Two emails arrive more often than any others. One asks me to write a fu. The other has a photograph attached: bought online, is it real.
I answer both badly, for reasons I’ll come to. First the two words.
One is written, the other is conferred
Fu and lu get said together as a compound, so people take them for one thing under two names.
You write a fu. A lu gets handed to you, on a particular day, with your name already written into it.
The second takes the worse beating overseas. People hear that someone received registers and picture a drawing course finished and passed. A register places you in a lineage. Brushwork is a separate apprenticeship.
What the word fu meant first
Before it meant anything religious it meant a tally. An object cut in two, one half kept at court, one half carried by the commander in the field. To move troops you brought the halves together, and the break and the inscription had to match or the order did not count. Tiger tallies are the famous ones. The Warring States examples out of the ground are small, less than a palm, the characters inlaid in gold.
England ran the same instrument for six hundred years, incidentally. The Exchequer issued split hazel sticks notched for the sum, one half to the payer, one kept in the tally room. When the accumulated sticks were finally cleared out in 1834 they were burned in a furnace under the House of Lords, the flue overheated, and the fire took most of the Palace of Westminster with it. None of which has anything to do with Daoism. I have never managed to leave it out.
The Daoist fu keeps the tally sense. It is a token that has to match on the other side, and if it doesn’t match it is paper. So a fu behaves more like a document. Talisman, amulet, charm: English puts all three weights on the object, so in consultations I explain the word before I use it.
What is on one
The common account divides a fu into three parts: head, core, foot.
The head sits at the top, most often three hooked strokes that the trade simply calls the three hooks; what those three refer to is not agreed: some say the Three Pure Ones, some the three terraces of stars, and some transmissions write the two characters for “by command” instead. The core sits in the middle and is the thing itself, the part a practitioner looks at first, and if the core will not stand, nothing above or below it holds the sheet together. The foot closes at the bottom, and there is more than one way of closing. Even these three names vary, some transmissions using head, belly and tail. Which stroke counts as the head, where the core begins, how the foot resolves: that differs house to house. You write it the way your teacher wrote it and nobody is obliged to reconcile with anybody. A fu for the same purpose can come out of two lineages looking like unrelated objects. This is where I stop. Below that level, how the brush actually moves, in what order, with which spell and which hand seal, is taught mouth to ear and does not go onto paper.
That is part of the craft. Once it is written down you have no idea who copies it, in what state, or what they do with it afterwards, and oral transmission carries something a page cannot: when not to do it. Xingyi was the same. What I got there came hand to hand, not out of a notebook.
Before the brush
What an outsider watches is the last few seconds. The brush goes down, the whole thing is written in one pass without lifting, and it looks as though the skill lives in the wrist.
It lives earlier.
Before it there is fasting and purification of body, mouth and mind, with the restrictions for those days kept as written; the altar space cleared; the parties addressed and summoned; and the visualisation held, the forms and the breath standing in the mind, and if they will not stand you do not write. The writing itself is short enough that it does not look like the important part. There is an old line in the trade: draw a fu without knowing the hinge and you only get laughed at by the spirits. The hinge is everything before the brush.
Fasting has since been borrowed by the fitness industry, so when somebody now asks how many days of fasting are involved I have to check which kind of fasting they mean.
Lu is a roll of names
The word means a register in the plainest office sense: a list. It records which line you belong to and who you may call on. Which grade of rite you may perform is written in as well, and not by you.
There are grades. The early Celestial Master registers ran from the one-general register given to children upward through ten generals, seventy-five, a hundred and fifty, the number of officials marking the level, and transmissions differ on the names. For the later Longhu Shan line the usual account gives Sanwu Dugong first, then Zhengyi Mengwei, with the Shangqing Five Thunder and Three-Cavern Five Thunder grades above those. The two sequences are ordered differently in different transmissions; I go by the common account and would not call it settled.
There is a stretch here I cannot read through. How the early registers, graded by how many officials you commanded, turned into the later system of ranked scripture-registers across the several centuries in between, I don’t know. The accounts I have read contradict each other and I have not worked it out.
The generation character hangs on the same line. Mine is Shan, the character sitting in my given name and a slot in the genealogy. You cannot award it to yourself.
About my own transmission I will write one thing. In 2014 Faleidaoren began looking me over, and in 2016 he brought me into the tradition. What came after that I have never put online and do not intend to.
Why this is Zhengyi’s trade
Quanzhen’s centre is inner alchemy. Zhengyi’s own work is filing petitions for people, running the rites, dealing with the spirits, and it is handed down through register ordination. The difference between the schools, registers against precepts, and what a generation character is, I set out in the piece on why a Daoist priest can marry and eat meat.
The one bought online
Back to the second email.
I can’t tell.
There is paper in the photograph and there is writing on it. I don’t know who wrote it, whether anything was done beforehand, or who it was written for. Those are the parts that make a fu a fu and not one of them photographs. That’s not a brush-off.
I am also not going to tell you the seller is a fraud. Some work carefully, the paper and the sequence and the timing all attended to. Others make craft objects and label them as such. The large middle ground I have no information about, so I won’t hold forth on it. What I will state is my own rule: I promise no effect from a fu, and that covers the ones I write myself.
One thing I will be blunt about. People burn a fu and drink the ash in water. Cinnabar is mercury sulphide, most of what is sold online as cinnabar is a substitute pigment, and whether the contents are declared is up to whoever is selling. See a doctor about your body. Anything touching illness, the law or money goes to a doctor, a lawyer or a licensed adviser, and this trade cannot cover it.
If the trouble is the house rather than your body, that is layout and circulation; I wrote about it in the piece on pixiu and gourds.
As far as this goes
What’s public is the frame: where fu came from, how one is put together, where it sits in this school. The rest stays off the page because putting it there ends the only way it travels.
If you want to learn it, find someone willing to take you and start at the beginning. In Australia that is not easy to arrange. I know.