The “King of Alchemical Scriptures for All Ages”: An Inquiry into the Secret Immortality Arts of The Seal of the Unity of the Three

Chiyang Daoren, Eastern Taoism

General Introduction

The Zhouyi Cantong Qi (The Seal of the Unity of the Three, in Accordance with the Book of Changes) by Wei Boyang of the Eastern Han has been revered by students of immortality through the ages as “the king of alchemical scriptures for all ages.” Yet very few can understand it, and its many commentaries are full of conflicting interpretations, making it an age-old enigma in the history of Chinese culture.

This article examines the cultural background of The Seal of the Unity of the Three (Cantong Qi) and the origins and development of the immortality arts it transmits, and analyzes the schools of Cantong Qi learning and their scholarly influence. Finally, the author reveals that the immortality art secretly transmitted in the Cantong Qi is the art of the union of male and female qi—that is, the Great Elixir of the Human Element, which advocates paired male-female cultivation and the grafting of yin and yang.

The Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection (Wuzhen Pian) both teach the yin-yang dual cultivation of the Southern School, and among their many commentaries the most accurate is that of Lu Xixing of the Ming dynasty.

The Zhouyi Cantong Qi, written by Wei Boyang, the Eastern Han master of the study of immortality, is an extraordinary book that has drawn the attention of a great many among China's vast body of ancient texts. It holds an important place in the history of Chinese philosophy, science, and Taoism, providing a theoretical system for the ancient studies of inner and outer alchemy, and has been revered by students of immortality through the ages as “the king of alchemical scriptures for all ages.”

In modern times the Zhouyi Cantong Qi has attracted still more attention from historians of science around the world, and scholars at home and abroad have written paper after paper on it. Yet in the more than 1,800 years since it appeared, very few have truly understood it. No wonder even so famous a scholar as Zhu Xi of the Song said that “its words and rhymes are ancient, profound, and elegant, and hard to penetrate.” Though he once “lay awake all night” studying it, he sighed that “before my eyes it is clear enough, yet there is nowhere to set my hand.” Later commentators saw in it what they were inclined to see, and their conflicting interpretations proliferated without agreement. As the Yuan student of immortality Chen Zhixu said: “More than a hundred people have explained this book, but few have penetrated its mysteries.”

Modern scholarly papers on the Cantong Qi seldom hit the mark. The Zhouyi Cantong Qi is still shrouded in veil upon veil of mystery, an age-old enigma of traditional culture. Why have scholars past and present held so hard-to-understand a book in such high esteem? What immortality art does the Cantong Qi actually transmit in secret? To answer these questions and uncover its secrets, we must carefully trace the origins and development of its immortality arts.

1. The Age-Old Unique Learning of the Ancient Immortality Masters

Traditional Chinese culture began in the matrilineal clan society of the age of Nüwa and Fuxi. The earliest primitive religious culture of matrilineal clans included nature worship, totem worship, worship of heavenly gods, and ancestor worship, and its most distinctive features were the worship of the female and the worship of reproduction. As the “Sequence of the Hexagrams” commentary to the I Ching (Book of Changes) says: “There are heaven and earth, and then there are the myriad things; there are the myriad things, and then there are male and female; there are male and female, and then there are husband and wife; there are husband and wife, and then there are father and son; there are father and son, and then there are ruler and subject; there are ruler and subject, and then there are high and low; there are high and low, and then ritual and righteousness have their place.”

However complex real society may be, it developed from yin and yang, male and female, husband and wife. Hence the “Appended Statements” of the Book of Changes says: “The way of Qian forms the male; the way of Kun forms the female”; “One yin and one yang: this is called the Tao”; “Heaven and earth intermingle, and the myriad things are transformed and refined. Male and female join their essences, and the myriad things are transformed and born.” Only with men and women can there be humankind, and all things are divided into yin and yang; this is the most basic principle of nature and of human society. This idea of the mutual stimulation of yin and yang in the study of the Changes is the foundation of ancient Chinese science and philosophy.

Although traditional Chinese culture later divided into the Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Mohist, Legalist, and other “three teachings and nine schools,” all of them can be traced back to the primitive religion of male-female reproductive worship in clan society, and all take as their intellectual source the philosophy of the Book of Changes in which male and female join their essences and yin and yang stimulate each other.

The immortality arts of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi came from the creations of the ancient immortality masters, and their wisdom was built precisely on this ancient idea of the mutual stimulation of yin and yang.

In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, rationalism and humanistic thought arose, the learning of the hundred schools broke out of the shamanic and scribal culture of ancient primitive religion, and the immortality masters who studied the techniques and numerological arts also established a school of their own. The “Treatise on Literature” in the Book of Han says: “The immortality masters are those who preserve the truth of their nature and life and wander in search of what lies beyond. They use it to ease their minds and calm their hearts, to regard life and death as one realm, and to keep fear from their breasts.”

