Wuxiang Temple Cliff Inscriptions

The Wuxiang Temple Cliff Inscriptions are Ming stone inscriptions in what is now the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area, Honglan Subdistrict, Lishui District. The Nanjing municipal list of protected sites records them as Ming, at Wuxiang Mountain scenic area, Honglan Subdistrict. In listing the district's heritage, the district overview sets them alongside Wuxiang Temple, Tiansheng Bridge, the Yanzhi River, Changle Bridge, Putang Bridge, the Yongshou Pagoda and the tomb of the imperial son-in-law.

The batch is now confirmed against the municipal gazette notice. Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 of 10 June 2006 published the third batch of 159 municipal protected sites. The Wuxiang Temple Cliff Inscriptions appear as item 5 in the "caves and stone inscriptions" section, with the period given as Ming and the address recorded as "Wuxiang Temple scenic area, Honglan Town, Lishui County". The notice says "Wuxiang Temple scenic area" where the municipal list says "Wuxiang Mountain scenic area"; the two are two renderings of one scenic area, and each is quoted as printed.

The three inscriptions

Both the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area website and The Paper record that there are three cliff inscriptions, all in seal script, laid out as a tripod, and named "Fengquan", "Danding" and the "Wuzun Inscription". Their form and position:

• Fengquan: "Fengquan" is written horizontally on the left side of the rock face, and refers to the waterfall formed by the spring at the summit running down among the rocks.
• Danding: to the southwest of Fengquan stands another rock, rising on its own a little over one chi high, on which "Danding" is cut vertically; the name means that this rock, standing here, is lofty like a natural cauldron.
• Wuzun Inscription: on the southeast side is a rock about as tall as a person, its upper part levelled, on which the "Wuzun Inscription" is cut vertically with a main text of twenty-nine characters; "wuzun" means digging a hollow to serve as a vessel.

All three lie around the Guanyin-in-Stone Pavilion in the middle section of the Hundred-Step Cloud Ladder. The ladder runs from the old Wuxiang Temple up to the Heavenly Lake, about one chi wide and some 800 metres long. "汙" is a variant form of "污"; each source quotes it as it stands and no source rewrites it. The forms should be noted: in the material held by this library "汙尊铭" appears both as "汙" and as "污", and a few sources corrupt it further to "汗"; this entry follows the "汙尊铭" of the scenic area website and The Paper and notes the variant.

Author and date

For the author and the date of the three inscriptions, the old gazetteer and modern accounts differ in evidential level, and must be given separately.

A direct record in the Kangxi Lishui County Gazetteer — volume 5, in the mountains section, under "Wuxiang Mountain":

無想山南一十五里。山形環抱，與杜城諸山相連。中有唐建禪寂寺及南唐韓熙載讀書台址、大士石像。古桧、銀杏皆唐宋間植。有元謝瑛招云亭碑記。山頂有泉，下注岩石間成瀑布，明嘉靖間知縣王從善鑿石題曰「鳳泉」，構亭其側，今廢。近多遊人題詠，俱載《藝文志》。

Translated: Wuxiang Mountain lies fifteen li to the south of the county seat. Its shape is embracing, joined with the Ducheng mountains. Within it are the Tang-built Chanji Temple, the site of Han Xizai's reading terrace of the Southern Tang, and a stone image of Guanyin. Its old cypresses and ginkgos were all planted between the Tang and the Song. There is a stele record of the Zhaoyun Pavilion by Xie Ying of the Yuan. A spring on the summit runs down among the rocks and forms a waterfall; in the Jiajing reign of the Ming the magistrate Wang Congshan hewed the rock and inscribed "Fengquan", and built a pavilion beside it, now fallen to ruin. In recent years many visitors have inscribed poems, all carried in the Treatise on Literature.

The same volume, in the springs section, has a separate entry:

鳳泉在無想山。知縣王從善鑿。

Translated: The Fengquan is in Wuxiang Mountain. It was cut by the magistrate Wang Congshan.

This is the earliest, and the only, record in a contemporary gazetteer that directly connects the "Fengquan" inscription with Wang Congshan, and it is a direct statement rather than an inference. The scenic area website and The Paper instead put it as "traditionally ascribed to the writing of Wang Congshan, the Lishui magistrate of the Jiajing reign" — the word "traditionally" must be kept. This entry takes the gazetteer as its main authority for author and date, with the scenic area and the press as support, and does not let a "traditionally" overwrite a direct record of the gazetteer.

The old gazetteer has an important silence in its place: the "Wuxiang Mountain" and "Fengquan" entries above record only "Fengquan", and do not mention "Danding" or the "Wuzun Inscription". The full picture of three inscriptions currently rests on secondary sources alone. This must be stated plainly: one must not write "three inscriptions recorded in the old gazetteer", nor use the absence of Danding and Wuzun from the gazetteer to deny their existence — the mountains section of the Kangxi gazetteer was never a register of inscriptions, and its selections were made with a view to what was worth recording.

The gazetteer's note that a pavilion was built beside the inscription and has "now fallen to ruin" records that Wang Congshan had a pavilion built there by the time of the Kangxi era. It should be noted that the gazetteer gives neither the name of the pavilion nor the year of its ruin. The name "Fengquan Pavilion" current in the scenic area website and the press is absent from this gazetteer; the two are of different levels, and the present name must not be written back into the old record.

