Chunyang Zhenren Huncheng Ji — Preface and Songs Exhorting the World from Lü Dongbin's Collected Poems

This is the preface and the first five poems of the Chunyang zhenren huncheng ji (純陽真人渾成集), a two-scroll anthology in the Daoist Canon gathering more than two hundred poems attributed to the immortal Lü Dongbin (呂洞賓), addressed here by his Daoist name Chunyang, "Pure Yang." It is usually catalogued in the Taixuan section of the Ming Zhengtong Daozang as DZ 1055. The preface dates itself to the full-moon day of an intercalary tenth month in a xinhai year, most likely 1251 in the Southern Song, and is signed by He Zhiyuan, a Daoist of Tiaoyang, who wrote it at the request of the keepers of a Chunyang Palace who wished to cut the collection onto woodblocks for wider circulation.

The preface itself is periodic literary prose, built on a classical opposition between the ancients, who wrote without calculation and so wrote whole, and later writers, whose hunger for reputation lets ornament outrun feeling. It holds up Lü Dongbin's poems as writing of the first kind — arriving as spontaneously as sun, moon, and mountain take their own shape — which is why the compiler named the collection Huncheng, "Formed Whole." What follows is the opening of Scroll One: a sequence called "Songs Exhorting the World," in eight-line heptasyllabic verse, of which twenty-nine poems are announced under that heading. The Wikisource transcription behind this translation preserves the preface and the first five of them, ending where the digitized page itself ends.

The five poems are poems of renunciation and immortal flight: a whale ridden out of Lake Dongting, a green sword tucked in a sleeve, a chariot of purple phoenixes, Buddhist-tinted talk of the "dharma-body" and the body's "four borrowed elements" — all addressed to worldly readers as a summons to wake before old age and death close the gate. One word worth holding onto is the title's own: huncheng (渾成), "formed whole," writing that arrives complete the way natural things do, without the seams that deliberate composition leaves behind.

Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese of the Daoist Canon, printed in full below. We have not found a complete published English translation of this preface and poem sequence; a modern anthology of poems attributed to Lü Dongbin exists in English, but we could not confirm whether it draws on this particular compiled text, so we make no claim of firstness.

Translation

Preface

The ancients had no calculation in their writing, and so their words rose from sincerity, and their substance came out whole. Later ages calculate for the sake of a name, and so their writing outruns their feeling, and ornament wins the day. Substance is rooted, simply, in what is natural; ornament rises from what is contrived. What is natural is one with Heaven; what is contrived partakes of Man. The heart's voice shows itself within its own measure — this needs no argument to judge.

Nature itself blazes into sun and moon, patterns itself into the River of Clouds, melts into mountains and rivers, scatters into grass and trees. Look up, look down: the ten thousand forms stand ranked like a forest, and not one of them is other than Heaven's own writing, Earth's own principle — and in the great transformation of Heaven and Earth, what room is there for calculation? They arise without speaking, they are transformed without acting; there is that which becomes so without meaning to become so.

Our patriarch, the venerable Perfected Chunyang, Master Lü, learned through the whole space between Heaven and Man, his hand upon the very hinge of creation and change. He speaks, and the words are already made; he flings his brush, and the composition is already whole — not, from the first, the product of thought and calculation, but Heaven's own mechanism bursting forth of itself, pouring out in a flood that nothing could dam.

In his songs exhorting the world, he shapes the teaching to the occasion; his words are plain, his meaning exact. To read them is to feel doubt melt away like ice, to feel reason fall smoothly into place — the greedy grow honest, the mean grow generous, and one rises, vigorous, toward thoughts of cutting free from the world's dust. In his sword songs, he borrows things to make principle plain; his spirit is bold, his heart unbound. To read them is to feel every knot come loose on every side, the spirit clear, the breath at ease — as though grime were scraped away and the surface brought to a shine — and one floats free, buoyant, with thoughts of rising into the empty sky.

Now the Immortal Elder's art passes beyond spirit into sagehood, transforming a thousand, ten thousand ways, and his writings, scattered through the human world, could hardly all be gathered and set down entire. Only recently, in the scripture hall, I came upon more than two hundred of his poems. I have arranged them into two scrolls and named the whole the Huncheng Collection — "Formed Whole" — because their wholeness comes so entirely of itself, as Heaven's own making, that no human hand could reach it.

