Chiyang Daoren, Eastern Taoism
1. What Is Inner Alchemy?
Answer: Inner alchemy (neidan) refers to the “elixir” that a person forms within the body by cultivating his or her own essence, qi, and spirit. It is not some concrete thing with shape and substance that can be seen and touched; the term is used in contrast to “outer alchemy” (waidan), the elixir refined from substances outside the body. What exactly is the “elixir” of inner alchemy? Inner alchemists disagree: some hold that it is one's own original true nature, some that it is a mass of energy, and some that it is a body of light.
2. What Is the Ultimate State Sought in Inner Alchemy Cultivation?
Answer: Returning to one's original nature and becoming one with the Tao.
3. What Is the General Principle of Inner Alchemy Cultivation?
Answer: “Dual cultivation of nature and life.” Nature means the mind and nature, the original source; life means essence and qi, vital life. Cultivating inner alchemy requires both purifying the mind and fostering original qi, so as to develop wisdom and strengthen the body.
4. How Does One Begin Cultivating Inner Alchemy?
Answer: Before practicing, first accumulate virtue. Anyone who wishes to cultivate inner alchemy must first strengthen his moral cultivation, including abandoning improper behavior, habits, and addictions, restraining his words and deeds by moral standards, and actively doing good deeds that benefit others and help the world. Then, by setting aside a certain time each day for seated meditation, he is sure to obtain good results.
5. Elixir Refining Must Begin with Seated Meditation. How Does One Practice It?
Answer: Seated meditation has no special requirements; just let it take its natural course. Each day when you are at leisure, either sit cross-legged on the bed (single lotus, double lotus, or free style are all fine) with the hands overlapping on the legs, or sit on a chair with legs hanging down and the hands resting flat on the thighs. Keep the upper body straight, press the cervical spine slightly upward, and let the head bow slightly and naturally. Do not rush to close the eyes; first concentrate the spirit on listening to your breathing. When the breath feels fairly fine and even, lightly close the eyes and attend slightly to the lower dantian (elixir field), while keeping your attention mainly on listening to the breath (listening to the breath is better than counting breaths). If stray thoughts disturb you, it is best to ignore them. Just keep the body sitting still and let the stray thoughts rise and fall as they will, back and forth; after sitting for half an hour or an hour, they will naturally subside little by little. Then, in a sudden moment of awareness, all stray thoughts vanish. If after this awareness you can hold it without losing it, you will have an indescribable feeling of joy and comfort.
6. After Sitting in Meditation for a While, My Back and Waist Ache. Have I Gone Astray?
Answer: This is normal. Many illnesses in the body have a latent period, and when they flare up after it, they are often severe. If they can be diagnosed during the latent period, they are easier to treat. When true qi circulates in the body during seated meditation, it serves to detect latent illnesses. When true qi meets a site of disease, it is obstructed, producing pain—as the saying goes, “Where there is pain there is blockage; where there is flow there is no pain.” As you sit longer, the accumulated energy keeps increasing, and the true qi can break through the site of disease and eliminate the latent illness.
7. After More Than a Month of Seated Meditation I Feel Great Benefit. How Should I Advance My Cultivation?
Answer: Continue with seated meditation, and you can keep the good feeling all along. If conditions allow, you may ask someone within the Taoist community to teach you the method of refining essence into qi.
8. Someone Asks: I Am Too Busy at Work and Have Almost No Free Time. How Can I Practice?
Answer: The ancients said: in activity refine your nature; in stillness refine your life. How does one refine one's nature in activity? In all work and social dealings, let conscience be the master and the mean the measure; be without selfishness and without stray thoughts, and wholeheartedly do your job well, so that you are not ashamed before heaven above or before people below. This is the best way of refining nature. How does one refine one's life in stillness? When you have nothing to do, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, always turn the light of the spirit down to shine on the dantian. Make the spirit embrace the qi and the intention bind the breath, so that spirit and qi cling to each other and never part. Gathered like this without scattering, they merge into one mass, leisurely and lively, moving to and fro within the dantian. Day by day and month by month, true qi naturally surges and envelops the whole body inside and out.
