The annals of Weihaiwei also contain this story. In the year 1723 there was a very heavy shower of rain. In the sky, among the dark clouds, was espied a dragon. When the storm passed off a man named Chiang of the village of Ho Ch'ing or Huo Ch'ien picked up a Thing that was "as large as a sieve, round as the sun, thick as a coin, and lustrous as the finest jade. It reflected the sun's light and shone like a star, so that it dazzled the eyes." It was passed from hand to hand and minutely examined, but no one knew what it was. The village soothsayer was appealed to for a decision. A single glance at the strange object was enough for the man of wisdom. "This Thing," he said, "is a scale that has fallen from the body of the dragon." Chiang placed the treasure on his family-altar and preserved it as a precious heirloom, but whether it still exists no one seems to know, or those who know will not tell.
Among the greatest of the Taoist gods are Lao Chün,—Lao Tzŭ himself, who would have been more disgusted than most men to know of his future deification; P'an Ku, a kind of magnified Adam; and Yü Huang Shang Ti, the Jade-Imperial-God to whom is entrusted the supreme control of the world and mundane affairs. The functions of these deities are general rather than specific, so it is no wonder that they are rather neglected by the ordinary worshipper, who usually prays to the Taoist gods not for the sake of glorifying the divine personage addressed (which would be regarded as mere useless flattery) but with the direct and avowed object of obtaining some benefit for himself or his friends and relatives.
One hears little of Lao Chün and P'an Ku in Weihaiwei—probably most villagers know hardly anything of them—but there are several shrines dedicated to the Jade-Imperial-God. These are little stone buildings on the hill-tops. They are perhaps the most interesting, if among the most insignificant in size and appearance, of all the Taoist temples. Mountain-worship is one of the very oldest forms of religion in China. The most ancient historical records which the country possesses tell us how those famous old emperors of the Golden Age—Yao, Shun and Yü—offered sacrifices on mountain-tops. The old records are so terse in expression that it is scarcely possible to say definitely whether the mountains were worshipped for their own sakes or whether they were merely regarded as altars for the worship of Shang Ti or T'ien, the One God or the Greatest of Gods. As the Emperor Shun (2255-05 B.C.) and other rulers of that early time (presuming they are not altogether mythical) are said to have selected particular mountains for their acts of worship it seems probable that the mountains themselves, or the spirits they harboured, were the usual objects of worship; though it is possible and even probable that the imperial sacrifices to Shang Ti (still carried out annually on the Altar of Heaven at Peking) were also regularly offered up on the summits of lofty hills.
Primitive worshippers of the visible heavens naturally thought that the higher they climbed the nearer they would be to their god and the more acceptable to him would be their sacrifices. As time went on, four and subsequently five mountains in China were singled out as being specially sacred for their own sakes as well as for the imperial sacrifices, and those Five Mountains (Wu Yüeh) have been annually visited and worshipped by countless pilgrims through all the centuries down to the present day.[390] It does not appear, from the ancient records of the Shu Ching, that Taoism had anything whatever to do with mountain-worship in its early days: but it was evidently the policy of the Taoists—as soon as they developed something like a priestcraft—to associate themselves and their cult with every form of worship in the country. Thus they soon established a priestly guardianship, which they still retain, over the Five Sacred Mountains. I have come across, in Chinese Buddhistic literature, evidence that the priests of these mountains were Taoist priests in the first century of the Christian era. No doubt it was natural enough that the sacred hills should fall under the priestly superintendence of the Taoists, for it was in the dark ravines and caves and on the rocky ledges of great mountains that the Taoist recluses were accustomed to make their solitary homes.
The impelling cause that first drove them to the hills was no doubt to find the magical herbs and roots that were necessary ingredients of the elixir of life, and to practise the self-control and purity of thought that were as essential to success as the mysterious draught itself. But the spell of the mountains soon became independent of drugs and philosophies. Men discovered—many centuries before the sterner aspects of hill and forest had begun to make their appeal to the poets and artists of Europe—that wild Nature was an enchantress who made willing slaves of all who had feelings responsive to beautiful sights and sounds. The time came when poets, scholars, dreamers—many of them Taoists only in name and some not even in name—sought the solitude of mountains not because they hoped to concoct medicines or acquire strange faculties and powers, but because they had fallen under the power of the great enchantress, because they found amid the sky-piercing crags and cloistered watercourses and dark pine-forests of the great mountains a companionship, a peace of mind, a pure and sometimes ecstatic happiness that they had never known and could never know in peopled plains or in crowded cities. If one may presume to alter a single word of a great poet's confession—
"The sounding cataract
Haunted them like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to them
An appetite."
Five mountains, it is hardly necessary to say, were too few to satisfy the Chinese longing for natural beauty. When the Buddhists came to China in the first century of our era they found Taoist recluses and priests in possession of the Five Sacred Mountains, but it was not long before they, too, fixed upon equally beautiful mountain-retreats of their own;[391] and no one who has visited a number of them can fail to be struck by the peculiarly keen sense of the loveliness of nature that must have guided the Buddhist recluses in their choice of romantic sites for hermitages and monasteries. It is hardly too much to say that there is not a beautiful mountain in all China that is not to-day or has not been in past time the resort of monks and hermits or laymen who have abandoned "the world."