■54 THE EIGHT IMMORTALS OF THE TAOIST RELIGION 



'description of the personal appearance of one .or two of the 

 more prominent of the Eight, or perhaps incidents in the 

 lives of the Eight which are so popular. It would almost 

 surprise one to think that the Taoist priests themselves 

 should be ignorant of the patriarchal personages in their 

 religion, whose names are so well-known and the belief in 

 whose real existence constitutes one of the most fundamental 

 tenets of the religion. And yet, this is a fact. No Christian 

 minister can be found ignorant of the lives of St. Ignatius, 

 or St. Augustine or other patriarchs of the Church. The 

 fact that the Taoist priests know nothing authentic of the 

 lives of the Eight Immortals clearly indicates that historic 

 accounts of them are wanting, and that they are a creation 

 of tradition, and so long as tradition holds ground in men's 

 minds, there is no need for searching and preserving the 

 true accounts. 



Failing to get information from the priestly source, the 

 present treatise depends more or less on extracts from books. 

 Many books have been referred to, especially works on the 

 Chinese, and on the religions of the Chinese. According to 

 the Tz'u Y Han's H M they are not mentioned in all the 

 books on genii or in the most voluminous of the Chinese 

 historical records. 



The work that gives comparatively long accounts of the 

 lives of the Eight Immortals is Emperor Kang-hsi's 

 Encyclopedia. This work of ten large volumes quotes the 

 authority of The Supplementary Lives of the Genii |f filj M 

 in dealing with most of the lives of the Eight Genii. 

 It is interesting to note that among the numerous treatises 

 on genii alone in Chinese such as 3§t if# t>\l , "t* M BE • M fill fS> 

 M (U $f II- M % t H and others, practically nothing is 

 said of the Eight Genii, and yet they are the most popular 

 of the legion of genii, and at the same time, supreme in this 

 order of super-human beings. 



Other books that tell the stories of the Eight at some 

 length are William Frederick Mayer's The Chinese Reader's 

 Manual, and Dr. Herbert A. Giles' Chinese Biographical 

 Dictionary. There is one other book which formed the 

 principal source of information to the writer : A Mission 

 to the East of the Eight Genii, with pictures Wi H&. A flf 

 ]£ M nS * It was secured in Foochow, one of the commercial 

 centres of the coastal provinces of China, and exists in the 

 form of two small handy volumes. They contain about 

 forty-five pages, each with about nine hundred characters. 

 Here, we at once see a work of not less than 40,000 



Edited by mfX^Tt^m 



