about Li Bai—his contempt for the machinations of court officials, his resignation from the Imperial Academy, and above all his extraordinary poetry—that he approached the poet and bowed deeply. He loved Bai for his arrogance and irreverence, which he, as a man of letters, felt he could share at heart.

Bai recognized him and immediately returned the bow. They struck up a conversation, reminiscing about their previous meeting. Li Yong said he still had the poems Bai had presented to him back in Yu Prefecture. A little sheepish, he went on to say that Bai’s reproach about his mistreatment of him had turned out to be justified. They both tipped back their heads and laughed. Bai in turn admitted that he had been too brash back then. Then he added that he hadn’t changed much. They both laughed again. Li Yong told Bai that the two of them had common enemies at court: Zhang Ji and Li Linfu. Because they had disparaged him, Li Yong had been appointed to a remote prefecture, even though he was very senior and should have been promoted to the rank of chief minister long before. He combed his thin hair with his fingers and said he was too old now to care about positions and fame.

Bai was still weak from the seven-day induction and quickly became drunk at the party. Du Fu and Gao Shi took him back to the inn where they were all staying and kept him resting in bed. Gao Shi had some local friends, so he went out to see them during the day and then decided to head south and wander around the Chu region. Du Fu and Li Bai would stay for a while longer. At the mayor’s party they had met a local squire named Fan Shi, whose village was near Jinan City. Fan had invited the two poets to come and visit his home, so Li Bai and Du Fu decided to call on him.

They were unfamiliar with the roads and had to climb hills and cross valleys as they continued northeast. At one point Li Bai fell into a bush and emerged covered with burrs, his hat lost, irretrievable. He tried to brush off the burrs but couldn’t, so Du Fu began to help pick them off. Bai stopped him and said they shouldn’t bother about the burrs. In this state the two men barged into Fan Shi’s farmhouse unannounced, and it took the host a while to recognize them. Then he broke into laughter and ordered his servants to cook a chicken, a duck, and cured pork with vegetables from his garden and to pour the sorghum liquor he himself had made. In his front yard was a large flat stone, on which Bai stretched out, barefoot and waggling his toes. The three men chatted and soon began to chant poems of their own and of the ancient poets. Toward evening both Li Bai and Du Fu became tipsy.

That night Li Bai and Du Fu slept in the same bed, sharing a large thin quilt, their feet entangled. In a corner of the room a coil of wormwood burned slowly to repel mosquitoes. Outside the window, a waning crescent moon hung above the treetops as insects trilled in the distance. Li Bai and Du Fu slept soundly until cockcrow. They stayed at Fan Shi’s home for more than ten days and slept the same way every night.

Because they shared one quilt, some have surmised there might have been a homosexual relationship between them. The American poet Carolyn Kizer even dramatizes this episode in a poem she wrote in the voice of Du Fu:

My lord, how beautifully you write!

May I sleep with you tonight?

Till I flag, or when you wilt,

We’ll roll up drunken in one quilt.

In our poems, we forbear

To write of kleenex or long hair

And how the one may fuck the other.

We’re serious artists, aren’t we, brother?

“TU FU TO LI PO”

In fact, it is unlikely that there was any erotic element to their relationship. Up until recent decades, it was common for Chinese friends of the same sex to share a bed and a quilt without any carnal inclination, especially in cold weather when it was better to sleep together to keep warm. Actually, even in our time such a practice isn’t unusual. The current top Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan once shared a bed and a quilt in the Shaanxi countryside. This episode in the two politicians’ lives is often mentioned by the Chinese media as proof of their long friendship. For his part, Du Fu was very proud of such an experience, writing, “Li Bai throws out many great lines, / Which show how prodigious his gift is. / I too am a guest in Shandong / And love him like a brother. / When we are drunk, we share a quilt in the autumn night, / And we also walk around hand in hand during the day.”2

Before they left the village, they each presented the host with a poem written for him. Afterward they spent a few more days together, visiting sites near Li Bai’s home in Yanzhou. Before Du Fu, as planned, left for the capital to take the civil-service examination again, Li Bai threw a farewell party for him. He also wrote these lines, depicting the two friends climbing a mountain near Bai’s home:

醉別復幾日 登臨遍池臺

何時石門路 重有金樽開

秋波落泗水 海色明徂徠

飛蓬各自遠 且盡手中杯

《魯郡東石門送杜二甫》

Only a few days are left,

So together we climb up to face the endless pools.

When will we get on the stone path again

Toward the gate up on the mountain

And raise our cups up there?

The autumn waves spread on the Si River,

An ocean view brightens Julai Mountain.

Like tumbling weeds, we will go separate ways,

So for now let us drain our cups.