9. Some Say That Practice Requires Guarding an Aperture. Which Aperture Should Be Guarded?
Answer: There are many methods of guarding apertures, but beginners should focus on the lower dantian (one cun three fen behind the navel). This is especially so for people who use their brains a great deal in daily life, whose heart fire rises too much: keeping the mind on the lower dantian lowers heart fire and raises kidney water, so that yin in the body is calm and yang sealed. While guarding the aperture, you should also respond flexibly to changes in the qi dynamic and switch the aperture on which you keep your mind. If you become drowsy, shift to the upper dantian; if you become scattered, shift to the lower dantian. As for the method of guarding the aperture, all schools stress “neither forgetting nor forcing, seeming to guard yet not guarding”: the intention must not be too tight, nor must it be wholly absent, drifting into scatteredness and drowsiness.
10. I Hear That Practice Requires Grasping the “Living Zi Hour.” When Is the “Living Zi Hour”?
Answer: The Zi hour is the time of the return of the first yang. The living Zi hour refers to the moment in practice when, at the extreme of stillness and in a hazy state, with no desire whatever in the mind, yang qi naturally arises and the genitals naturally become erect.
11. Are There Any Dietary Taboos in Cultivating Inner Alchemy?
Answer: Keep mainly to a vegetarian diet and eat little fish or meat. Among vegetarian foods, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, fresh fungi, and the like, though tasty, easily trigger illness and should also be eaten sparingly. Among meats, you may for the time being eat only chicken, duck, and fish, and eggs; it is best to eat as little of other meats as possible.
12. What Are the Main Schools of Inner Alchemy?
Answer: In the course of its transmission, inner alchemy formed different schools owing to differences in lineage, emphasis, and other factors. Some focus mainly on cultivating nature, others mainly on cultivating life; some favor solitary pure cultivation, others yin-yang dual cultivation. All these schools claim to derive from the Golden Elixir school of Zhong (Liquan) and Lü (Dongbin) of the late Tang and Five Dynasties. By the traditional classification, they can mainly be divided into the Southern and Northern Schools and the Eastern, Western, and Central Branches.
The Southern School was founded by Zhang Boduan of the Southern Song; his representative work, Awakening to Perfection (Wuzhen Pian), is revered as a work of inner alchemy as important as The Seal of the Unity of the Three (Cantong Qi). The school is known for its method of cultivation “life first, nature after,” and since most of its leading figures came from the south, it is called the Southern School. Within the Southern School there are two branches, a pure-cultivation branch and a yin-yang dual cultivation branch.
The Northern School was founded by Wang Chongyang of the Jin dynasty and was prevalent north of the Yangtze. In its method of cultivation it advocates nature first and life after, with the cultivation of nature as the main focus, and it promotes solitary cultivation in clarity and stillness.
The Northern and Southern Schools were merged in the Yuan dynasty through the great efforts of Chen Zhixu to reconcile them, and from then on became two branches within the Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) school.
The Central Branch was founded by Li Daochun of the Yuan dynasty. It originally had no school name, but because its alchemical method takes “guarding the center” as the essential, it came to be so called. This branch fused the Confucian idea of “centrality and harmony” into Taoist cultivation theory, always taking “guarding the center” as its key formula and holding that “the center” is the single aperture of the Mysterious Pass, the root of a person's nature and life. Pointers on Nature and Life (Xingming Guizhi) of the Ming dynasty, Huang Yuanji of the Qing dynasty, who transmitted the Recorded Sayings from the Hall of Joyful Nurture (Leyutang Yulu), and Min Xiaogen, who transmitted the Central Yellow Direct Penetration method, are all regarded as belonging to the Central Branch.
The Eastern Branch was founded by Lu Xixing in the Jiajing era of the Ming dynasty. Its methods derive from the Southern School and advocate yin-yang dual cultivation—not, however, the techniques of “controlling women and gathering in battle,” but the intercourse of spirit and of qi, cultivating both partners and nourishing both. Its key points are “concentrating the spirit and gathering the qi” and “the Tao follows what is so of itself.” The alchemical methods of Sun Ruzhong, who wrote the True Transmission of the Golden Elixir (Jindan Zhenchuan) at the end of the Ming, and of Fu Jinquan, who compiled the Seventeen Taoist Books (Daoshu Shiqi Zhong) in the Qing, are both similar to the Eastern Branch.
The Western Branch was founded by Li Xiyue between the Jiaqing and Xianfeng eras of the Qing dynasty. Its alchemical method combines stillness with yin and yang: the first step emphasizes clarity, stillness, and naturalness, and the second yin-yang dual cultivation. Its methods have many levels: laying the foundation is divided into lesser and greater foundation laying; refining the self into inner and outer refining of the self; the method of refining the mind has nine levels; the medicines are divided into three levels; and the practice is divided into five passes. Wang Shuting, who wrote Essentials of Nature and Life and The Heart Method Outside the Teachings and compiled and printed the Great Compendium of the Taoist Lineage in the late Qing; Ke Huaijing, who wrote the Essay on Nurturing Life; and, in modern times, Xu Songyao (Haiying) of Suzhou all belong to the Western Branch.
