Miaohua Rock

Miaohua Rock is located on the mountainside of Xiaoyao Peak, one kilometer west of the Golden Summit of Wudang Mountain and the Qingwei Palace. Although few people have visited this place, it holds a significant position in the history of Wudang Taoism. During the Yuan Dynasty, there were already Taoist buildings here. In the tenth year of Yongle in the Ming Dynasty, a rock temple was rebuilt on the original site. Miaohua Rock has a very serene and elegant environment, with thick shade of trees and the singing of birds and the fragrance of flowers. It is also known as Miaohua Rock. After arriving here, Wang Shizhen, a great literary figure of the Ming Dynasty, composed a poem in praise: "Liu Zhu, a girl dressed in celestial robes, is obsessed with scattering and never returns." I sleep by the rock, drunk and dewy, covered in a drizzling rain of flowers. Around the 8th century AD, there were hermits practicing here. By the 12th century, there were reliable records confirming that Huang Shunshen, the 10th generation successor of the Qingwei School, taught his eminent student Ye Yunlai here. Ye Yunlai also passed on the wonderful Dharma here with his heart and hand, and taught hundreds of disciples, making the Wudang Qingwei School one of the important schools of Taoism at that time. Miaohua Rock also has another common name, which is "Oil tank". That is because there is a stone pit inside the Rock Temple. Legend has it that during the great renovation of Wudang in the Ming Dynasty, the stone pit kept gushed out oil, which was inexhaustible and made cooking oil no longer a problem for the 300,000 soldiers and civilians involved in the great renovation of Wudang. Later, people gradually forgot its original name and casually called it "oil tank".