A ragged monk's robe, an old palm-leaf fan, and a jug of aged wine: this madcap figure, wandering the streets of the Southern Song, has been talked about across China for eight hundred years. He was a successor of the Yangqi lineage, the fiftieth patriarch of Chan Buddhism, yet he loved wine and meat and flouted monastic rules, earning the nickname “Ji the Eccentric.” He was Li Xiuyuan, the orphan of an official family, yet he abandoned the prospect of worldly success and found his true nature amid the morning bells and evening drums of Lingyin Temple. From a young scholar beside the Red Creek in Tiantai to a record-keeping monk who gave himself up to solicit alms at Jingci Temple, from a healer who cured the people's long-standing ailments to a wandering hero who stood against the powerful, Ji Gong's life was itself a legend spanning both the monastic and secular worlds.
1 - Sounds good, sounds good, sounds good