Baosheng Dadi

A tiger came down the mountain path with its mouth held open, gagging. Lodged in its throat was a woman’s hairpin, which told the doctor on the path exactly how it had got there. He looked at the animal and refused to treat it. A tiger that had eaten a woman, he said, was being punished by Heaven, and he was not about to interfere.

The doctor was Wu Tao, and by the usual count the meeting took place around a thousand years ago in the hills of southern Fujian. He was born on the fifteenth day of the third lunar month in 979 in Baijiao, a village in what was then Tong’an County in Quanzhou prefecture, on the coast opposite Taiwan. His parents, Wu Tong and Huang Yuehua, were poor people who lived by fishing. His father died of illness when the boy was thirteen, and his mother followed soon after, of grief. Tradition draws a straight line from those two deaths to everything else. The orphan turned to medicine, read every book he could find, kept to a vegetarian diet all his life and never married.

The stories were not content with an ordinary education. When he was seventeen, a stranger is said to have invited him onto a boat and carried him to Mount Kunlun, where the Queen Mother of the West received him and taught him her arts. He came home with more than herb lore. Even so, most of what is told about his working life is plain: a man with a basket walking the slopes above the coast before the heat came up, cutting roots and leaves, and coming back down to villages that smelled of salt and drying fish to treat whoever was waiting. He is remembered as a doctor who did not turn the poor away, and one of his oldest temples, at Huaqiao, is said to stand where he taught medicine without charge.

Then the miracles begin. At thirty-five he came across a human skeleton with one leg bone missing. He made up the difference, spoke over the bones and brought them back as a living boy, who became his servant. A county magistrate heard the story and refused to believe it, so Wu Tao turned the boy back into bones in front of him, and then back again. Twenty years later a demon king arrived in the district at the head of a troop of plague ghosts. Wu Tao met him alongside two companions remembered as Jiang the Immortal Official and Zhang the Saint, broke him with lightning, and then went from house to house treating the epidemic the ghosts had left behind with charmed water.

The tiger belongs to this run of stories. Having been refused, it did not leave. It showed remorse, convincingly enough, and the doctor relented, reached into its throat and drew out the pin. The tiger carried him on its back from then on and guarded him after his death. A dragon with a diseased eye also came to him, and he treated it with drops. In the temples the two cures travel together as a single proverb about dotting the dragon’s eye and healing the tiger’s throat, and the tiger is still there: at the Baoan Temple in Taipei, the Black Tiger General is worshipped under the god’s own altar.

He was not a gentle doctor in every case. A man of the Huang family brought him a daughter who had fallen pregnant after touching a dragon in a garden pool. Wu Tao diagnosed a litter of dragon young, operated, and did away with six of the seven. The seventh attacked him and fled toward Mount Wenpu, and he hunted it down and killed it there.

Wu Tao died on the second day of the fifth lunar month in 1036, aged fifty-eight. He fell from a mountainside near the village of Qingjiao. That is the whole of it, and it is an ordinary death for a man who spent his life climbing after plants. The legend adds that a crane took him up to Heaven, which is why cranes appear beside him in temple art.

The villages he had treated began to worship him almost at once. Shrines went up at Baijiao and Qingjiao, and the court took notice. A Song emperor is credited with naming him an immortal of the Great Way, and in 1166 his temple received the imperial title Ciji, “Compassionate Relief”, which the main temples on both sides of the strait still carry. The grandest title came under the Ming. The empress of the Yongle Emperor was suffering from a disease of the breast that the palace doctors could not cure. A Taoist priest appeared at court, took her pulse through a silk thread so that he need not touch her, and healed her. Offered gold, he declined it and left on a crane. The emperor answered with a title long enough to fill a plaque, ending in the words by which the doctor is now known: Great Emperor Who Protects Life. The accounts do not agree on which emperor signed it. Temple tradition says Yongle, and other sources name his son, the Hongxi Emperor.

Settlers from southern Fujian took him with them to Taiwan, where fevers killed new arrivals in great numbers and a god of medicine was not a luxury. Tradition places his first Taiwanese temple at Xinhua, near Tainan, in the years of Dutch rule. The best known today is the Baoan Temple in Dalongdong, Taipei, where thirty-six celestial officers, carved by the sculptor Xu Yan between 1829 and 1833, stand guard around him, and where his birthday sets off weeks of processions, opera and drifting incense smoke.

Taiwanese folk humour has also given him a failed romance. In the less respectable tellings he and the sea goddess Mazu were married in Heaven, quarrelled and parted. Every year since, he sends rain on her birthday, the twenty-third of the third month, to wash the powder off her face, and she sends wind on his, eight days earlier, to blow off his hat. The saying is still used as a weather forecast: wind for the Lord of the Great Way, rain for Granny Mazu.

His powers are a doctor’s powers pushed past the edge of the possible. He diagnoses at a distance, cures the incurable, restores the dead from their bones, and commands thunder and consecrated water against the spirits that carry plague. Animals and dragons seek him out as patients. His limits come from the same place. He is a healer who was once a man, and he could not save his own parents or keep his own footing on a cliff. He will not treat a patient he thinks deserves the illness until the patient repents. And against the wind on his birthday, by all accounts, he can do nothing at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baosheng Dadi?

Baosheng Dadi is the god of medicine in the folk religion of southern Fujian, Taiwan and Hokkien communities in Southeast Asia. He is the deified form of Wu Tao, a Song dynasty physician born in Baijiao, Fujian, in 979. His name means “Great Emperor Who Protects Life”.

Why is there a tiger in Baosheng Dadi temples?

The tiger comes from the legend in which Wu Tao removed a woman’s hairpin from a tiger’s throat. He first refused to treat it because it had eaten a person, and only helped once the tiger repented. The tiger then served as his mount and guardian, and is worshipped beneath his altar as the Black Tiger General.

How did Baosheng Dadi die?

Wu Tao died in 1036 at the age of fifty-eight after falling from a mountainside near the village of Qingjiao in Fujian. Legend says a crane carried him up to Heaven. Local people began to worship him soon afterwards.

What is the story of Baosheng Dadi and Mazu?

In Taiwanese folk tradition, Baosheng Dadi and the sea goddess Mazu were married in Heaven and then separated after a quarrel. He sends rain on her birthday to wash off her face powder, and she sends wind on his birthday to blow off his hat. The saying “wind for the Lord of the Great Way, rain for Granny Mazu” comes from this story.

When is Baosheng Dadi’s birthday celebrated?

Baosheng Dadi’s birthday falls on the fifteenth day of the third lunar month. The Baoan Temple in Dalongdong, Taipei, marks it with weeks of processions and performances.

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