Lü Zu Hutou Ji Xuan — Attributed to the Immortal Lü Dongbin

This short piece is drawn from the "Gourd-Head Collection" (葫頭集), a body of writing attributed to Lü Dongbin (呂洞賓, trad. b. 796 CE), the Tang-dynasty scholar-turned-immortal counted among the Eight Immortals and revered across Quanzhen Daoism, popular religion, and the tradition of spirit-writing (扶乩), through which he is held to continue speaking to this day. This text survives in the Chinese Wikisource transcription used here; its date of composition and its exact place, if any, within the printed Daoist Canon could not be confirmed, and no catalogue number is given.

It is written in dense parallel prose (駢文), pairing matched four-, six-, and seven-character phrases and leaning on a chain of classical allusions — Sima Xiangru's love song, the cloud-and-rain tryst of Wu Mountain, the ox and purple mist that heralded Laozi at the pass, the palace woman who fled the fall of Qin to live wild in the mountains — to turn romance, illusion, and the passing of years toward a single exhortation: still the mind, keep loyalty and filial duty whole, and awaken to the Way. Two characters near the middle of the text are illegible in the transcription and are marked with ▢.

Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese printed in full below. To our knowledge, this is the first complete published English translation of this text.

Translation

Flowers fall, water flows — ask of the Sima of years past. Clouds withdraw and rain scatters — recall the Wu Mountain of old days. Guard the mirror of my Numinous Terrace (靈臺) — why fear the illusory bubble of this form? The cause and effect of a former life were, from the start, made in this very life; the right and wrong of a life to come will return, in the end, to what is done in this one. Awaken to the mystery of the Mysterious Pass (玄關), and you comprehend and dissolve the doubts raised by the dust that obstructs. Rushing about before the wind, one looks exactly like a signboard for Lord Yama; grieving through the whole of the universe, one seems just like a placard for the Emperor of Demons. Watch the surging waves, and at once you know the danger of hoisting sail; wish for quiet withdrawal, and then you can understand the purity of gathering herbs. Transgression has always been of our own making; only when merit is achieved does one finally depart. To divine a dream within a dream — how sad that is. To flee the body by means of a body outside the body — this brings laughter. Let the source that stops, stop; let the still lake that waits, be still. Stillness may be met; stopping, too, should be sought. Effect to come and cause gone before — in the end, one awakens.

An ancient mirror, one round disc, shines upon the dust and turns it green; new rose-clouds, ten thousand threads, dwell in the world and yet remain empty. Dragon and tiger roar through wind and cloud beyond the world of things; profit and fame wear out the numinous nature amid delusion. Beneath the eyes, the light of wisdom seems like cold lightning; within the body, the secret instructions are mistaken for cold [...]. The years spent gathering firewood by the water are already drawing toward their end — for the loyal and the filial, how far off can Heaven be, a bare foot away? Unfold the mystery left unexplained since eternity of old; awaken to the transformation now shown plain. The man of the Way talks on and on, and the lotus bud blushes with shame; the man of the world forgets his scheming, and the peach breathes out its fragrance and its splendor. If truly you can spread your wings and hold fast to my rule, cast off the mayfly's common hindrance, and complete true awakening astride the simurgh and the crane. Then you will see white clouds encircling your knees, and green apricots arrayed upon your breast. When loyalty and filial duty are both fulfilled, birth and death are at once resolved. Who says the stubborn stone cannot be made to nod, or the withered pine cannot grow green again in old age?

The crane's legs are long, the wild duck's are short — the works of a human life are never equal one to another; the mayfly dies at dusk though born at dawn — the sorrows and joys of this world cannot be foretold. Bamboo-leaf wine knows no care — waking from it, one finds Zhongshan already old. The yellow chrysanthemum keeps its tryst — returning to it, the Upper Park is only now come into spring. White clouds draw off the wild scheming of the heart, yet the crimson phoenix still chatters on; the green ox arrives bearing the first wisdom, and the purple mist at once turns back. [...] within the mist, a man of old — a lowly servant of Qin; rising and sinking upon the rock, the aged Hairy Woman — an idle immortal of the Han age. To see the body as void even of voidness — to know this already is error; to fathom the wordless stillness of body and mind — even to err here is to forget feeling itself. The solitary simurgh bears in its beak the rainbow-mist of the Nine Poles; the great flood floats upon the mirror of the Three Primes. Fame, rank, wealth, and honor — a burden wearily shouldered through the red dust; the years of Heaven and Earth — infants hurrying, hurrying, toward the yellow earth. Grieve for the trailing vine upon the burial mound; cherish the sparrows among the flowers. The Great Void has its limit; the original vow has none. Recall the mist of fine jade — at Lantian the sun is warm; cherish the hue of true gold — by the Vermilion Waters the wind is gentle. I entreat my fellow travelers on the Way: may you be united with the Dao.

