Daoism

This study surveys the introduction of astrology into East Asia with a primary focus on the Buddhist experience of Indian and Iranian astrology during the eighth and ninth centuries. It is argued that prior to the introduction of Esoteric Buddhism during the 8th century, the Chinese sangha had no pressing need to observe astrology. However, following the rising popularity of Tantric rituals, which require proper timing according to non-Chinese astrological conventions, Chinese Buddhism took a deep interest in astrology. This in turn prompted a wider interest in astrology among Chinese elites, encouraging the translation of more foreign works on astrology, even outside of a Buddhist context. It is shown that around the year 800 there was a shift from Indian to Iranian sources of astrology, most likely as a result of ethnic Iranians working at court. Iranian astrology, which included a rich system of horoscopy rooted in the earlier Hellenistic tradition, prompted a booming popular interest in astrology. Buddhists subsequently took up practice of horoscopy for themselves. Chinese Buddhist astrology was then exported to neighboring countries, most notably Japan where it influenced medieval religious and court cultures.

This paper surveys some of the main features of the view of the human body in Daoist Internal Alchemy (Neidan 內丹). The first sections discuss three different terms that refer to the body; the metaphors — cosmological, political, theological, natural, and alchemical — used to describe it; and the use of the body as a support for the system of correspondences that tie the human being to the cosmos. On this background, the development of Internal Alchemy is closely related to earlier Daoist meditation practices on the inner gods. The figure of the Red Child (the innermost deity of the human being), in particular, bears close analogies to the 􏰀"embryo"􏰁 that alchemists generate through their practices􏰃 The final sections are concerned with the two main alchemical charts of the human body and with the use of the Buddhist concept of 􏰀dharma-body (fashen 法身)􏰄􏰁 which some Neidan masters describe as the true immortal body.

Daoist hagiographic works depict the so-called "immortals" (xianren) as extraordinary human beings endowed with several powers, the most important of which is the ability to reach a life span of indefinite length with their ordinary bodies. When we look at other sources belonging to the traditions that evolved during the history of Daoism, a different picture emerges. These sources show that adepts make use of the physical body in order to generate a new person (shen) that is not subject to death.

Among others, early Daoist works (ca. 2nd-6th centuries) describe two main ways to attain immortality. The first is by going through a "simulated death" followed by the refining of the physical body, which then serves as a support for adepts to continue their practices. The second way consists in generating an inner "embryo" that is unaffected by death, and is the seed of one's rebirth as an immortal.

Internal Alchemy (Neidan), which developed from ca. 700, inherited elements of both practices. The refining of the basic components of one's own person results in the generation, gestation, and delivery of an embryo. In certain traditions, the embryo is seen as one's "dharma-body" (fashen), the unmanifested body of Buddhahood, which is free of birth and death. Despite the differences of perspective, here again the ordinary body is seen a support used to generate the immortal body.

"Under an allusive poetical language and thick layers of images and symbols, The Seal of the Unity of the Three (Cantong qi) hides the exposition of the teachings that gave birth to Taoist Internal Alchemy, or Neidan.
          Traditionally attributed to Wei Boyang and dated to about 150 CE, The Seal of the Unity of the Three is concerned with three major subjects — Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), and Alchemy — and joins them to one another into a unique doctrine. The charm of its verses, the depth of its discourse, and its enigmatic language inspired a large number of commentaries and other works, and attracted the attention not only of Taoist masters and adepts, but also of philosophers, cosmologists, and poets.
          In addition to a complete translation, this book contains a detailed introduction to the history and the teachings of The Seal of the Unity of the Three, explanations of each of its sections, and notes on its verses. Also included are several tables and pictures, an index of main subjects, and the complete Chinese text."

"In this dissertation, interdisciplinary research demonstrates how Chinese people affiliated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960- 1279 CE) utilized artistic, literary and visual representations to merge the natural world with the human body. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, architectural developments of Neo- Confucian scholars, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. Traditionally, scholarship within the field of religious studies relies heavily upon textual sources, and material objects are often seen as accessory to the findings related to these sources. When found within the context of religion, art objects are in this same vein often described as representational as opposed to foundational of religious experience or its aspects.

This thesis asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. As the dissertation will show, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.

This thesis also examines sacred space of the Song period, theorizing that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. In essence, Song representations of mountains, landscape and other natural formations act as material records of how people visualized their own bodies in microcosmic and macrocosmic form."