The primitive religion of the ancient Chinese already held the ideal of long life and becoming an immortal. Once the immortality masters, who nourished their nature, preserved the genuine, and transcended the terror of life and death, had arisen, they merged with the yin-yang and Five Phases school and with the masters of techniques and numerology, and in the Warring States period formed groups of fangshi (masters of esoteric arts) practicing various Taoist techniques, which historians call the “Way of the Fangshi and Immortals” (Fangxian Dao).

The Qi fangshi Zou Yan wrote a book of 105 chapters propagating the theory of yin and yang and the Five Phases and the principle of the mutual response of heaven and humanity, and also transmitted the Recipes for Valuing the Tao and Prolonging Life, laying the theoretical foundation of the fangshi learning.

From the Eastern Han on, the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals took the Huang-Lao learning of Taoism as its theoretical pillar, worshipped the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, and turned into the Huang-Lao Way; the Yang Zhu school's way of preserving life and completing one's years merged with the immortality masters' teaching of long life and lasting vision.

The immortality techniques spread by the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals in the Warring States period fell roughly into three schools. The fangshi of Yan and Qi followed Anqi Sheng and Xianmen Gao, focusing on ingesting immortality drugs and refining cinnabar—for example, the “recipe for repelling old age” transmitted by Li Shaojun in the time of Emperor Wu of the Han, and his arts of turning cinnabar into gold and becoming immortal by eating jujubes.

The fangshi of the Qin and Jin region transmitted the bedchamber arts of intercourse with women, revering Pengzu and Rongcheng Gong and claiming that the arts came down from the Yellow Emperor, Yao, Shun, and other tribal chiefs of clan society. The “Treatise on Literature” in the Book of Han also records works such as The Yellow Emperor and Three Kings' Recipes for Nourishing Yang, The Yin Way of Yao and Shun, and The Yin Way of Tang and Pan'geng, which in fact derive from the primitive shamanic religion of the ancients' reproductive worship. The arts of the bedchamber were extremely widespread in the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals of the Qin and Han and its variant, the Huang-Lao Way; by the end of the Han, Zhang Ling, Gan Shi, Zuo Ci, Dongguo Yannian, and others were all adept in them.

The fangshi of the south—the regions of Jing-Chu, Wu-Yue, and Ba-Shu—transmitted the arts of circulating qi, daoyin (guiding and pulling exercises), breathing exercises (tuna), and meditation, tracing their lineage to Wangzi Qiao and Chisongzi.

From the Qin and Han on, these three schools of techniques gradually merged, and from this the immortality arts of the Cantong Qi were born. Wei Boyang was a transmitter of the Huang-Lao Way of the Han. His Cantong Qi, based on Zou Yan's theory of yin and yang and the Five Phases and the principle of the mutual response of heaven and humanity, combined the strengths of the three schools of immortality arts—ingestion, the bedchamber, and circulating qi—uniting the three arts into one and transmitting the art of the Great Elixir of the Human Element, which seizes the creative power of heaven and earth.

The immortality art of returning from old age to youth transmitted in the Zhouyi Cantong Qi is the age-old unique learning of the ancient Chinese immortality masters. Peng Xiao's “Preface to the Explanation of the Meaning of the Cantong Qi” says: “Wei Boyang, a native of Shangyu in Kuaiji, devoted himself to cultivating perfection in hidden silence and nourished his will in emptiness and nothingness. Widely versed in literature and well acquainted with the apocrypha and prognostication, he obtained the ancient Classic of the Dragon and Tiger and fully grasped its wondrous meaning. He then drew on the Zhouyi to write the Cantong Qi in three parts, and further wrote one part, ‘Filling in Gaps and Omissions.’ Much of what he describes is expressed through analogy and borrowed matters, hiding and revealing through differing wording. He secretly showed it to Xu Congshi of Qingzhou, who commented on it while concealing his name. In the reign of Emperor Huan, the master also transmitted it to Chunyu Shutong of the same commandery, and so it spread in the world.” Chunyu Shutong lived in the reign of Emperor Huan of the Later Han and is recorded in Yuan Hong's Annals of the Later Han and Tao Hongjing's Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen'gao), among other books. Ge Hong's Biographies of Divine Immortals (Shenxian Zhuan) also tells the story of how Wei Boyang and his disciple Master Yu refined elixirs and became immortals. It begins: “Wei Boyang was a man of Wu. The son of a noble family, he loved Taoist arts by nature.” And it ends: “Boyang wrote the Cantong Qi and the Wu Xianglei, three scrolls in all. Their subject appears to be the Zhouyi, but in fact they borrow the images of the lines to discuss the meaning of making the elixir.” The chapter “Distant Vistas” of the Baopuzi (Inner Chapters) also records one scroll of the Inner Classic of Wei Boyang. The Zhouyi Cantong Qi is listed in the “Treatise on Classics and Books” of the Old Book of Tang; it is quoted in the Beitang Shuchao, the Family Instructions of Master Yan, and the Declarations of the Perfected; and Lu Deming's Textual Explanations of the Classics records that Yu Fan once wrote a commentary on the Cantong Qi. This proves that the Zhouyi Cantong Qi is indeed a book of the Later Han. Moreover, the text of the Cantong Qi itself already conceals a riddle on “Wei Boyang's song” (which the chapter “Textual Evidence” of the Family Instructions of Master Yan interprets as “made by Wei Boyang”). On this basis there is hardly any doubt that the Cantong Qi was written by Wei Boyang in the reign of Emperor Huan.

