Inner Alchemy

The aim on Inner Taoist Alchemy was to sublimate the inner potentiality, the cosmic energies residing within the body to attain immortality. In a famous Chinese play,”Lu-tsu chih”, the Chung-li Ch’uan, a famous Immortal teaches the neidan instead of revealing the art of making gold as”everything that has been transformed one day returns to its origin. Alchemical gold turns back into stone after several thousand years”. For the Taoist alchemy practitioner, the elixir of immortality is found within himself and the phases of alchemical transformation materialize through ascetic and meditational practices.

Ancient texts such as “The Book of the Center” and the “Book of the Yellow Court” give instructions often using alchemical language, about how the body of the Tao goes through successive transformations until the yin “embraces” the yang and the harmony of energies realizes their union:”I transform my body, passing through death to live again…I die and am reborn, and each time I have a [new] body”.⁶ Death is used in the alchemical texts as a symbol of the passage between different states of consciousness, and at the opposite side, birth is the metaphor of the “Wholeness of chaos and the birth of man” when the yin and yang energies “procreate”. During the gestation period, the practitioner goes through the nine stages of “pregnancy” and accordingly, through the nine dietary regimes, when “essentially the adept becomes what he eats”.⁷ The dietary restrictions involved the guiding of qi, the life generating, celestial energy, through austere, self disciplined fasting techniques which would ultimately lead to “becoming one with the Tao”.

The methods of suppressing hunger and sustaining fasts, meditation, scripture recitation and evoking the divine beings were guiding the practitioner in harmonizing the fluids and inducing mystical experiences. ”The cutting oneself off from grains”, or tuan-ku, is a recurrent theme in Taoist legends about Immortals and is related to the idea of corruption and death within the body.⁸ The malevolent spirits or deities dwelling inside the body, The Three Worms or The Three Cadavers which reside near the Cinnabar Field, the source of life, “join together to attack the child [the embryo of immortality]”. ⁹ As these deities feed on cereals, renouncing cereals and with the aid of alchemical drugs such as cinnabar, they can be eliminated. According to the Taoist Master – Who – Embraces – Simplicity the divine mushroom, identified as Ganoderma lucidum, is the product of the sublimation of precious minerals lying under the ground, such as gold and divine cinnabar.¹⁰ Being endowed with immortalizing properties, was consumed by the mountain dwelling ascetics “as a powerful weapon against death”.¹¹

“Indeed, vegetable drugs, as well as practices undertaken to nourish the Vital Principle can prolong human life, but only alchemy can confer complete immortality.”¹²

The rigorous self-discipline undertaken by the practitioners, was accompanied by ascetic practices which would endow them with the purification and refinement of the body, and thus, of the elements. The practitioner underwent through “bitter training”, seclusion and fasting ,where the ideal form of nourishment was the ”liquid from heavens”¹³ , meaning that the adept was nourishing himself with saliva swallowing techniques. According to the scholar Charles D. Orzech, the neidan is an ancient metaphor of internal alchemy, where the body is viewed as cosmos, the heaven as cranium and the body as bowels. The elixir which confers immortality, “the sweet dew”, parallel to the Vedic, yogic amrita or bodhicitta, is the metaphor for the “divine saliva or pearl of ‘jade yang’ […], which is synthesized in the fiery crucible of the Daoist master’s body, lianhua fa”.¹⁴

Another important element which frequently recurs in Taoist text Shangqing, is the celibacy, which, if not followed, would nullify the medicinal strength of the medicine, yaoli. The Zengbao scripture explains that through the intercourse, and thus the rising of the “primal jing”, the demonic forces inside the bodies of both men and women “lust and mingle with each other, regardless of the conscious intentions of those they inhabit”.¹⁵  The main motif of these instructions is to purify the polluted and lustful thoughts, as to attain a superior, transformed divine “partnership” with immortals of opposite sex. The union of the opposites takes place on an elevated mental state, pure and uncorrupted by “the affairs of the bedroom” and by the lustful impulses, symbolized in alchemical language, by the hun and po souls and by the “evil corpses”.

The manifestation of the mysticism of sublimated sexuality is found in the Shangqing texts, describing visualization methods of figurative union of the son and the moon – parallel to the Father and the Mother of the original birth. The practitioner visualizes the Jade Woman of the Cinnabar Aurora of the Highest Mysteries of the Great Mystery, who spews red qi, or “liqueur of the pneuma” from her mouth, which is consequently ingested by the adept.¹⁶  Sex is no longer concentrated through these practices, to the genital organs, but is united in the Center and from there, emanates and radiates through the whole body.

The sexuality advocated by Taoists is related to the control over the essences the body produces and which generate the power of transcendence. The seminal essence and the Original Breath, or the “embryonic breathing” were put into a reverse circulation in the body. The practice of “the return of the spermatic essence” comprised of raising the spermatic course from running downward, to the top of the body, (the brain), and then stabilizing itself in the center of the body, or in the belly. The embryonic breathing, or the inner breathing, brings the alchemy practitioner into a state of equilibrium and harmony equal to the condition of that of an embryo in his mother’s womb. The symbolic regression or return to the primal phase, through the sublimation of sexual energy and breathing, comes as a final alchemical stage of transformation of both body and mind. What occurs when the divine Work of the Tao is accomplished, when the union of the yin and the yang takes place in the Center, is that the “oneness is abandoned”.¹⁷

To be continued …..

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