13. What Are the Basic Features of Inner Alchemy?
Answer: The basic features of inner alchemy can be summed up in four points:
(1) Inner alchemy is a system of inner cultivation of human life characterized by quiet practice;
(2) Inner alchemy practice begins with a person's sexual function, adjusting the body's own endocrine hormones and thereby strengthening self-control over the reproductive, endocrine, nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems and changing the body's own functions;
(3) Inner alchemy takes as its object of development the potential of human sexuality and the potential of the unconscious;
(4) Inner alchemy embeds the Tao in technique. It is not only a systematic set of practices but also a complete worldview, a pattern of conduct for living in the world with the Taoist thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi at its core.
14. What Is the Core of Inner Alchemy Practice?
Answer: The core of inner alchemy practice is called “taking from Kan to fill Li” and “extracting lead to add mercury”; in fact, it is returning the essence to replenish the brain. In modern language, it means promoting the sublimation of sexual energy and using it as nourishment for the brain, thereby keeping the brain youthful and vigorous.
15. What Joys Does Cultivating Inner Alchemy Bring?
Answer: When the “living Zi hour” arrives, the body of a person cultivating inner alchemy secretes a morphine-like hormone that produces a melting, blissful feeling of rapture and intoxication.
16. What Is the Key to Cultivating Inner Alchemy?
Answer: The key lies in knowing the moment when “the aperture of the Mysterious Pass opens.”
The ancients said: “The methods of the Tao have three thousand six hundred gates, and each person clings to one sprout and root. Who knows that the little aperture of the Mysterious Pass is not among the three thousand six hundred gates?” The so-called aperture of the Mysterious Pass means the most mysterious and wondrous mechanism of the human body. Some people insist on identifying a particular part of the body as the aperture of the Mysterious Pass, but this is not right. The heart of the matter lies not in the static aspect of bodily structure but in the dynamic aspect of the state of body and mind—how to bring about the “Mysterious Pass phenomenon” (the appearance of the Mysterious Pass). The Mysterious Pass phenomenon, also called the opening of the aperture of the Mysterious Pass, cannot ordinarily be seen or touched; it appears only in practice, when true qi has accumulated to a certain degree and stillness reaches its extreme and gives way to movement. The opening of the aperture of the Mysterious Pass is a state in which, amid stillness and concentration, knowing nothing and perceiving nothing, a knowing, aware mind suddenly arises—with no thought before and no memory after, clean and pure. At this time a qi cavity forms in the abdomen; the practitioner should concentrate the spirit and enter the qi cavity, and the yang arising of the “living Zi hour” will occur of itself.
17. Practice Requires “Keeping the Mind on the Dantian.” Where Exactly Is the Dantian?
Answer: The location of the dantian differs among the texts and the teachings of various masters. Some say the dantian is one cun three fen below the navel, some say three cun below the navel, some say it is in front of the kidneys and behind the navel, and there are other views too. All of these were experienced intuitively by our ancestors over long practice. Because each person's constitution differs, their experiences naturally differ. Besides individual differences, the sensory nerves of the abdomen are visceral nerves, whose reflexes transmitted to the brain's sensory centers are not very precise and are often off. So it is understandable that records of the dantian's location differ. How, then, should we understand where the dantian is? Generally speaking, the term dantian should refer to the region from the navel (Shenque) in front to Yangguan and Mingmen behind (the lower abdomen)—not a single point, nor a single plane, but a three-dimensional region from outside to inside and from top to bottom. In teaching and practice, where schools and masters differ and the aims and methods of practice differ, simply follow your master's instruction and fix it at a particular location—as the saying goes, “to grasp it with spirit and understand it depends on the person.”
18. Could You Introduce the Method of Passing Qi Through the Governing and Conception Vessels?
Answer: Passing qi through the Governing and Conception Vessels, also called the Microcosmic Orbit (the lesser circulation, xiao zhoutian), relies on the body's mechanism for generating true qi and is achieved naturally through constant practice, which lets essence and qi fully accumulate. The method is to silently concentrate the spirit and constantly illuminate the qi cavity (that is, the lower dantian). When original qi is full, it will of itself break through the Governing Vessel, rise along the spine to the brain, then turn and descend to connect with the Conception Vessel. But original qi's passage through the Governing Vessel does not necessarily happen during seated meditation; it may occur at any time. The most noticeable sensation is a stream of heat surging up along the spine to the Yuzhen (Jade Pillow) point at the back of the head.