The ancient Classic of the Dragon and Tiger on which Wei Boyang based the Cantong Qi was probably a work of outer alchemy on the making of gold and silver. Master Wei was expert in the art of the Golden Elixir. He discovered that the patterns of the chemical reactions between different elements in outer alchemy not only accorded with the principle of the mutual stimulation of yin and yang in the great Book of Changes, but were also well suited to serve as analogies for the secret art of male-female stimulation in the Huang-Lao Way. So he united the three traditions—the great Changes, Huang-Lao, and the furnace and fire—into one and wrote this book, which was transmitted and annotated by Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong. Zhang Boduan's Awakening to Perfection says: “Shutong studied under Wei Boyang and left it as the king of alchemical scriptures for all ages.” Gao Xian's “Song of the Golden Elixir” also says: “Have you not heard how (Chunyu) Shutong, (Xu) Congshi, and Wei Boyang went laughing together into the Land of Nothing-at-All? Following the Lianshan they wrote the Cantong Qi, left as the king of elixirs for all ages.”

Because the Zhouyi Cantong Qi was written in coded language, its immortality arts were passed down only by secret oral instruction, and its manuscripts were treasured in the hands of a few transmitters of the Huang-Lao Way, rarely seen by others. Hence the teachings of the Cantong Qi did not spread in society until the Tang dynasty, and its editions were mixed and confused, its sentences muddled, and its commentaries full of conflicting interpretations.

Xiao Tianshi described this situation in his “Preface to the Reprinted Collected Commentaries on the Ancient Text of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi” and other writings: “The Zhouyi Cantong Qi, written by Wei Boyang of the Han, is revered by the world as ‘the king of alchemical scriptures for all ages’ and taken as their ancestor by alchemists of all ages; it is the most profound of the classical philosophical books of our country.” “Above all, the book is hard to read, its words hard to explain, its principles hard to grasp, its instructions hard to penetrate, its methods mostly secret, and its arts hard to transmit. That is why, over thousands of years, schools have proliferated while the orthodox sacred lineage has hung by a thread, and its Taoist arts have remained hidden and unmanifest.”

2. The Schools and Scholarly Influence of the Cantong Qi

The Cantong Qi says: “I speak privately to the worthy; how would I dare lightly commit it to writing? If I tie my tongue and do not speak, cutting off the Tao, I will be punished for the crime; if I set down my feelings on bamboo and silk, I fear I will leak the tallies of heaven. Hesitating, I sigh all the more; looking up and down, I ponder.” According to the precepts of the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals and the Huang-Lao Way of the Qin and Han, Wei Boyang feared heavenly punishment and calamity upon his descendants. He dared neither to withhold what could be transmitted and thus close the Way of Heaven, nor to transmit what could not be transmitted and thus leak heaven's secrets. So he wrote the secret way of restoring youth in the Cantong Qi in coded language, deliberately setting up a maze. Knowing full well that “the smelting has its rules,” he only “revealed the branches and hid the roots,” leaving “the wise to consider carefully and grasp it with their minds.”

Under Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang, Liu Zhigu was magistrate of Changming in Mianzhou. When an edict sought masters of elixirs, Liu Zhigu held that nothing surpassed the Cantong Qi for the great medicine of the immortals, and so he wrote the Treatise on the Mysterious Pivot of Sun and Moon and presented it to the court. Once the Zhouyi Cantong Qi circulated openly in Tang society, its fame soared. But although Taoist scholars knew it transmitted immortality arts kept secret by a thousand ancient sages, they could not decipher it without the oral instructions, so all of them explained the book wrongly, and schools of Cantong Qi interpretation proliferated.

