Feilian () or () is a Chinese wind spirit from a southern tradition, later identified with and subsumed under the primary wind deity Fengbo. Feilian has also been identified with a late Shang dynasty minister as well as with the mythical phoenix bird, and retained a separate identity as a mythical creature after losing its status as master of the wind.
Concept
Southern origin
Feilian is first attested in the influential poem Li sao by Qu Yuan, wherein Feilian assists the poet in part of his mystical journey. This work comes from Chu, a Zhou dynasty state which was on the periphery of the Zhou cultural sphere, and is typically dated to the 300s or 200s . Wang Yi, who collated and annotated the transmitted Chu ci collection centuries later, annotates this mention of Feilian with the text "Feilian is Fengbo", which demonstrates that the various wind spirits were already being systematised under a single identity. Wang Yi goes on to explain that in order to ride a dragon through the clouds as the Li sao narrator does, one must borrow the strength of "jifeng" (). This term jifeng acts as a gloss for Feilian in the Shiji. According to Deng Xiaohua (), fēilián (Old Chinese: ZS *pɯl-ɡ·rem; B&S *Cə.pə[r]*(k-)[r]em), might be a dialectal variant of (OC: ZS *plum; B&S *prəm) "wind". This same relationship was explored by Tôdô in 1959. Sun Zuoyun's () influential 1943 study of Feilian argues that the term feilian was an alternative written representation of the sound in Old Chinese that was the pronunciation of . Feilian appears twice more in the Chu ci collection: once in Jiu bian and once in Yuan you, each time as a helpful spirit assisting the narrator.
Evolution
Early Chinese wind spirits were many. The Shang had the masters of the four directions, an eastern tradition had the naturalistic "Great Wind" (), another tradition considered the winnowing basket constellation (箕星, comprising four stars in Sagittarius) as the controller of the winds, the south had Feilian, and theorists have speculated that a number of named mythical birds from early Chinese culture – including the phoenix and the great peng bird () of the Zhuangzi – should be considered originally to have been wind spirits. The Zhou culture had two competing wind spirits: Fengshi and Fengbo, the latter of whom would end up subsuming all these traditions, and lives on in the Taoist pantheon as Fang Daozhang ().
In Feilian's identity as Fengbo, he carries wind with him in a bag and stirs up trouble. Feilian is kept in check by Houyi, the heavenly archer and Shang legendary culture hero. Feilian has become attached to the later mythology of the Yellow Emperor, against whom he contended under the leadership of Chiyou.
Before consolidation into the Fengbo entity, Feilian was also thought to be able to grant immortality. Emperor Wu of Han (141–87 ) believed this sufficiently to order the construction of several buildings dedicated to Feilian worship in pursuit of this gift of eternal life. In the Huainanzi, Feilian is mentioned as a creature one can ride astride into the world of spirits where nothing perishes.
As an individual
In histories of the consolidation of the Zhou conquest of Shang, the Duke of Zhou pursued Shang king Di Xin's minister Feilian to the seacoast and killed him there. This episode is narrated in the Mengzi as well as the excavated text Xinian, part of the Qinghua University bamboo slips collection, a product of Chu provisionally dated around 370 . According to the Shiji, which carries a not dissimilar account, Feilian's descendants would later found the state of Qin. Various theories have attempted to explain how the name Feilian was attached both to an individual minister at the end of the Shang dynasty and a Chu cultural wind spirit.
Form
Modern English language sources state Feilian is a winged dragon with the head of a deer and the tail of a snake. Hawkes states Feilian is commonly depicted as a winged deer, but it can encompass a multiplicity of different winged creatures.