Li Tieguai

The pupil had six days of patience in him, and the seventh was the one that mattered. His master lay in the cave exactly as he had been left, so still that the cold coming off the rock seemed to be doing his breathing for him. The instruction had been plain. The body stays here, the soul goes travelling, and if the soul has not returned in seven days you may burn what is left. Then word came that the young man’s mother was dying. He lit the fire on the sixth day and went.

When the soul came home on the seventh, on schedule, there was nothing left to come home to. It found ash where a handsome body had been, and no other lodging anywhere within reach, until it caught sight of a corpse lying nearby: a man who had starved to death, lame, filthy and newly cold. It went in. What stood up out of that borrowed skin became one of the most recognisable figures in Chinese art.

Before the fire he had been, in the phrasing of the old biography, a fine man of imposing presence. He heard the Dao while still young, took a mountain cave for a house, and settled into the long unglamorous work of purifying body and mind. Forty years of it, by one account, much of it without food or sleep. The work drew attention. Laozi came down from heaven to teach him and brought another immortal, Master Wan Qiu, along for the lessons. On the day everything went wrong he was only keeping an appointment. Laozi had asked to meet him on Mount Hua, and it was a journey his body could not make.

The face he ended up with is the reason people know him. Hairy, dark-skinned, hideous by the frank standards of the record, with eyes that bulge and a mane of unkempt curls held off the forehead by a gold band. He goes about scantily dressed in rags that have clearly not been off him in a while. The right leg is crippled, and the iron crutch that gave him his name takes the weight, wedged under one arm at the angle of a man who stopped noticing he was leaning a long time ago. Perceval Yetts, writing in 1916, put his finger on the uncomfortable thing about the image: it is drawn from life. Li looks exactly like the beggars who filled every Chinese city in his day, the ones people gave to out of unease rather than pity.

His other object is a bottle gourd, the calabash carried by every immortal, and his is the interesting one. In painting after painting a thread of vapour climbs out of the mouth of it and hangs in the air, and inside the vapour is a second, smaller Li: the soul out for a walk, sometimes drawn as a vague shape, sometimes as a perfect miniature of the man holding the gourd. Occasionally the vapour carries a sphere instead. The gourd is also his bedroom, his dispensary and the whole of his practice. What comes out of it relieves suffering, and he gives it away.

That is the ordinary business of his afterlife. A filthy old man turns up wherever people are dying badly, unstoppers something that smells of dried herbs and old rind, hands out what he has, and limps off before anyone can thank him properly. The trades took him at his word. His iron crutch still hangs outside traditional apothecaries as a shop sign, and the purveyors of medicinal dog-skin plasters claim him outright as the originator and patron deity of their business.

None of which is ancient, and the record is unusually candid about it. The word baxian, eight immortals, is genuinely old. It appears in the third century for eight divine beings said to predate history, then attaches itself to a set of worthies from Sichuan, then in the Tang to eight scholars celebrated mainly for drinking. Three separate groups of eight circulated in Daoist tradition, upper, middle and lower, belonging to different periods and sharing only a handful of names between them. The eight that everyone now pictures are the middle set, and they were not fixed as a unit before the Yuan dynasty, when the theatre got hold of them and made them a troupe.

Li is the least historical member of a group that is not very historical to begin with. Zhongli Quan is placed in the Han, Zhang Guo was a real Tang priest who left writings behind, Cao Guojiu is attached to the brother of a Song empress. Li is legend the whole way down, and the tradition cannot even settle on what he was called before the crutch. Li Xuan, in most tellings. Li Ningyang, in the inscription a nineteenth-century painter brushed onto a scroll of him now hanging in New York. Li Yue, on the Yuan stage, where the master who calls his soul back is not Laozi at all but Lü Dongbin. Four names, two teachers, one crutch.

The powers follow from the accident that made him. He can leave his body, which is exactly what got him into this, and the freed soul goes where it pleases; the vapour over the gourd is that ability drawn as a picture. He heals, and the medicine is aimed at the poor and the desperate specifically, which is a preference rather than a limitation. Later retellings pile on a good deal more, an inexhaustible gourd, pills that abolish hunger and confer flight, a famously vile temper reserved for people who have earned it, but those belong to modern popular versions and sit on top of a much barer original.

The limits are stricter than they look. Everything he can do runs through the gourd and the crutch, and both were gifts rather than his own work. He is fixed permanently in the body he grabbed. He never got the other one back. Nothing in forty years of purification, no instruction from Laozi, nothing in the entire apparatus of Daoist immortality offered him a way to undo six days of one boy’s impatience, and no version of the story pretends otherwise. He won his argument with death and lost the one with a funeral, and he spends the rest of it dispensing cures for other people’s bodies out of a gourd, inside a body that a stranger died in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Li Tieguai?

Li Tieguai, whose name means Iron-Crutch Li, is one of the Eight Immortals of Chinese folklore and Daoism, and usually the senior of them. He is depicted as an ugly, hairy old beggar leaning on an iron crutch and carrying a medicine gourd. He is a legendary rather than a historical figure, and the sources give his original name variously as Li Xuan, Li Ningyang or Li Yue.

Why does Li Tieguai walk with an iron crutch?

Because the body he is living in is not his own. Li had sent his soul travelling and left instructions that his body be burned if he did not return within seven days, but his pupil cremated it on the sixth day in order to reach a dying mother. Returning to find only ashes, Li’s soul entered the nearest available corpse, a lame beggar who had starved to death, and he has been crippled and hideous ever since.

What is in Li Tieguai’s gourd?

Medicine. The bottle gourd holds the remedies he distributes to the poor, the sick and the needy, and Chinese tradition also treats it as his sleeping quarters. In many paintings a vapour rises from its mouth containing a miniature image of Li himself, representing his ability to send his soul out of his body.

What is Li Tieguai the patron of?

He is the patron of doctors, pharmacists, beggars and the crippled. His iron crutch is still displayed outside traditional Chinese apothecaries as a trade sign, and sellers of medicinal dog-skin plasters regard him as the founder of their business.

How old is the legend of the Eight Immortals?

The phrase “eight immortals” is ancient and was applied to several different groups over the centuries, including eight primordial divine beings, a set of figures from Sichuan, and eight hard-drinking Tang scholars. The particular eight that includes Li Tieguai was not fixed as a group until the Yuan dynasty, when Chinese drama assembled them into the troupe now familiar from popular art.

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