Liang Chen梁谌

Style & Daoist names

Liang Zhan, Perfected Liang

Period

Western Jin

Dates

? — ?

School

Louguan School

Role

Daoshi (Daoist Priest)Transmitter of the Louguan School

Birthplace

Fufeng (present-day Shaanxi)

Places of activity

Louguantai (Louguan Terrace)

Life

Liang Chen, a Western Jin Daoist priest, was a pivotal figure in the transmission lineage of the Louguan School. According to Louguan-authored texts such as the Original Account of Louguan (Louguan benqi zhuan) and the Stele Records of Perfected Immortals through the Ages at the Scripture Platform on Mount Zhongnan, Liang Chen studied around the second year of Yongxing under Emperor Hui of Jin (305) under Master Zheng (Zheng Lüdao) at Louguan, receiving the Riyue huanghua shangjing (Upper Scripture of the Sun, Moon, and Yellow Flower), the Dongshen huangting neijing jing (Scripture of the Yellow Court's Inner Effulgences of the Cavern of Spirit), and methods of alchemical transmutation using water and minerals. He afterward cultivated and transmitted the teaching at Louguan on the Zhongnan Mountains (traditionally held to be where Yin Xi built a thatched tower and Laozi expounded his scripture), thereby founding the Louguan lineage. The Louguan School holds Yin Xi as its distant ancestor and takes the Daodejing and the doctrine of Laozi's conversion of the barbarians as its doctrinal core; from Liang Chen it was transmitted through Wang Jia, Sun Che, Ma Jian, Yin Tong, Wang Yan, Yan Da, and others, becoming by the Northern Dynasties the most powerful Daoist tradition in the Guanzhong region. The Louguan School occupied an important position when the Northern Zhou established the Tongdao Abbey, and when the Sui and Tang imperial houses venerated Laozi. Liang Chen's deeds appear entirely in biographical stele inscriptions authored by the Louguan tradition itself; he has no biography in the standard histories, and the details of his dates and teacher-disciple transmission are difficult to verify with rigor. Nonetheless, as the point at which the Louguan School passes from a legendary era into recountable history, he has been unanimously honored as the school's founding patriarch in Daoist texts through the ages.

Contributions & Influence

• Honored as the actual starting point of the Louguan School's transmission, founding the Louguan lineage on the Zhongnan Mountains
• A genealogical link connecting the legend of Yin Xi above to Guanzhong Daoism of the Northern Dynasties below
• The Riyue huanghua shangjing and the water-and-mineral alchemical methods he transmitted formed the content of early Louguan practice

Legends

Episodes such as receiving scriptures left by Yin Xi and being moved to receive alchemical instructions from a descending Perfected are drawn from Louguan-authored stele biographies and belong to tradition internal to the school.