Chen Zhixu's Commentary on the Zhouyi Cantong Qi by Chapter says: “Later people each held to their own views, without resolving to search diligently for a true master, and without understanding that yin and yang of the same kind need each other. Each prizes what he has heard, and the further they go the further astray they get. Seeing ‘Zhouyi,’ they take it for a book of divination and the najia system; how would they know the way of the same kind finding its partner? Seeing ‘talk of the cauldron and vessel,’ they guess it is about metals, minerals, and furnace fire; hearing ‘talk of gathering,’ they guess it is the Three Peaks art of gathering in battle; hearing ‘action,’ they suspect it is a heterodox side path; hearing ‘non-action,’ they suspect it is sitting in meditation in dull emptiness; hearing ‘Great Vehicle,’ they insist it is the empty nature of Chan.” Chen Zhixu annotated the Cantong Qi in terms of “yin and yang of the same kind needing each other” and “the way of the same kind finding its partner,” so he evidently received the true transmission of the alchemists. But although this orthodox sacred lineage, passed down secretly through oral instructions from master to disciple, survived by a thread, it remained hidden and unmanifest, while commentaries that took the words of the Cantong Qi at face value spread widely in society and formed many schools.

The wave of study of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi in society also had a broad and far-reaching scholarly influence on the history of Chinese science and technology, philosophy, and Taoism, objectively promoting the development and progress of many disciplines. Wei Boyang applied the highly developed numerology of the Han to the techniques of nurturing life, describing the procedures of alchemical practice by the laws of the yin-yang changes in the movements of the sun and moon. This undoubtedly provided a universal theoretical framework for inner and outer alchemy, raising the study of immortality from the level of experimental technique to that of an archaic theoretical science.

The ancient immortality arts recorded in the Cantong Qi are not outdated even today. This extraordinary achievement of human-body science invented by the immortality masters is something that Chinese and foreign scientists trained in Western scientific thinking could hardly have foreseen, and it will still shine with the light of wisdom on the frontiers of future science.

The first to apply the theoretical system of the Cantong Qi consciously were the alchemists devoted to outer alchemy and the making of gold and silver. In the Warring States period, Mohist scholars also merged with the immortality masters, and by absorbing the metallurgical and manufacturing techniques and experience of the Mohist craftsmen, this developed into the outer alchemy of gold and silver.

Before the Zhouyi Cantong Qi appeared, alchemical methods such as the Thirty-Six Methods for Liquefying Minerals, the Scripture of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquor of Grand Clarity, and the Scripture of the Divine Elixirs of the Yellow Emperor's Nine Cauldrons were already circulating in the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals. The Cantong Qi contains the words “the matter of the furnace and fire truly has a basis,” so Wei Boyang was clearly expert in the outer alchemy of gold and silver handed down in the Huang-Lao Way of the Han, and this book undoubtedly brought the theory of outer alchemy to its peak. Considering the original meaning of the Cantong Qi, it by no means rejects outer alchemy; rather, confident that it had reached the highest level of the alchemical theory of its time, it held that the Tao is one and consistent, that inner and outer can both be pursued, and that the three arts of ingestion, the bedchamber, and circulating qi are interconnected, so that the art of the Golden Elixir could be placed under the guidance of its theory. It is therefore not going too far for some scholars to conclude that it contains outer alchemy.

The Tang dynasty was the high point of the development of outer alchemy in China. The outer alchemists of that time all took the Cantong Qi as their standard, knowing that the book concealed a formula for immortality that “seizes the creative work of heaven and earth and steals the generative task of the four seasons,” and strove to apply it in outer alchemy.

The present text of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi largely preserves the form of the Tang editions, and the anonymous commentary under the character “rong” and the commentary attributed to Yin Changsheng, both included in the Taoist Canon, in fact date from the Tang. The book was written successively by three men of the late Han: Wei Boyang, Xu Congshi of Qingzhou, and Chunyu Shutong. Since the most secret part of the yin-yang stimulation art of the Human Element elixir method is the “fire timing,” and the Cantong Qi uses outer-alchemical firing precisely as a metaphor for this fire timing, Tang outer alchemists easily matched the Cantong Qi's discussions of the line images to the fire procedures of outer-alchemical firing, forming the “direct correspondence” theory that used fire to represent the line images.

The Tang Taoist Liu Bi, misled by the Cantong Qi's talk of dragon and tiger, lead and mercury, took literally its line “use metal as the embankment, and water enters to wander at ease,” and formed Liu Bi's so-called lead-mercury school of alchemy.

According to Han Yu's “Epitaph for the Late Erudite of the Imperial Academy, Mr. Li,” “Their method was to fill a cauldron with lead, press a hollow in the middle, fill it with mercury, cover and seal the edges, and fire it into cinnabar.” Thus the Taoists who explained the Cantong Qi by the theory of lead and mercury produced a mixture of mercuric oxide (HgO) and lead oxide (PbO), while those who explained it by the theory of sulfur and mercury directly “burned Yuzhang with sulfur, smelting mud and mercury together,” making mercuric sulfide (HgS) from sulfur and mercury.

