Luo Gongyuan罗公远

Style & Daoist names

Luo Siyuan

Period

Tang

Dates

? — ?

Role

Daoshi (Daoist Priest)practitioner of the occult arts

Birthplace

Ezhou (present-day Wuchang, Hubei; alternatively Pengzhou)

Life

Luo Gongyuan, a renowned Daoist priest of the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, counted together with Ye Fashan and Zhang Guo as one of the three extraordinary men of Xuanzong's court. Accounts of his life appear chiefly in the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, citing the Lost Histories and Biographies of Encounters with Divine Immortals, with no biography in the official histories. Tradition holds that he performed the art of invisibility for Xuanzong but withheld part of the technique, so that Xuanzong had him killed in anger, only for others to later see him on the roads of Shu; he is also said to have engaged in a contest of powers with Ye Fashan and the monk Vajrabodhi, and to have taken Xuanzong to travel to the Moon Palace (an episode also attached to Ye Fashan), making him a central figure in the cluster of stories linking Emperor Xuanzong to Daoism. His dates of birth and death are unknown. As an image of the court Daoist priest, Luo Gongyuan concentrates the High Tang court's fascination with esoteric arts, and the later popular imagination that mythologized the age of Xuanzong.

Contributions & Influence

• A representative figure in the narrative of court Daoist arts in the High Tang

Legends

The above episodes — the art of invisibility, the Moon Palace, the contest of powers, and his reappearance after being killed — all belong to legend.