Chen Nan (陈楠)
Chen Nan 陈楠 (d. 1213) — the barrel-hooper of Huizhou who became the fourth patriarch of the southern lineage: mud-pills for the sick, thunder-rites from a mountain god, poems composed drunk, and the widening of the school — from one-to-one transmission to four named disciples. The master who taught Bai Yuchan, and whose own poem names the date, the place, and the heir.
The man and the arc
- The barrel-hooper who became a patriarch. The records agree on the sharpest biographical fact and the site keeps it: 以箍桶为业 — Chen Nan made barrels for a living. The southern lineage’s fourth patriarch enters the record as a craftsman, and the site’s craftsman line holds the family this belongs to: the cook, the wheelwright, the bell-stand maker — the book’s masters of practice all start with a trade, and the lineage’s own patriarchs repeat the pattern. The trade matters here in the doctrinal sense too: his alchemy is graded workmanship (see below), not revelation.
- The double transmission. The records give him two teachers of two kinds: from Xue Daoguang (the former Chan master turned alchemist) he took the 太乙刀圭金丹法诀, the golden-elixir method — and the line he quoted about himself is a text (付我归根复命篇 — he handed me the Returning-to-the-Root chapter, a title that quotes the ch. 16 formula 归根复命); from a spirit-man of Limu Mountain he took the 景霄大雷琅书, the thunder-scripture. So the two great lines of the school — the inner elixir and the thunder-rites — both run through Chen Nan, and both then run onward to Bai Yuchan, whose thunder doctrine (the method is the heart’s minister; the spirits summoned are the operator’s own essence) descends through this man. The site keeps the boundary on the second line: the spirit-man transmission is registered as the tradition’s own account, not as history.
- The mud pills and the name. 常以泥土渗符水，捏成小丸救人治病，无不灵验，时人称为陈泥丸 — he mixed earth with talisman-water, kneaded little pills, healed the sick without fail, and the people called him Chen Niwan, “Chen Mud-Pill.” The site registers the record as it stands: the healing claims are the tradition’s claim (照录不背书, per the site’s health-claims rule), and the nickname is worth its weight in method — the healer is named for the material of his healing, dirt and water, the plainest substances in the tradition’s pharmacy. His other image matches: 衣裳褴褛，终日烂醉，吟诗歌咏，出口成章 — ragged clothes, drunk all day, poems pouring out — the same mad-sage idiom the site filed for his disciple and for Wang Chongyang: the display of madness as the tradition’s own inverse of display.
- The poem that names the heir. The records carry his own verse as the transmission document: 嘉定壬申八月秋，翠虚道人在罗浮……还以金丹火候诀，说与琼山白玉蟾 — autumn of the eighth month of Jiading renshen (1212), the Cuixu man at Luofu… handing the golden-elixir fire-timing formula to Bai Yuchan of Qiongshan. The date, the place, the method, and the disciple — in the master’s own poem, matching the 1212 Luofu transmission on the site’s Bai Yuchan page. The site notes the genre: a transmission poem is a document and a claim, and this one is the lineage’s own evidence for its central hand-off.
- The widening that made the school possible. The Hun Yuan Lie Xian Tu record names four disciples — Ju Jiusi, Sha Daozhang, Bai Yuchan, Huang Tiangu — with the gloss the site treats as the arc’s hinge: 南宗自陈楠起，门徒始众 — from Chen Nan on, the school’s disciples first became many. The site’s organizer arc holds the sequence this completes: Zhang Boduan wrote the founding text; Chen Nan widened the transmission from one-to-one to four; Bai Yuchan opened the teaching seat. The site’s Bai Yuchan page said “he ended the one-to-one transmission” — and this page files the finer record: the ending began here, with four names instead of one.
- The graded alchemy. His systematic mark is the three-grade classification the records preserve: 下品地仙之道 (the earth-immortal way — the older Zhong-Lü methods of swallowing and rubbing), 中品水仙之道 (the water-immortal way — spirit and breath as the lead and mercury, the Ziting Jing), 上品天仙之道 (the heaven-immortal way) — and the doctrine that underwrites the whole: 气之根本凝成神，方曰无为而通灵 — when the root of breath condenses into spirit, only then is it called non-doing and reaching the spirit. The site’s essence-breath-spirit page and qi page hold the triad this runs on, and the site registers the doctrinal point against the sequence debates elsewhere: Chen Nan’s 无为 (non-doing) is earned — it arrives at the top of a graded curriculum, not as its beginning. A barrel-hooper’s theology: the product comes after the stages.
- Why he belongs here. He is the site’s bridge-figure: backwards to Zhang Boduan (the text), forwards to Bai Yuchan (the school), and sideways to the whole craftsman-family of the book (the trade, the graded work, the plain materials). The site files him with the teacher question in view: this is what the lineage means by transmission — a poem naming a date and a disciple, a method handed over like a trade, and a school that widened only when there were four names to carry it.
Sources
- The biographical records (Baidu Baike's Nan Wu Zu entry and the Wikipedia Nan Wu Zu article, agreeing): Chen Nan, d. 1213, courtesy name Nanmu, style Cuixu; from Boluo, Huizhou (Guangdong); worked as a barrel-hooper (以箍桶为业); said of himself: '道光禅师薛紫贤，付我归根复命篇' — received the Guigen Fuming pian from Xue Daoguang (the former Piling Chan master); studied the Taiyi Daogui golden-elixir method under Xue, and later received the Jingxiao Dalei langshu (thunder-scripture) from a spirit-man of Limu Mountain, then entered the Way; the records carry the mud-pill healing practice (常以泥土渗符水，捏成小丸救人治病，无不灵验，时人称为陈泥丸), the thunder-rites practice, the mad-sage image (衣裳褴褛，尘垢遍身，终日烂醉，吟诗歌咏，出口成章), and his own poem naming the transmission: 嘉定壬申八月秋，翠虚道人在罗浮……还以金丹火候诀，说与琼山白玉蟾; the Hun Yuan Lie Xian Tu record of four disciples (鞠九思、沙道彰、白玉蟾、黄天谷 — 南宗自陈楠起，门徒始众), and the inner-alchemy doctrine (the three grades: 下品地仙之道/中品水仙之道/上品天仙之道; 气之根本凝成神，方曰无为而通灵), with the Li Yuanguo study (陈楠与神霄派) and the Zhihu study of the Xiuzhen Bianhuo Lun (海南白玉蟾，自幼事陈泥丸，忽已九年) confirming the Chen Nan–Bai Yuchan teacher-student line