"Originally written for Chinese readers, this book provides a clear description of the Taoist practice of Internal Alchemy, or Neidan. The author outlines the stages of the alchemical practice and clarifies several relevant terms and notions, including Essence, Breath, and Spirit; the Cinnabar Fields; the "Fire Times"; and the Embryo. The book is based on the system of the Wuzhen pian (Awakening to Reality), one of the main sources of Internal Alchemy, and contains about two hundred quotations from original Taoist texts.

Wang Mu (1908-92) received the Longmen ordination in his youth. He taught Internal Alchemy (Neidan) and was held in high regard by both Taoist practitioners and scholars. He served as a board member of the China Taoist Association and was for some time in charge of its research activities. He is known outside China mainly for his annotated edition of the Wuzhen pian (Awakening to Reality), the text at the basis of the outline of Internal Alchemy that he provides in the present book.

Originally published as "Wuzhen pian danfa yaozhi" 「悟真篇」丹法要旨"

This bibliography is mainly addressed to students of my courses on Daoism. The earliest version dates from 1998. From time to time I update it, adding new materials and omitting a few of the older ones. The present version contains works dating to 2016.

The current study is the transcription of a lecture given to the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) in 2011. The transcript was prepared and edited by Aranyelixír Kiadó (Budapest, Hungary), revised, supplemented and approved by Louis Komjathy in September 2014.

Table of Contents:

Salutation

Introduction
- Approaches to the Study of Contemplative Practice
- A Religious Studies Approach
- Dimensions of Contemplative Practice
- Understanding Daoism (Taoism)

Major Types of Daoist Meditation
- Historical Periods and Sources of Daoist Meditation.
- Apophatic Meditation
- Visualization
- Ingestion
- Inner Observation
- Internal Alchemy

Conclusions

Questions and Answers

Introduction: The most common association we as modern people have with the word " alchemy " is probably the image of our medieval ancestors in a smoky dungeon struggling to transform lead into gold. Certainly this aspect (called ​ chrysopoeia ​) has been a significant part of all traditions of alchemy, but probably an overemphasized one. Alchemy was primarily the (pre)scientific discipline of transmuting substances into one another, and was therefore based (in the European traditions) upon an Aristotelian worldview where the four elements constituted all substances, meaning these could be transmuted if one only knew how. The form of alchemy I would like to explore in this paper however is an internal one, and is based on a different worldview altogether. The Chinese tradition of internal alchemy (​ neidan ​) was preserved largely within the indigenous tradition of Daoism, which I will explicate in the first chapter. For starters the question I would like to pose is the following. ​ To what extent does the cosmological view of the body differ between the (first stage of) internal alchemy practice of the Longmen tradition and that of the Zhengyi Dao tradition?​ For the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the first stage of the practice of internal alchemy, also because this first stage reveals the most about the implicit worldview of this alchemical tradition, specifically about what the human body is, and how it relates to nature. In order to narrow the subject down even more I have chosen two modern exponents of internal alchemy, each coming from their own tradition, so this discussion stays relevant to the emergence of modern western spirituality as it draws from eastern traditions such as Daoism. First I will establish a base in Chinese/Daoist cosmology or worldview, and then the different " bodies " that this cosmology distinguishes, namely cosmic, national, social, and personal. The personal body being the place where internal alchemy occurs. Then I will look at these two traditions, and their interpretation of the process, to see to what extent these differ in view and method.

""This paper examines convergent discourses of cure, health and transcendence in fourth century Daoist scriptures. The therapeutic massages, inner awareness and visualisation practices described here are from a collection of revelations which became the founding documents for Shangqing (Upper Clarity) Daoism, one of the most influential sects of its time. Although formal theories organised these practices so that salvation superseded curing, in practice they were used together. This blending was achieved through a series of textual features and synæsthesic practices intended to address existential and bodily crises simultaneously. This paper shows how therapeutic interests were fundamental to soteriology, and how salvation informed therapy, thus drawing attention to the entanglements of religion and medicine in early medieval China.""

"This book contains four essays on Internal Alchemy by Isabelle Robinet, originally published in French and translated here for the first time into English. The essays are concerned with the alchemical principle of "inversion"; the devices used by the alchemists to "give form to the Formless by the word, and thus manifest the authentic and absolute Dao"; the symbolic function of numbers in Taoism and in Internal Alchemy; and the original meanings of the terms "External Elixir" (waidan) and "Internal Elixir" (neidan).

