Li Tieguai(李鐵拐)
In the Lotus Prince Chronicles
Li Tieguai is at the dining-hall table in Ch6 of Jackie Vs. AI, leaning the iron crutch against the chair beside him. Jackie notices the crutch first — heavy, dark, with a foot worn smooth — and the gourd second, hung at the hip on a frayed cord. Li Tieguai's beard is black and his right leg does not bend. When he stands to speak, he stands slowly. He tells Jackie that the body the soul comes back into is rarely the body the soul left, and that this is how it usually works for everyone, mortal or otherwise — only the immortals are honest about it. Jackie does not know what to do with this. He thinks of his glasses, which are taped at the bridge.
Li Tieguai uncorks the gourd once during the meeting. A small smell of ginger and something darker rises into the room. He does not pour anything out. He says only that the medicine is for whoever is asking, and that Anna, when she is found, will need a different kind of medicine than Jackie thinks. The gourd is corked again. Later, in Ch23 of Anna Vs. AI, when the body refuses what it had been holding — the rainbow vomit on the daycare floor — there is a smell of ginger in the room that the staff cannot place. Li Tieguai is not on screen. He does not need to be.
Backstory
Li Tieguai is the oldest, in some traditions, of the Eight Immortals, with stories going back at least to the Tang dynasty and consolidated in Yuan-dynasty drama and the late-Ming Investiture of the Gods (封神演義). The famous origin tale: Li was a handsome young Daoist adept who could send his soul out of his body to wander the heavens. He instructed his disciple to guard the empty body for seven days; on the sixth day the disciple was called away to a dying parent, and burned the body assuming Li would not return. When the soul came back, the only nearby corpse was a beggar with one withered leg. Li entered it, and Lord Lao Tzu gave him the iron crutch and the medicine gourd. He has limped through Chinese hagiography ever since.
Patronage of the sick, the disabled, and the apothecary trade follows from this. Li Tieguai is the immortal who teaches that the body the soul ends up in is not necessarily the body the soul deserves, and that this is not, in itself, a tragedy — what is in the gourd is for whoever asks.
Key Ideas
The body as second-best vessel. Li Tieguai's beggar body is not the one his soul started in — a Daoist parable that the body is a vehicle, not an identity, and that vehicles get swapped.
The gourd that does not run out. The medicine in Li Tieguai's gourd is for whoever is asking; the supply is not the question, the asking is — a parable about who allows themselves to need help.
Patron of the sick. Li Tieguai stands for everyone the able-bodied world treats as second-class — the disabled, the chronically ill, the addicts. The crutch is iron because it has had to be.
The smell of ginger. Across the four books, the smell of ginger appears in rooms where someone is being healed without quite knowing it — Li Tieguai's signature, uncorked at the right moment.
Further Reading
- Li Tieguai — Wikipedia
- Eight Immortals — Wikipedia
- Xu Zhonglin (attr.), Investiture of the Gods (封神演義), 16th c.