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(1)Įxcerpted from “The Collapse of the Northern Ming,” by Russell Jones.
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Thousands of priests, sages, and their followers lived in and around the complex, which occupied almost four thousand hectares of land. In 1552 the Jiajing Emperor ordered the refurbishment of the complex, which took almost two years. Indeed, it was the subject of no fewer than three hundred and sixty-nine Imperial edicts during the years of the Northern Ming. Even after the passing of the Yongle Emperor, the Wudang complex retained its importance. While Xuan Wu is a patron deity of martial artists, much of Wudang Mountain’s current reputation as a hotbed of martial arts is inflated most of the Daoist sages and priests that resided in the Wudang complex were practitioners of 内丹术 ( nei dan shu, or “internal alchemy”), a variety of Daoism concerned foremost with harnessing meditation to unite the yin and yang energies and prolong life. Yongle himself proclaimed Wudang as the “Great Mountain,” and announced that the patron deity of the complex would be 玄武 ( Xuan Wu, or “Perfected Martiality”).
ENTER THE WU TANG 36 CHAMBERS SERIES
During a fifteen-year period between roughly 14 CE, no fewer than nine palaces, nine large temples, thirty-six nunneries, and seventy-two smaller temples were built on and around 武当山 ( Wudang shan, or Mount Wudang, which is in fact a series of peaks). Whatever the reason may have been, vast amounts of manpower and money were poured into the reconstruction of the Wudang Temple complex. Many contemporary scholars have argued that Yongle, who usurped the throne from his nephew, wished to make a gesture to the Daoist faith - which his father, the Hongwu Emperor, had followed - in order to establish himself in the eyes of the populace as being under the protection of the gods. It is unclear exactly what prompted this move on the part of the emperor he was not an adherent of Daoism, which had been on the wane in the later years of the Yuan Dynasty. The most prominent exemplar of this trend was the Yongle Emperor’s decision in 1412 to rebuild the temple complex in the Wudang Mountains of northwest Hubei Province. Daoism flourished during the early Ming period. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it.Įxcerpted from “Daoism in China: The Ming Years,” by Clifford Smith. This is the first half of the timeline, more or less I'll post the second half later. I've cleaned things up a bit in this version and made some minor edits. If you'd like to make a comment, ask a question, or demand a refund, do it in that thread, not this one. OBLIGATORY ADMINISTRATIVE STUFF: The original thread is here.