762 Li Bai died. The banished immortal Li Bai died an ordinary death, probably because of his excessive drinking and illness. Rather anticlimatic for a person as fabled and excentric as Li Bai. It is believed that he fell into a river while reaching for the reflection of the moon while also beeing intoxicated. No wonder that many legends arose surrounding his death. Li Bai becomes a popluar figure for Folk Lore and Taoist legends. One of those legends is „the Aquatic Metamorphosis“. It says that Li Bai wanted to reach for the moons reflection in the water, when he touched the water however he transformed and performed an aquatic metamorphosis and thus becoming immortal. Because he released his spirit into the river and than ascending on an …show more content…
Handling the moon playfully, he fell over. He must not have fallen suddenly intto the hungry dragon‘s mouth. Insteat, he must have ascended to heaven astride a leviathan. Those who embraced this legend of Li Bai, used „the language of immortality“ to show their admiration for Li Bai‘s talents, but maybe not believe that he actually transcended. Furthermore those poems were used for entertainment and not necesseraliy to serve a religious Taoist point of view. Those who actually believed that Li Bai transcended, especially Taoist hagiographers, used the term shijie (尸解) to explain his transcendends. Shijie means to leave the world behind and leave a trace, the spirit ascends to the spirit realm but the body was not refined enough. Its an act of metamorphosis, in Li Bai‘s case it was a shuijie (水解 ) transcendence, which works in a similar way just it happens inside a body of water. This is further elaborated by Du Fu in his Collected Remnants: Seeing the moon reflected in the water, Taibai [said], „I will enter this very day to grasp the moon“. Despite efforts to retrieve his corpse in the water [shuijie]; this is something done by spirits and immortals.