"Prefatory note": this chapter contains extensive background and ritual descriptions. Readers who are not interested may skip it. The main text follows.
Ming year 490, the ninth day of the ninth month, the Double Ninth Festival.
The ninth month, ninth day, ninth hour: three nines marked the utmost yang, three yang ushered in prosperity-auspiciousness upon auspiciousness. Favorable for presenting memorials, receiving investiture, sculpting and painting sacred images, ritual offerings, consecration, praying for offspring, and cutting cloth for garments. In Xunzhou Prefecture, Eight Gui, people packed together like mountains and seas.
Five years earlier, this place had still been called the Dayao Mountain Main Headquarters, the Southern School's heartland and the lair of the Green-Robed Ancestor. But the Southern School's Main Headquarters followed its ancestor and changed locations very quickly. At first it had been on Ma Xiong Mountain, Ancestor Haha's place of cultivation. Later, Green Robe took up the Southern School's banner and established the Main Headquarters on Hundred Barbarian Mountain, then moved it to Rotten Peach Mountain. Before long, he moved it again to Dayao Mountain. By now, he had fled overseas, and the Southern School essentially existed in name only.
After the Grand Master drove out Green Robe and reclaimed the Southern Wastes, he renamed the "Southern Wastes" "Eight Gui," dividing it into two prefectures and five commanderies, seven separately governed territories. Northwestern Gui, west of the Red Water River and centered on Baise Mountain, was called "Baise Commandery." Baise Mountain might sound unfamiliar, but mention its former name, Hundred Barbarian Mountain, and everyone would know it. After the Grand Master achieved union with the Dao here in Ming year 485, he renamed the mountain Baise, replacing "barbarian" with "colors" to evoke a hundred brilliant hues.
Northeastern Gui, east of the Peach Blossom River, was called "Guilin Commandery"-Osmanthus