Those who administer the Chunyang Palace resolved to cut woodblocks and spread it widely, that every quarter might share in it, and so they charged me with writing this preface. I tried firmly to decline and could not, and so for now I set down its general outline. Within it there are, here and there, one or two doubtful readings of the kind that comes from careless copying — how would I dare alter them on my own judgment? I leave them to be handed on exactly as uncertain, and wait for someone with the understanding to resolve them.

Ah — if there is one who, through these poems, can seek out his heart; and through his heart, come to his conduct; and by the conduct he practiced, arrive at the sages' Way — would this not come close! In my foolishness, I cannot help but hope in the students of later ages.

Written in a xinhai year, on the full-moon day of the intercalary tenth month. He Zhiyuan, the Pure-and-True Daoist of Tiaoyang, bows his head and knocks his brow to the ground. Respectfully prefaced.

Scroll One

Songs Exhorting the World

Twenty-nine poems in seven-character verse

Living in this world, do not cling to its clamorous dust —
within this phantom body there lies a body of dharma.
Do not flaunt the brocade you keep folded inside your breast;
better, amid its circumstances, to guard your essence and spirit.
Turn back, and go seek out the immortals' companions;
stay lost, and you will hardly escape your worldly kin.
This I proclaim to the clever, the outstanding, the bold:
never let yourselves grow blind to what you were from the first.

How many times, astride a whale, have I set out from Lake Dongting?
Who knows this carefree wanderer, this man grown weary of the world?
Ten thousand blossoms of golden lotus open within the Chaos;
a single wheel of the heart's moon stamps its seal upon the Void.
I do not ask to make my home inside the towers of gold;
I wish only that people might dwell inside a flask of white jade.
The green serpent sheathed in my sleeve, I turn now and go home,
and walk into the capital of Heaven on the sound of a phoenix flute.

Bright, bright, the stars and constellations blaze into pattern and script;
my body drifts after idle clouds, far from the emperor's domain.
A single grain of cinnabar is refined beyond the world;
a hundred poems come wild and unbidden out of drunkenness.
The gourd-heaven holds, of itself, a country of unending spring;
could the sea-isles really lack a hall where night never falls?
I tread and break the road that runs past the kingfisher clouds,
and high above the ninefold heavens, look down even on Fuxi.

Tall trees, deep in shade, set off the falling sunset clouds;
every good mountain belongs to the household of the Daoist adept.
Cold ash in a warmed cauldron gives birth to flame again;
a withered tree, returned to its root, puts out blossom once more.
The rise and fall of the human world comes, in the end, to its limit;
the years of the Jasper Palace run on without any shore.
The wind of Heaven brushes and stirs my chiming girdle-jades,
as I fly back and forth, coming and going, in a chariot of purple phoenixes.

Failing to wake to the truth of worldly things, one is merely stubborn and blind —
entering a mountain of treasure, one comes back home with empty hands.
Black hair at the temples turns to snow in the time it takes to hesitate;
a ruddy young face is traded for an old gray one within an inch.
The small heart strains to play a thousand different tunes;
these four borrowed elements — when have they ever had one day's rest?
However much ambition goes into carving your name on a pillar, writing it on a bridge,
it too must be locked away, in the end, behind the gate of birth and death.

Colophon

This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Daoist shelf of the Good Works Library, for its Lü Dongbin and the Immortals' Teachings room. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below; no other translation was consulted in producing it. The preface's periodic prose is rendered as prose, broken into paragraphs for readability where the original runs as one continuous period; the five heptasyllabic poems that follow, each eight lines of seven characters in four rhymed couplets in the original, are kept as eight-line English poems, one English line to each line of the source.

Before the claim above was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed. Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud update of the same were both searched for 渾成集, "Huncheng ji," and "Chunyang zhenren huncheng ji" under any spelling; neither lists an entry for this text. General web search located the Chinese text on Chinese Wikisource and the Chinese Text Project, and turned up its catalogue number — DZ 1055, in the Taixuan section of the Zhengtong Daozang — confirmed against the Schipper-Verellen Taoist Canon companion. The same search surfaced a modern English-language anthology, Immortal Lü Dongbin: Poems of the Golden Elixir, gathering more than a hundred and eighty poems and songs attributed to Lü Dongbin from across the wider tradition; its host refused automated access, so we could not confirm whether it draws on this particular compiled preface and poem sequence or on other sources entirely. We found no complete published English translation of this preface and poem sequence itself, and make no claim of firstness — only that this translation was made independently, and that no prior translation of it could be located or verified.