Although the outer alchemists of the Tang carried out all kinds of alchemical experiments following the text of the Cantong Qi, trying every possible way to find in it the means to make a divine elixir that, once taken, would let one ascend in broad daylight and never grow old or die, none of them succeeded. The princes, nobles, and Taoists who dreamed of becoming immortals by taking elixirs paid for it with their lives. Although down to modern times some have still struggled tirelessly to uncover the secrets of outer alchemy, the many deaths from elixir poisoning in the Tang finally caused the outer alchemy of gold and silver, having reached the height of its prosperity, to decline rapidly. People began to wonder: why did the elixirs made by the Taoists according to the Cantong Qi have no effect when taken? Could the immortality art of returning to youth hidden in the Cantong Qi really be a matter of outer-alchemical gold and silver?

As early as the Northern and Southern dynasties, the study of inner alchemy had already spread within the Taoism of the immortals. The Sui and Tang Taoists Su Yuanlang, Sima Chengzhen, Sun Simiao, Liu Zhigu, Wu Yun, Luo Gongyuan, Ye Fashan, Zhang Guo, Tao Zhi, Yang Canwei, and others all developed inner alchemy and left works on it.

Especially from the late Tang and Five Dynasties on, the schools that interpreted the Cantong Qi in terms of inner alchemy gradually prevailed over the outer-alchemy school and became the mainstream of the study of immortality. Famous inner alchemists such as Zhongli Quan, Lü Dongbin, Cui Xifan, Chen Pu, Chen Tuan, Shi Jianwu, Liu Xuanying, and Zhang Boduan saved people through inner alchemy and honored the Zhouyi Cantong Qi as the ancestor of alchemical scriptures, and the value of the Cantong Qi as a secret manual of immortal cultivation was publicly recognized. By then inner alchemy had reached a state of perfection and began to form schools, each with its own features. These inner-alchemy schools all traced their origins far back to the Yellow Emperor, Pengzu, Wangzi Qiao, and Chisongzi, and claimed Laozi as their patron.

One school claimed descent from Guanyinzi (titled Perfected Wenshi in the Tang) and was therefore called the Wenshi school. Another claimed descent from Wang Xuanfu (of the Han), the Divine Lord Shaoyang of the Purple Mansion of Eastern Florescence, and was therefore called the Shaoyang school.

The Wenshi school takes emptiness and nothingness as its root and the nurturing of nature as its principle. Its methods are based on the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the True Classic of Wenshi, and belong to the highest vehicle, the Great Way of emptiness and nothingness: reaching the extreme of emptiness and holding firmly to stillness, attaining great penetration and great awakening, stealing the true workings of the emptiness of heaven and earth, entering directly and suddenly, equalizing right and wrong and self and other, and entering a state of primal chaos without heaven or earth—cultivating nature while also cultivating life.

The Shaoyang school advocates dual cultivation of nature and life, refining and nourishing yin and yang, proceeding from methods of action to methods of non-action, with the steps of refining essence into qi, refining qi into spirit, and refining spirit to return to emptiness in clear order, and its branches multiplied widely. From the late Tang and Five Dynasties on, Zhongli Quan, Lü Dongbin, Chen Tuan, the Hemp-Robed Taoist, Perfected Huolong, Liu Cao, Zhang Boduan, and others opened the gates of the Shaoyang teaching wide. Through the Song, Jin, Yuan, Ming, and Qing it gradually formed the Southern School, the Northern School, the Central school, the Eastern school, the Western school, the Qingcheng school, the Wu-Liu school, and other branches. Hence the saying in inner alchemy that the Wenshi school is the highest and the Shaoyang school the largest.

In addition, Perfected Zhang Sanfeng of the Yuan-Ming period combined the strengths of the Wenshi and Shaoyang schools and founded the Sanfeng school (also called the Hidden Immortals school). Clinging neither to action nor to non-action, it created a gate of purity within yin-yang grafting, combining the features of the Southern and Northern Schools.

In terms of practice, these many schools fall roughly into three kinds: first, the grafting method of yin-yang dual cultivation; second, the seated meditation method of pure solitary cultivation; and third, a combination of the yin-yang grafting school and the pure solitary school.

Among the inner-alchemy practices transmitted by the Cantong Qi, the art of yin-yang grafting through paired male-female cultivation is the most orthodox. Of the alchemical scriptures derived directly from the Zhouyi Cantong Qi since the late Tang and Five Dynasties, the best known are the Mirror for Compounding the Medicine, Awakening to Perfection, the Song of Striking the Lines, and the Rootless Tree, and all of these in fact teach the yin-yang practice of paired male-female cultivation.