“SEEING DU FU OFF IN EASTERN LU PREFECTURE”

Li Bai cherished Du Fu as a devoted friend, though the younger man was still an obscure poet, his poetry known only to a small circle of readers, and would remain so all his life. Bai could tell that this might be their final meeting. Du Fu too seemed to sense that their paths might not cross again. The few months he had spent with Bai affected him profoundly—it was an unforgettable time in his life, which he would recall fondly time and again. Even in his last years he would dream of Li Bai, who had died by then, and would compose poems about him as if the light shed by Bai had never left him.

Their friendship did not affect Bai as deeply; Du Fu seemed to leave his thoughts once they had parted company. In spite of his gregariousness, Li Bai was at his core a loner, a solitary figure in Chinese poetry, like a blazing star whose light also comes from a deep indifference to the world below.

Now, what should Bai do with the money he had brought back from the capital? His partner, the woman of Lu, must have urged him not to squander the gold on drinks and parties. So when it was warm enough in the spring, he had their house renovated and bought some farmland, which was added to the land allocated to him by the local government. For centuries the government issued land to individuals, each receiving several acres, as a way to keep the land productive so that taxes could be levied. We do not know how many acres Li Bai owned, but it must have been a good number. The land was meant to be the basis of his property so that it could support his family when he went on the road again.

Bai also built a bar of his own, which he named the First Wine House Under Heaven. In spite of its striking name, the place was modest, with just a few tables in the main room, but it sat on a slope that commanded a full vista of the landscape. One could see the nearby Si River and the faraway Wen, which flowed like a ribbon flickering in the wind. Mount Tai also loomed in the distance to the northeast.

In addition to hosting friends and relatives in the place, Bai sometimes lived there. In his own words, he wished he could be “always drunk without the need to sober up.” His failure in the capital still tormented him—he knew that his political career had no clear way forward, so he wanted to invest his energy and talent in another, more spiritual path. Daoism, as the state religion, dominated the land: all over China, Daoist shrines had been built, and the emperor himself was psychologically addicted to the so-called pills of immortality.

Li Bai soon resumed his practice of making the elixir of life, which he believed would enable him to ascend to the world of divinity and live forever. He celebrated this illusion in his poetry. “If I come by the pills for immortality / I will fly away to the divine world” (“Visiting Mount Tai” [4]); “If I grow wings / I’d lounge in the sphere of paradise forever” (“Gazing up on Heavenly Terrace at Dawn”). The elixir was intended not only to prolong physical life, but also to produce fleeting moments of spiritual transcendence.

Throughout his adult life, Bai had taken such pills regularly, even becoming addicted to them, but now he wished to produce them himself. It was a complex process, and an expensive one. The pills were made from many precious materials: gold, silver, pearl, bright jade, mica, cinnabar. At a late stage of the firing in a special stove, costly medicinal herbs also needed to be added: wolfberries, lilyturf, red celery, sealwort, caterpillar fungus. The equipment required was elaborate and extensive: stoves, kilns, fine sieves, jade knives, earthen cauldrons, iron pots, grindstones, mirrors, cooking vessels, brass basins, bamboo pots. What’s more, there was no way to evaluate the quality of the product. Some graded the pills by their color and glossiness, but there was no empirical basis for such an assessment. Far from extending his life, Li Bai’s regular consumption of the pills might well have ruined his health. His drinking, too, may have harmed him even apart from the alcohol itself—most wine containers in ancient China were made of alloys, which usually were heavy with lead.3

Despite everything, however, Li Bai persisted in making the elixir and even styled himself as a master of the alchemic art. He often experienced hallucinations induced by the pills, which were believed to be a sign of their potency. He searched for minerals and herbs deep in the mountains. When he began the firing, he would sit in front of the stove for many days. He rarely produced the desired quality product, though he always obtained the most expensive honey available to make the pills glossy. After the minerals were fired and reduced to a whitish powder, he would sample the result and then suffer diarrhea and palpitation. Nonetheless, he never gave up. He resolved “to make the elixir of life and shun the world for good” (“Ancient Songs 5”).

The use of the pills was prevalent among Tang poets, many of whom developed addictions to the pills and even died from them. The poet Bai Juyi meditated on such “magical pills,” reasoning, “Red sand is cheap like dirt. / Why should it be burned into pills?” In his poem “Thinking of My Old Friends,” he laments the deaths of his fellow poets who had become obsessed with pills of immortality, which at the time most people still believed to be beneficial to their health: “Han Yu, eating sulfur, / Once ill, could not recover. / Yuan Zhen burned stones / But died before he was old. / Du Mu got the secret recipes of the panacea / And would no longer touch any meat.” In fact, five emperors in the Tang dynasty died of poisoning from the pills. Thereafter, more and more people began to see their poisonous nature, and they gradually went out of fashion.

We cannot say how accomplished Li Bai was as a maker of the elixir, but he must have learned a good deal from his Daoist friends such as Yuan Danqiu, who were master makers of the pills and possessed knowledge of alchemy.

During this period, Li Bai also wrote a long treatise on his beliefs, titled Book of the Dao, but the work is lost and we know nothing about its contents. Even if we had it now, few might be able to understand his imaginative thoughts.4