Three notes. Huncheng (渾成), the collection's own title-word, names writing formed whole and entire of itself, as nature forms things, rather than assembled by craft; the preface glosses the word directly, and this translation's title borrows the same image. Xin (心) recurs throughout — the heart's voice, the heart's moon, the small heart straining after a thousand tunes — and is rendered "heart" rather than "mind," since the images built on it are images of feeling more than of intellect. And this translation is complete relative to its source: the Wikisource transcription used here preserves only the preface and the first five of the twenty-nine poems announced under "Songs Exhorting the World." The remaining poems of this scroll, and the whole of the collection's second scroll, are recorded elsewhere in the printed Daozang and in other digital transcriptions, but not in the witness this translation was made from; nothing present in that witness has been shortened, summarized, or left out.

Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.

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Source Text: 純陽真人渾成集

Classical Chinese text of the Daoist Canon, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.

純陽真人渾成集
殷誠安 點校

序

竊謂古人無心於為文，故言發乎誠，而大體全。後世有心於為名，故文過乎情，而華藻勝。大體乾根于自然，華藻者出於使然。自然者同乎天，使者參乎人。心聲之發見限量，不言而判爾。且煥而為日月，章而為雲漢，融而為山川，散而為草木，仰觀俯察，萬象森羅，莫非天之文、地之理，而天地大化，豈容心於此哉？無言而生，不為而化，蓋有不期然而然也。我祖純陽呂翁真人，學貫天人之際，手握造化之機，矢口成言，灑翰成章，初非心思智慮之所致，抑亦天機自發，沛然莫能禦者。其勸世也，隨方設化，辭白義精，觀之使人判斷然冰釋，怡然理順，廉貪敦薄，勃勃然稔絕塵之慮歟。其誅劍也，假物明理，氣豪心放，讀之使人釋然四解，神清氣逸，刮垢磨光，飄飄然有升虛之思歟。夫仙翁之出神入聖，千變萬化，其文散落於人間，殆不可以兼收而備舉。甫于藏室中得其詩章二百餘，厘為二卷，名之曰《渾成集》，以其渾然天成，非人為所能及也。執事于純陽宮者，議欲鋟木以廣其傳，庶與四方共之，因囑予序引。剛拒不能，姑為道其梗概。其中亥豕之疑，不無一二，安敢以己意輒更之？遺以傳疑，當俟達者。嗚呼，有能即其詩以求其心，因其心以得其行，由其所行之行以造聖人之道，其亦庶幾乎！愚不能無望于後之學者。時辛亥歲閏十月望日，條陽清真道人何志淵頓首稽首。謹序。

卷上

勸世吟

七言詩二十九首

為人不可戀囂塵，幻化身中有法身。

莫炫胸中摛錦繡，好于境上惜精神。

回來便訪仙家侶，迷即難逃俗眷親。

為告聰明英烈士，休教昧了本來真。

騎鯨幾齣洞庭湖，誰識逍遙厭世夫？

萬朵金蓮開混沌，一輪心月印虛無。

不求我住黃金闕，唯願人居白玉壺。

袖得青蛇歸去也，鳳簫聲裏步天都。

暉暉星斗煥文章，身逐閒雲別帝鄉。

一粒丹于方外煉，百篇詩向醉中狂。

壺天自有長春境，海島寧無不夜堂？

踏破碧霄雲外路，九重天上傲羲皇。

喬木陰陰襯落霞，好山都屬道人家。

寒灰溫鼎重生焰，枯樹歸根復放花。

人世興亡終有限，瑤宮歲月了無涯。

天風觸亂鏗鏘佩，來往飛騰紫鳳車。

世情不悟只嚚頑，空手歸來下寶山。

綠鬢逡巡翻雪鬢，朱顏咫尺換蒼顏。

寸心勉作千所調，四假何曾一日閒？

標柱題橋多少志，也應囚入死生關。

Source Colophon

The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon edition of this text (article 純陽真人渾成集, revision of 12 July 2009), inspected from a witness copy captured on 8 August 2026. Chinese Wikisource transcriptions are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL; the text itself is ancient and in the public domain. The wiki header and license templates have been removed; the text is otherwise complete and unaltered.

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