師言：祖師嘗到登州時，頂笠懸鶉 ，執一節、攜一鐵觀，狀貌奇古，乞於市肆，登州人皆不識。夜歸觀，書一絕於壁：
一別終南水竹村，
家無兄女亦無孫。
數千里外尋知友，
引入長生不死門。明旦拂衣束邁。後數日，郡守紇石烈邈詣觀，觀其題詩，欽歎不已。乃依韻和曰：
迴首三年別故村，
都忘庭竹長兒孫。
他時拂袖尋君去，
應許安閑一叩門。
Our teacher Ma Danyang told us:
The founding teacher Wang Chongyang once went to Dengzhou¹ wearing a large bamboo hat and a patched cloak, with a bamboo staff in one hand and an iron bowl in the other. He looked like something from an old legend. He went begging in the market, and no one in Dengzhou recognized him. In the evening he returned to the monastery and wrote a poem on the wall:
I left at last
The mountains of Zhongnan²
And my village of bamboo and water
Where no family remained —
Not brother nor daughter —
To search everywhere
For a knowing friend
That I may lead him
Or her³ to the gate
Of long life without death.
The next morning he shook out his sleeves and strode away.
A few days later, the local magistrate He Shilie arrived at the monastery from afar and saw the poem on the wall. He sighed, lost in admiration. Then he composed a matching poem, keeping to the same rhyme scheme:
You look back three years
When you left your hamlet
And your house, its courtyard
of bamboo, leaving your sons
and their sons.
But a time will come when I, too
Shaking out my sleeves, will search for you.
And will you, then, give leave for me
To cast off cares and knock at your gate?
from the Discourses of Ma Danyang
- On the coast of Shandong.
- As well as the place where Wang Chongyang founded the Complete Perfection school of Daoism, the Zhongnan mountains were the location of Louguantai (楼观台), where Laozi traditionally was held to have transmitted the Dao De Jing to Yin Xi.
- This is not just modern political correctness. One of Wang Chongyang’s most famous disciples was Sun Bu-er–Sun the Inimitable–who was, as it happens, the wife of Ma Danyang.
The Fat Monk 