Yin-yang dual cultivation is represented by the Southern School. Zhang Boduan received the true transmission of Lü Dongbin's alchemical instructions and opened the gate wide, passing it on to Shi Tai, Xue Daoguang, Liu Yongnian, Weng Baoguang, Lu Yanfu, Dai Tongfu, Lu Ziye, Zhen Jiuying, Tao Susi, Qiu Zhao'ao, Fu Jinquan, and others.

In fact, the Northern School lineage of Ma Yu, Song Defang, Li Shuangyu, Zhang Ziyang, Zhao Youqin, and Chen Zhixu also practiced paired male-female cultivation.

The Eastern school founded by Lu Qianxu and the Western school founded by Li Hanxu are likewise yin-yang practices.

The alchemical method of paired male-female cultivation and yin-yang grafting is also called the Great Elixir of the Human Element, and it has been passed down secretly from generation to generation through the coded language of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi. Zhang Boduan's Awakening to Perfection is a book that fully expounds the practice of the Cantong Qi. The Cantong Qi says: “If things lack yin and yang, they go against heaven and turn from the origin; when a hen lays eggs by itself, its chicks are not whole.” This shows that the yin-yang practice of paired male-female cultivation accords with the laws of nature itself.

The Cantong Qi also says, “With the same kind, the work is easily done; with a different species, skill is hard to apply.” This shows that the Great Elixir of the Human Element must follow the principle that “broken bamboo is mended with bamboo, a broken person is mended by a person,” taking effect through the mutual response of yin and yang of the same kind (that is, man and woman). This practice was inspired by the grafting of trees, as the Lyrics of the Rootless Tree says: “Rootless tree, its blossoms just faint; when a tree grows old and near withering, graft on a tender branch. Plum lodged on willow, mulberry grafted onto pear—so when people grow old there is, after all, medicine to cure them. The grafting method of the immortals since ancient times is handed down as a model for those who cultivate perfection.” Such practices must make use of the cauldron and furnace, the zither and sword, the companion and the Yellow Matron, the dragon and tiger together, and fire and medicine all complete; only then can one mend a person with a person, join life to life, and gather the true yang within Kan of the same kind, achieving the goal of returning from old age to youth, with immediate results.

Awakening to Perfection says: “The yin essence within yang is not firm in substance; cultivating one thing alone only makes one weaker and more frail,” and “Do not use clever falsehoods as your effort; recognize the undying formula of the other party. Keep adding life-prolonging wine inside the cauldron, and collect the soul-restoring nectar in the pot.” It thus revealed this practice of the Cantong Qi to the world. Since the Song, many have practiced it but few have succeeded, probably because they did not obtain the oral instructions.

From the Jin and Yuan on, Wang Chongyang founded the Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) school, fusing inner alchemy with Chan Buddhism and transmitting the Tao and saving people by the practice of pure solitary cultivation. The art of pure solitary cultivation is also a true transmission from Wangzi Qiao and Chisongzi, anciently called the art of circulating qi. It and the qi-union art of paired male-female cultivation originally followed on from each other; they differ only in their steps and do not diverge in principle. This art was probably inspired in ancient times by the hibernation of warm-blooded animals such as bears.

In pure cultivation, at the time of “gathering the Great Medicine” there is a state of “great death for seven days,” when the body's basal metabolic rate falls to its lowest point, like hibernation. The immortals say, “If you want not to die, you must be one who has died,” holding that after passing through this stage of hibernation one can transcend life and death.

Inner alchemists also paid attention to the shedding of snakes' skins, hoping through cultivation to shed the embryo and change the bones, like arthropods and reptiles molting, and so attain the Tao and become immortals. Hence, when the Great Medicine is obtained in pure-cultivation alchemy, the phenomena of the “six roots quaking”—fire blazing in the elixir field (dantian), the two kidneys boiling like soup, golden light shooting from the eyes, wind rising behind the ears, the cry of an eagle at the back of the head, and the body surging and the nose twitching—are regarded as signs of shedding the embryo and changing the bones. This practice can produce sudden awakening in the course of opening up the primordial consciousness, so it not only achieves the same end as Chan practice by a different route, but also brings the results of the intercourse of spirit and qi, dual cultivation of nature and life, and the forming of the embryo and completion of the elixir.