Isabelle Robinet (1932-2000) was one of the most important Western scholars of Taoism. Her work dealt with several major topics: the Laozi and the Zhuangzi with their commentaries; the Shangqing (Highest Clarity) school of Taoism; Neidan (Internal Alchemy); and Taoist thought and cosmology. Her publications in English include Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity (1993) and Taoism: Growth of a Religion (1997)."

Part 1: The oldest Daoist seals appear in the Eastern Han dynasty, growing in importance and complexity throughout the middle ages. In particular, the so-called Yue Seal had an enduring reputation in Daoist healing and exorcism, its transmission , reproduction, and transformation ranging from the Han to the Tang and Song. The preferred materials for Daoist seal-making were first stone and metal, and later wood notably wood struck by lightning. Various ritual rules applied to carving, including selecting auspicious dates and properly venerating and placing the seal.

Part 2: This second part of the study of Daoist seals focuses on types, building on Wang Yucheng’s earlier studies. They come in four: 1) seal script; 2) heavenly scripts; 3) talisman-inspired; and 4) graphic. The underlining criterion is the Daoist strategy of image-making: it sheds light on the interlocking relationship of Daoist texts and images. The first type is purely script-based, while the fourth is purely graphic. Between the two is the core zone of Daoist visual culture as it blends image with text.

This study explores the introduction and development of foreign systems of astrology in medieval China (Tang to Ming periods), in particular the practice of horoscopy, and how such models were implemented within a Chinese astronomical framework. It is argued that the basic character of such horoscopy was in large part Dorothean, rather than Ptolemaic. It is furthermore demonstrated that Chinese horoscopy was as much an heir to Persian systems of horoscopy as was the Islamicate, a point that has yet to be recognized. The paper also demonstrates the enduring impact of horoscopy within the culture of Chinese divination.

“The Sinicization of Indo-Iranian Astrology in Medieval China.” Sino-Platonic Papers 282 (2018): 1–95.

Chan 禪Buddhism’s rise to popularity in the Song dynasty produced far-reaching effects within Chinese religious culture. This paper examines the ways in which doctrinal, literary, and mythological elements, drawn from Chan sources, were utilized
within literary works associated with internal alchemy (neidan 內丹), a form of Daoist self-cultivation that emerged in the late Tang and became increasingly widespread during the Song. I examine the works of the influential neidan practitioner Zhang Boduan 張伯端, who wrote favorably of Chan Buddhism and incorporated elements of its practice within his own tradition. Following this, I turn to an analysis of the writings of other authors and commentators within Zhang’s tradition. These authors held more critical views of Chan and of Buddhism in general; drawing upon long-standing polemical arguments, they attempted to present Chan as an inferior form of Daoist practice and claimed that well-known Chan practitioners were, in fact, engaged in neidan practice. With this study, I hope to contribute to the growing body of scholarship focused on the analysis of Buddho-Daoist relations and polemics in the Song period.

This study examines the planetary icons found in East Asian art, arguing that they should be divided into three sets: Indian, zoomorphic and Iranian-Mesopotamian. It is demonstrated that the Indian icons are earlier representations of the navagraha directly from India. The latter two are identified as coming from an Iranian source. The Iranian-Mesopotamian icons are further discussed in relation to parallels found in the Picatrix, the Latin translation of an Arabic manual of astral magic. The roles of these icons within the magical traditions of Buddhism and Daoism are identified. It is proven that such astral magic was also imported from Near Eastern sources.

This article provides an analysis of the problematic of foresight in traditional Chinese thought, articulating it with current developments in the epistemology of futures studies, planning theory, and strategic management. It is argued that in Chinese thought the answer to the question " Can the future be predicted? " depends on the forecasting horizon: whereas the immediate future can be sensed and taken advantage of by immersing oneself in the evolving situation, the remote future is fundamentally unpredictable. These dual answers are entrenched in discussions of what constitutes wisdom, opening up productive spaces of encounter between the problematic of foresight and the problematic of wisdom. https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.2018.22(3).00A35

In Chinese martial arts circles, differences of interpretation concerning the origins of the art of taiji quan are not new. In fact, they are at the heart of a century-old debate that generally divides scholars and practitioners. Chinese myths and legends have been in great part adopted by Western practitioners. The aim of this article is to analyze how was construed in the second half of the 20th century a complex rhetoric trying to convince Western readers of taiji quan books that their practice has an ancient Daoist origin.
A version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Chinese Martial Arts, Spring 2013, pp. 46-52. See www.cmajournal.com

