Ge Xuan

Accounts place Ge Xuan in the Wu region during the Three Kingdoms period and associate him with Zuo Ci as teacher and Zheng Yin as a later recipient. The book titles named in this chain matter for studying how Daoist writers represented the custody of early alchemical knowledge. The chain is recorded in later texts; each link should be assessed as a tradition of transmission, not assumed to be documented by contemporary contracts or surviving personal manuscripts.

Mount Gezao became part of Ge Xuan's religious geography, and tales of abstention, talismans, and extraordinary ability expanded his reputation. In the Song, honorifics dated 1104 and 1243 gave official shape to a figure already revered as Ge Xiangong. Such later recognition is evidence of his reception, not proof that miracle stories happened in the third century. This account distinguishes the person, the book-transmission tradition, and later devotion, without providing external-alchemy methods, ingestion advice, or claims of safe efficacy.

Ge Xuan was a figure associated with religious and alchemical traditions of the Three Kingdoms period. Later Daoists revered him as Ge Xiangong and as a patriarch connected with Lingbao traditions and Mount Gezao.

The source identifies him as a native of Jurong in Danyang, with the courtesy name Xiaoxian, and as an older relative of Ge Hong. The two should not be confused: Ge Xuan belongs to the earlier transmission remembered in accounts of Ge Hong's religious inheritance.

Accounts connect his learning with Zuo Ci and describe the passing of alchemical teachings to Zheng Yin. This sequence concerns transmitted authority as well as personal relationships. It provides a way to understand how later practitioners located their teachings within an ancestral line.

Mount Gezao in Jiangxi is a principal place associated with his religious career and later veneration. Lingbao practitioners honoured him as a patriarch, but this attribution should not collapse the development of later Lingbao institutions into the lifetime of a single early figure.

Sacred biographies describe extraordinary abilities and an ascent to the divine realm, while later imperial honours extended his public religious standing. The source disagrees on the date of one Southern Song honour. The distinction between an early figure, his sacred biography and his later titles is more useful than forcing those accounts into one seamless chronology.