From the Song on, however, the Neo-Confucianism of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi dominated the realm of ideology, and the constraints of feudal ritual morality on the people grew ever tighter; the yin-yang grafting practice of the paired male-female school gradually came to be unacceptable to public opinion. The transmitters of the pure school increasingly set themselves against the yin-yang school, denouncing paired male-female cultivation as a depraved heresy that corrupted public morals and yin-yang grafting as sacrificing oneself in seeking from others, and they reinterpreted the Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection in terms of the pure school's practice.

Especially since the Qing, the Longmen (Dragon Gate) lineage of Quanzhen Taoism has flourished greatly, and the Linji school of Chan Buddhism has also prospered, giving rise to the saying “Linji and Longmen cover half the world.” The Longmen lineage was founded by Qiu Chuji, a disciple of Wang Chongyang. He left home at nineteen and studied the Tao under Wang Chongyang and Ma Danyang at twenty-six. Being young and strong, he did not need, as the old do, to rely on yin-yang grafting to build a bridge and pave the way, and attained the Tao entirely through the pure alchemical method of solitary self-realization. Later Wu Chongxu and Liu Huayang founded the Wu-Liu school of alchemy and wrote the Direct Discourse on the True Principles of the Heavenly Immortals, the Recorded Sayings on the Common Source of Immortals and Buddhas, the Treatise on Attesting the Golden Immortal, and the Scripture of Wisdom and Life. As a pure practice that converged with Chan, it spread widely in society, so that in public opinion the alchemy of the pure solitary school prevailed over the yin-yang dual cultivation school and became the mainstream of inner alchemy.

The pure school also honors the Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection as ancestral scriptures, but explains them in terms of pure practice, and it also reinterpreted such alchemical scriptures as the Mirror for Compounding the Medicine, the Lyrics of the Rootless Tree, and the Song of Striking the Lines.

Some of these alchemical scriptures, such as the Mirror for Compounding the Medicine, were abridged when included in the Taoist Canon in the Ming dynasty. Add to this the many years in which alchemists of every school annotated these books from their own points of view, and few outsiders today can know the true face of these scriptures.

Nevertheless, the pure practice, which uses no outer cauldron from the other party and relies on no money or power, has its own distinctive merits. Pure-cultivation alchemy holds firmly to the principle that “if people can remain constantly clear and still, heaven and earth will all return to them,” takes “when stillness reaches its extreme, yang is born” as the key to success, and “turning the light around to shine back” as the true oral instruction of its school, continuing until the spirit returns and qi is restored, the three flowers gather at the crown, and the five qi pay court to the origin—which is no easy thing for ordinary people to achieve!

The great masters of immortality of old, such as Wei Boyang, Lü Dongbin, Chen Tuan, Zhang Boduan, Wang Chongyang, and Zhang Sanfeng, all understood both outer and inner alchemy and knew both the instructions of yin-yang dual cultivation and the art of pure solitary cultivation, so their writings in fact integrate the alchemical methods of the Three Elements. We should therefore treat the various commentaries on the Cantong Qi by ancient alchemists with the utmost care, earnestly uncovering the alchemical instructions hidden in them rather than lightly dismissing them.

3. The Secret of the Great Elixir of the Human Element in the Cantong Qi

The Cantong Qi says: “This wondrous art—examine it carefully; these are no false words. Handed down for a hundred million generations, it is clear and can be verified.” These words show that the author of the Cantong Qi truly believed he had obtained a wondrous art not transmitted by a thousand sages. This art can be transmitted only to “the worthy,” and those who obtain it can “ride the white crane and mount the dragon's scales, roam the Great Void and visit the immortal lords, receive the charts and registers and be titled Perfected.” That is, the Zhouyi Cantong Qi is in fact a scholarly treatise on how to achieve long life and lasting vision and attain the Tao to become an immortal. It sums up the theories and techniques accumulated over a long time by the ancient immortality masters and the scholars of the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals and the Huang-Lao Way of the Qin and Han in their struggle against death, and it hides a wondrous art that can restore youth. This art naturally falls within the study of immortality, including both outer and inner alchemy, but its core should be the art of the mutual stimulation of yin and yang of the same kind—the Great Elixir of the Human Element.

This secret art of the union of male and female, yin and yang qi, originated in the reproductive worship of remote clan society. After a thousand years of exploration by the masters of the bedchamber, the immortality masters, physicians, and others, it had matured by the Qin and Han and was transmitted secretly in the Way of the Fangshi and Immortals and the later Huang-Lao Way. The bamboo slips unearthed from the Han tombs at Mawangdui, for example—Ten Questions, Uniting Yin and Yang, and Discourse on the Supreme Way Under Heaven—show that this secret art had already reached a fairly high level at the time and was highly valued as a wondrous way to long life in the Qin and Han.