Freedom from disease, physiological signs of well- being, and avoidance
of death appear as consistent themes in many writings from preimperial
and imperial China, but there were no direct analogues to a
conceptual category like the English term “health.” These themes do
not appear under a universally consistent term or bounded theoretical
formulation. Instead they appear as common technical terms or
practical foci across different literary genres. Chinese writers refer to
material forces like breath (qi 氣), the force of life (sheng 生), and inner
nature (xing 性), which are cultivated or nourished (yang 養) in the
body, to lengthen one’s life (ming 命). Engagement with health was as
a quantitative object that could be stored in the body, as a processual
goal rather than a conceptual object. While the term “nourishing life”
(yangsheng 養生) only came to refer to a common, recognizable set of
practices after the first century CE, the practices and goals themselves
were understood to be coherent in sources as early as 400 BCE.
In this chapter I argue that three major periods of writing in preand
early imperial China produced dominant modes of writing on
bodily ideals that have continued until the present day. These writings
include philosophical works, self- cultivation manuals, canonical medical
writings, transcendence writings, and formal Daoist texts.

We have been lied to about what real Pythagorean harmonics alchemy is. The lie started with Philolaus who wrote a book, even though he was not a real practitioner of the Pythagorean training, requiring five years of silence meditation as incubation. The lies in this book were then spread by Plato and Archytas and powerful lies they were! They created Western civilization which has enabled very fancy materialistic technology, at great expense to ecology and social justice around the world. Aristotle critiqued the lies spread by Plato but Aristotle did not know the real truth of Pythagorean philosophy. By then, as Dr. Peter Kingsley has pointed out, it was too late.

In fact the secret of Pythagorean alchemy was known in ancient Egypt since 2/3 was the sacred fraction there, as well as in ancient Sumeria and ancient Dravidian culture and ancient Chinese culture – going back to the original human culture, the San Bushmen from at least 70,000 years ago! Just as Pythagoras means "snake-master" so too did the San Bushmen teach that N/om as snake energy is sacred and the ancient Greeks knew this was the reproductive life force energy that is ionized into the cerebrospinal fluid. For example ejaculation is mainly lecithin and lecithin is what myelinates the neurons so that more electromagnetic charge can be stored up in the body.

And so the One was also known as the Counter-Fire that exists in the Underworld and as the pan pipes blow this creates the One as the Fire and light of the Universe. So the Pan Pipes were the original Harmonia "breathing" that feeds the spirit light energy. Or in other words the secret, as Empedocles taught, is to visualize the fire underneath the water in the body – to reverse the Tetraktys based on the complementary opposites of the Perfect Fifth and Perfect Fourth – so that more Air or Aion energy (ionized Snake kundalini) energy is created, called Qi or Prana by the ancients in China and India.

Mysticism and quietistic self-cultivation practices have long been associated with the classical Daoist texts of Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi 莊子. The concern with longevity has primarily been associated with the figure of Laozi and the religion that deified him. In the 19th and first three quarters of the 20th centuries, Western scholars regularly described Laozi and Zhuangzi as mystics or quietists. In the past thirty years, however, these texts have been analyzed and interpreted more for their philosophy than for their religious practices or a broader holistic understanding of the spiritual and philosophical content. My hope is to give both the philosophical and religious or spiritual aspects their due.

This second part of the study of Daoist seals focuses on types, building on Wang Yucheng’s earlier studies. They come in four: 1) seal script; 2) heavenly scripts; 3) talisman-inspired; and 4) graphic. The underlining criterion is the Daoist strategy of image-making: it sheds light on the interlocking relationship of Daoist texts and images. The first type is purely script-based, while the fourth is purely graphic. Between the two is the core zone of Daoist visual culture as it blends image with text.

This anthology presents complete or partial translations of sixteen important works belonging to the Taoist tradition of Neidan, or Internal Alchemy. While the selections are far from covering the whole field of Neidan—a virtually impossible task, given its width and variety—they are representative of its main lineages and branches. Texts have been selected in this perspective and are arranged chronologically, in order to provide an overview not only of Neidan, but also of the history of its discourses and practices. Four of the sixteen texts are integrally translated. Six texts and two commentaries are translated here (entirely or partially) for the first time into English. The book is concluded by several tables and by an index of the main terms.

