The healer of Julu who styled himself Great Excellent Teacher, da xianliang shi, and served the way of the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, later called the way of Great Peace. Ten-odd years of charmed water and confession made him head of an enrolled empire inside the empire; he died of sickness before it was broken.
The Blue Heavens are spent, the Yellow Heavens rise: in the year jiazi, great fortune under all Heaven.the word written in white earth on the gates of the temples and provincial offices before the rising of 184 CE, the movement's own proclamation as the histories record it; Hou Han shu, Memoir of Huangfu Song, relayed in the Zizhi Tongjian
Appears in
Relations
- Ma Yuanyi colleagues — His grand-officer for the south, whom he sent to Luoyang with the money that bought two men at the emperor's elbow.
- Huangfu Song enemies — The general who broke the movement: his coffin was opened after a sickness had killed him and his head sent south to the capital.
Myth vs record
A sorcerer with magic and yellow earth, who raised an army of starving peasants overnight and founded organised Taoism.
He was a healer with a twelve-year start. The record gives him the way called Great Peace, water given a talisman and a recited formula, and one rule the sick had to keep first: kneel and put your faults on the record. Cures got told about, disciples went out in all directions, and eight provinces were enrolled into thirty-six battalions with appointed generals and an appointed day — an organisation, not an outbreak, and nothing in the record makes 184 a famine year. The religious line he is mistaken for, the Heavenly Masters of Hanzhong, is another family's and another book's; the Classic of Great Peace is never connected to him by the official histories.