The man himself

Wang Congshan, courtesy name Chengji, was a native of Xiangyang. Volume 6 of the Kangxi gazetteer, in the biographies of eminent officials, has an entry on him:

王從善，字承吉，襄陽人。由進士，嘉靖三年任。藹然愛民而老於吏治。夙富文詞，政舉其要。首請忠節祠祀，祀齊節愍公。建先斯倉，以備賑濟。公暇則過興教寺，翛然自適，不為俗務所拘。顏寺中堂曰「又得」，義取「又得浮生半日閑」也。每有訟，民即寺聽斷，視若無事，蓋超超若世外者。於諸生多所噓拂，士人向風依戀。省荒勸農多得古法。纂修邑志，今垂舊聞。

Translated: Wang Congshan, courtesy name Chengji, was a native of Xiangyang. Having passed the jinshi examination, he was appointed in the third year of the Jiajing reign. He was mild in his love of the people and long devoted to the business of government. Endowed from early on with literary elegance, he carried out the essentials of policy. He first petitioned for a shrine to the loyal and martyred, where Qi Jie-min was worshipped. He built the Xiansi Granary to prepare for relief. In his leisure hours he would visit Xingjiao Temple, free and untrammelled, refusing to be occupied by worldly business. He inscribed on the hall of that temple the words "Youde", taken from "gaining once more half a day of leisurely life". Whenever there was a suit, the people would have him hear and decide it at the temple, and he would treat it as no matter at all, quite beyond this world. He gave much encouragement to the scholars, and they turned towards him and clung to him. In checking famine and exhorting to farming he followed ancient practice. He compiled the county gazetteer, whose old accounts still endure.

That entry records the man and his doings only, and mentions none of Fengquan, Danding or the Wuzun Inscription — the gazetteer basis for the inscriptions is the two entries in volume 5, not this biography.

The two accounts of the beginning and end of his term as Lishui magistrate broadly agree: the old gazetteer records "appointed in the third year of the Jiajing reign", and the scenic area website records "magistrate of Lishui from the third to the seventh year of Jiajing", the starting year matching. The gazetteer records no courtesy name beyond Chengji, while the scenic area website and encyclopaedic sources give his literary name as "Fenglin" (the section of the cliff inscriptions is for this reason called the Fenglin cliff). The two are presented side by side, with no choice made between them.

Condition

The scenic area website records that all three inscriptions are in seal script, that "apart from the 'Wuzun Inscription', which is a little weathered, the other two are well preserved", and that over more than five centuries the group has weathered wind and rain yet still carries a strong cultural presence. Note that the latter half of this is the scenic area's evaluative wording and is not taken as fact here; "the Wuzun Inscription a little weathered, the other two well preserved" is a description of present condition and may be quoted. The protection level and batch of the group remain those of the municipal gazette notice and the municipal list; the statement on the scenic area page that it "is now a Nanjing municipal protected site" agrees with these and constitutes no separate recognition.

Relation to Wuxiang Temple

The temple near the inscriptions has its own entry in this library (see related). According to the scenic area website, the Hundred-Step Cloud Ladder "runs from the old Wuxiang Temple to the Heavenly Lake", and the inscriptions lie in its middle section, behind the temple. The gazetteer's "ponds" section in volume 5 further records that the "White Lotus Pool is at Wuxiang Temple. It was dug by the monk Chongquan in the tenth year of the Shunzhi era" — that is, 1653. The scenic area website also records that the Guanyin-in-Stone Pavilion "was originally built by the Ming magistrate Xu Bida and later fell to ruin", and that in the Shunzhi era the magistrate Min Pailu had the monk Chongquan (styled the Venerable Xingwu) rebuild it and compose a record cut on stone beside it, after which the stone record and the stone image of Guanyin were lost and what stands now is a reproduction. All the above old gazetteer passages reach this library as quoted by the scenic area website: the Shunzhi gazetteer is catalogued-only in this library (see src:shunzhi-lishuixianzhi) and must not be cited as old gazetteer original text; the "Lishui County Gazetteer" gives no edition, so the attribution of its version is unverified.

Open questions

• The main text of the "Wuzun Inscription", twenty-nine characters, is given in no source beyond its character count, and no transcription has been seen; this library holds no rubbing or reading, so not one character of it is written here.
• "Danding" and the "Wuzun Inscription" do not appear in the Kangxi gazetteer, so their author and date currently rest only on the second-hand level of "traditionally".
• The precise protected extent and boundary of the three inscriptions, and whether they carry a site marker, are unverified; neither the notice nor the municipal list gives more than level, period and location.
• Whether these three inscriptions are the same group recorded in the culture site's entry on the Wuxiang Mountain cliff inscriptions. The two entries are now known to record one and the same set of inscriptions, and the reason is worth stating, since it decides the question rather than leaving it open: both official records list exactly one row for this site. The third-batch notice has two entries for Lishui in the "caves and stone inscriptions" section, and they are "Wuxiang Temple Cliff Inscriptions" and "Qiuhu Mountain Ancient Quarry"; the municipal list likewise has a single row, "Wuxiang Temple Cliff Inscriptions, Ming, within the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area, Honglan Subdistrict". Nowhere does either record contain a separate row named "Wuxiang Mountain Cliff Inscriptions", so that name cannot be a second protected site — it is a rendering of the same one. "Wuxiang Mountain" is the name of the mountain and of the scenic area; "Wuxiang Temple" is the temple within it, which the notice's address column uses as the locational description. The two entries are nonetheless kept as they are, each in its own station, because merging them would mean choosing one id across stations; and related cannot express the link, since a cross-station reference is an error in this library and only an absolute URL is allowed. The two entries therefore record the finding in their body text and cite the same two official records.
• Though every source calls the script seal script, the particular seal form (great or small seal) and whether the carver was the same person are unverified.
• Whether a "Fengquan Pavilion" stands today, and its relation to the ruined pavilion of the gazetteer, are unverified.
• The statement that the Guanyin-in-Stone Pavilion "now existing is a reproduction" is the scenic area's account; the date and basis of the reproduction are unverified.