The Cantong qi is the main text of Taoist Internal Alchemy (Neidan). In addition to Taoist masters and adepts, it has also attracted the attention of philosophers, cosmologists, poets, literati, calligraphers, philologists, and bibliophiles. Thirty-eight commentaries written through the end of the nineteenth century are extant, and dozens of texts found in the Taoist Canon and elsewhere are related to it. The present book is the most complete guide to this vast literature available in any language.
          The book is divided into two main parts. Part 1 contains a catalogue of extant and lost commentaries, essays, and related texts, listing altogether about 150 works with systematic details on their authors, editions, and reprints. Part 2 contains a survey of the textual tradition of the Cantong qi, focused on the composition and contents of about 40 major texts. A final index of authors, editors, titles, and editions facilitates the use of the book.""

Awakening to Reality (Wuzhen pian) is one of the most important and best-known Taoist alchemical texts. Written in the eleventh century, it describes in a poetical form, and in a typically cryptic and allusive language, several facets of Neidan, or internal alchemy. This book presents the first part of the text, consisting of sixteen poems, which contain a concise but comprehensive exposition of Neidan. In addition to notes that intend to clarify the meaning of the more obscure points, the book also contains selections from a commentary dating from the late eighteenth century, which is distinguished by the use of a lucid and plain language.

It was C.G. Jung who first mentioned the idea of a more universal aspect of sexuality. In his work AION  he criticized the purely concretist interpretation of the term sexuality by Sigmund Freud. He was convinced that the Gnostics, who looked for the “procreative nature of the Whole in the procreative seed”, did not mean just biological sexuality, because they still knew the deep truth that “man’s procreative power is only a special instance of the ‘procreative nature of the Whole’.” It is the intention of this book to look behind the Freudian concretist view and give a new interpretation of the alchemical text Rosarium Philosophorum with its main content of the coniunctio, the sexual intercourse of God and the Goddess for the sake of new creation and incarnation. This way, we can understand the phenomenology of the alchemical Holy Wedding, coniunctio or hierosgamos on a deeper, archetypal or even psychophysical level. In the images of the Rosarium one recognizes the pattern of a creation myth, wherein in contrast to most other archaic myths, man is included as a responsibly acting co-creator.

Fulltext pdf for download with permission of the publisher. Available in print at  www.threepinespress.com and Lulu.com.
This monograph presents Twofold Mystery Teaching (chongxuanxue), its historical context, major representatives and texts, its philosophy, including cosmogony, epistemology, salvation and the pantheon. Developing in a context of intense interaction and debate between Daoists and Buddhists, Twofold Mystery integrates many originally Buddhist concepts into a Daoist theory of salvation based on, yet going beyond, the Daode jing. Heir to the philosophical tradition of Dark Learning (xuanxue) as well as to Daoist schools of the Six Dynasties, Twofold Mystery is a key to understandng medieval Daoist thought.

This essay is part of my series exploring the validity of the existence of “Classical Daoism” or Daojia 道家, “(Early) Daoism.” “Wuwei” is commonly taken to be a Daoist concept. My treatment of Wuwei differs from Edward Slingerland’s metaphorical interpretation of the term and focuses less on the psychological perspective that discerns notions of purposeless or effortlessness in wuwei and more on the wisdom of restraint and non-interference.

At the end of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Daoist inner alchemy had a significant influence on the medical theories of some of the most prominent scholar physicians in Jiangnan China. In this article, I zoom in on Zhang Jiebin’s (1563–1640) commentary on the Huangdi neijing (Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor), the foundational text of Chinese medicine. In the first chapter of this text, four exemplary types of human beings are described. I analyse how Zhang Jiebin elaborates on one of them, the Authentic Person (zhenren). Abundantly referring to inner alchemical sources, his focus is on the essential constituents of the body: essence (jing), qi, and spirit (shen). I further show how Zhang emphasizes strong connec- tions between medicine and inner alchemy in a discussion on concrete practices, which could not only dispel disorders but also lead to the Daoist ideal of becoming a zhenren.

This essay new explores cosmogony and cosmology in early China. Cosmogony refers to the creation or origin of the universe and cosmology to how the universe operates. We find that texts now labeled as Daoist – the Laozi and Zhuangzi, for example – appear to be among the first to write about it, often in terms of Dao 道.