Colophon

This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Lü Dongbin shelf of the Good Works Library. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below. The source is a single unbroken passage of parallel prose (駢文) in the original, without internal headings; the translation keeps its three source paragraphs and renders the matched phrase-pairs as flowing sentences rather than forcing them into verse lines, since the piece is prose ornamented with parallelism rather than metrical verse.

A genuine translation-status check was performed before the claim below was written: both local bibliographies of Daoist texts in Western-language translation (Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud survey) were searched by the Chinese title, by "Hutou Ji," and by "Lü Dongbin" generally; neither records this text. Two live web searches were then run, for the Chinese title and for a romanized title paired with "Lü Dongbin," and returned no matching translation. To our knowledge, this is the first complete published English translation of this text. We state this as the limit of our knowledge, not as a certainty.

A note on two passages. Two characters in the second paragraph are illegible in the Wikisource transcription and are kept as ▢▢ in the source text below; the translation renders them as "[...]". A further run of four illegible characters at the start of a clause in the third paragraph is likewise kept as ▢▢▢▢ in the source and rendered as "[...]" in the translation. The phrase 玄關, a technical term for the "Mysterious Pass" through which the adept's awareness is said to pass in meditation, is given in English with the Chinese term noted once, following house usage; 靈臺, literally the "Numinous Terrace," is kept as a proper term for the heart-mind, following the Zhuangzi's usage of the phrase. A passage describing the body as "void even of voidness" resists a fully confident rendering and is flagged below as uncertain.

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

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Source Text: 呂祖葫頭集選

Classical Chinese text of the Daoist Canon tradition, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above. ▢ marks a character illegible in the transcription.

呂祖葫頭集選

花落水流，試問當年司馬；雲收雨散，追思昔日巫山。守我靈臺之鏡，何虞幻泡之形？因果前生，原是今生所作；是非後世，還歸斯世之為。悟得玄關之奧，參通塵障之疑。奔走風前，酷似 閻 君幌子；憂愁宇內，宛然魔帝招牌。視洶濤，即可知揚帆之險；欲恬退，乃能明採藥之清。孽造由來，功成始去。夢中占夢以堪悲；形外逃形而發笑。止源伊止，靜湖待靜。靜之可遇，止也宜求。後果前因，到頭覺悟。

古鏡一輪，照塵而碧；新霞萬縷，處世而空。龍虎嘯風雲于物外，利名勞靈性于迷中。眼底慧光，疑于冷電；身中奧訣，誤也寒▢▢。樵沙歲月已將期，忠孝人天何咫尺？披亙古不闡之玄，悟於今示明之化。道人饒舌蓮蕊含羞，世子忘機桃香吐艷。果能奮羽，恪守吾規，棄凡礙于蜉蝣，了正覺于鸞鶴。將見白雲繞膝，青杏羅胸。忠孝既全，生死頓了。誰謂頑石不可點頭，枯松弗克青老耶？

鶴長鳧短，人生事業不齊；蜉死蝣生，世界悲歡莫測。竹葉無憂，醒後中山已老；黃花有約，歸來上苑才春。白雲牽去野心機，丹鳳尚然饒舌；青牛會來初智慧，紫霞即便回頭。▢▢▢▢煙中古丈夫，秦之小役；浮沉石上老毛女，漢世閒仙。視形體之無無，知而且誤；了身心之默默，誤矣忘情。孤鸞銜九極之霓，洪水泛三元之鏡。功名富貴，碌碌紅塵擔子；乾坤歲月，忙忙黃土嬰兒。愁塚上之絲蘿，懷花間之鳥雀。太虛有盡，本願無窮。憶美玉之煙，藍田日暖；懷真金之色，赤水風柔。倩我同人，願君合道。

Source Colophon

The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon tradition edition of this text (article 呂祖葫頭集選, revision of 10 June 2025), 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 a traditional Daoist work and is in the public domain. The wiki header and license templates have been removed; the text is otherwise complete and unaltered.

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