19. What Methods Are There for Entering Stillness?
Answer: You may try the following methods for entering a state of stillness:
(1) Counting the breath. During practice, silently count your breaths from one to ten or to a hundred, over and over; this lets you enter stillness quickly.
(2) Listening to the breath. During practice, listen to your own breathing to concentrate the spirit and help you enter stillness.
(3) Keeping the mind on the dantian. Rest your mental activity on the dantian region of the body, which helps clear away stray thoughts and enter stillness smoothly.
(4) Keeping the mind on an external scene. When for some reason you cannot keep your mind on the dantian, you may keep it on scenery outside the body, such as the sea, a pine tree, or fresh flowers. Resting the mind on some external scene can also bring you into a state of stillness.
(5) Keeping the mind on an organ. If a certain organ is diseased, you may keep your mind directly on it during practice—the liver or kidneys, for example. This not only helps you enter stillness but also lets the qi reach the site of illness (original qi clears that organ).
(6) Guidance by sound. During practice you may softly recite words or incantations, or listen to the sound of a pendulum; these are all means of entering stillness.
You may choose any one or several of the methods above to use at the same time; generally no more than three should be combined, or you will artificially add stray thoughts and hinder entering stillness.
20. Besides Seated Meditation, Could You Introduce Some Supporting Exercises?
Answer: The following exercises can be done anywhere, whenever you have a moment:
(1) Rubbing the hands and warming the eyes. Rub the palms together vigorously until they are hot as fire, open the eyes wide, and cover them with the palms facing inward, warming the eyes with the heat of the palms.
(2) Sounding the heavenly drum. Raise both hands and cover the ears tightly, then slide the index fingers down off the middle fingers to flick the back of the head, making a sound like beating a drum.
(3) Pressing the tongue. Press the tongue against the upper palate so that saliva arises of itself; then stir the saliva around the whole mouth with the tongue, swish it 36 times, and swallow it in three gulps, with a gurgling sound in the throat as you swallow.
(4) Lifting the anus. Lift and contract the anus as if holding back a bowel movement.
Practiced diligently and without interruption, these exercises greatly benefit the body.
21. How Should One Deal with Visions That Appear During Practice?
Answer: In the process of entering stillness, as the qi dynamic in the body changes, all kinds of visions may appear—mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, flowers, grasses, and trees, even immortals, buddhas, ghosts, and monsters. When visions appear, do not try to make them out, and do not let thoughts of delight or aversion arise, lest you provoke still more mental activity. Hold fast to your original object of attention; do this, and the visions will vanish of themselves and you will return to a state of calm. As the saying goes, “Let the mind be dead and unmoving, and ten thousand demons retreat of themselves.”
22. What Is a Deviation in Practice, and How Is It Corrected?
Answer: A deviation refers to suffering that disrupts normal life because the practice method was not properly mastered and, when something abnormal occurs in the body, one cannot control or eliminate it. The main causes of deviation are the following:
(1) Having no teacher to guide one, and not mastering the method of qigong practice properly;
(2) Being taught by someone without practice experience or medical knowledge, so that the method is wrong;
(3) Having correct guidance but failing to master the method correctly oneself; or forcing oneself to practice when one's illness makes practice unsuitable;
(4) Blindly pursuing and intensifying sensations or hallucinations that arise in practice, until they cannot be eliminated and lead to deviation;
(5) Being suddenly frightened or shocked during practice, leading to deviation;
(6) Constantly switching methods—practicing one set today and another tomorrow—causing confusion of methods and conflict in one's thinking;
(7) Blindly guiding qi to circulate during practice, violating natural laws, so that deviation occurs. When a deviation occurs, stop practicing, do not become tense, dispel fear, and turn your attention to beneficial activities. Try relaxation exercises to relax the mind and the whole body. Or have a qigong physician apply patting techniques, or treat the symptoms with acupuncture, tuina massage, or Chinese herbal medicine.
(Editor's note: What this article describes are traditional cultivation teachings; they cannot replace medical diagnosis and treatment. If you feel unwell, please seek medical care promptly.)