In the Eastern Han the Huang-Lao Way flourished. The fangshi gathered by Cao Cao—Zuo Ci, Gan Shi, Dongguo Yannian, and others—were all adept in the art of male-female qi union, so it is not surprising that Wei Boyang, Xu Congshi, Chunyu Shutong, and others secretly transmitted this art.

That the immortality masters of the Huang-Lao Way regarded this art as a ladder to attaining the Tao and becoming immortal can be proved from Ge Hong's Baopuzi (Inner Chapters) of the Wei and Jin. The chapter “Subtle Purport” of the Inner Chapters records: “I have heard that to seek the way of life, one must know the two mountains. I do not know where these mountains are; I hope you will enlighten me to dispel my confusion.” Baopuzi replied: “There are such mountains, but they are not Hua or Huo, nor Song or Dai. The Mountain of Great Origin is hard to know but easy to seek. It is neither in heaven nor on earth, neither sunk nor floating. Utterly steep and far-reaching, towering and rugged, harmonious qi fills it, and spirit and intent roam together. Its jade well is deep, irrigating without rest. One hundred and twenty offices and bureaus follow one another; Li and Kan are ranged in their positions. Ten thousand mysterious mushrooms and singular crimson trees grow there; its treasures are all extraordinary. Gold and jade tower up, and a sweet spring flows from its corner. Those who restore their years embrace its clear stream. If you can cultivate it, you may be the equal of Wangzi Qiao and Chisongzi. This is the first mountain. The Mountain of the Long Valley is dim and lofty; dark qi floats and drifts, jade liquor falls thick. A golden pool and purple chamber lie in its recesses. Foolish people who go there rashly all return dead; those who have the Tao climb it and do not decline. They gather and eat the yellow essence and so fly up to heaven. This is the second mountain. Both were kept secret by the sages of old; think on them deeply.”

It is not hard to see that the “way of seeking life through the two mountains” left by the ancient sages and secretly transmitted in the immortality Taoism of the Wei and Jin has some obscure connection with the “Three Peaks art of gathering in battle” in the Taoism of the Song and Ming. We can also see that the Cantong Qi's writing on the secret art of long life is similar in style to this passage in the Baopuzi on the secretly transmitted way of seeking life. Ge Hong's art came down from Zuo Ci of the late Han, while Wei Boyang's learning was connected with Yin Changsheng, Xu Congshi, and Chunyu Shutong. Though their lineages differed, their cultural background was the same.

The way of seeking life through the two mountains in “Subtle Purport” is in fact the secret art of male-female yin-yang stimulation transmitted in the Cantong Qi. The secret art of the Cantong Qi is also directly descended from the Mawangdui bamboo text Discourse on the Supreme Way Under Heaven; as early as the beginning of the Han, this art of male-female qi union was regarded as “the supreme way under heaven.”

In the Han and Wei the art of male-female stimulation and qi union was extremely secret. It could only be recorded on bamboo and silk in coded language and passed on by secret oral instruction. Ge Hong said: “This method was passed from mouth to mouth by the Perfected and was never written down.” “The Mysterious Girl, the Pure Girl, Zidu, Rongcheng Gong, Pengzu, and their like recorded only its coarser matters, and never put the most essential points on paper.” (Inner Chapters, “Resolving Hindrances”) This is the same tone as Wei Boyang's “I speak privately to the worthy; how would I dare lightly commit it to writing?”

It is not hard to see that Ge Hong in “Subtle Purport” and Wei Boyang in the Cantong Qi were recording the same thing. It must be pointed out, however, that in the eyes of immortality Taoists such as Wei Boyang and Ge Hong, this art of male-female yin-yang stimulation and qi union was an immortality art one level higher than the arts of the bedchamber; the two differ in method and in effect.

Even after the late Tang and Five Dynasties, when this practice of the Cantong Qi circulated in the world, Taoists still distinguished it sharply from the arts of the bedchamber. Awakening to Perfection also holds that the Great Elixir of the Human Element through paired male-female cultivation is the right path of the Way of the immortals and does not involve lust, while the arts of the bedchamber and the “mud and water” alchemy of the Three Peaks art of gathering in battle are condemned as lustful heresies. In fact, the Great Elixir of the Human Element of the yin-yang school of paired male-female cultivation uses prior heaven and not later heaven, uses qi and not substance, and truly has the wondrous effect of restoring youth.

The arts of the bedchamber, however, are merely techniques for regulating the sexual life of men and women. They can treat sexual dysfunction and support health, but done wrongly they lead to debauchery and harm life, and they cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the inner-alchemical immortality art of yin-yang qi union. So although yin-yang alchemy and the arts of the bedchamber are essentially connected, the inner alchemists had good reason to set them against each other. Moreover, the moral values of Chinese society have always been founded on ritual propriety, and inner alchemists had to do this to gain a footing in society.

The Cantong Qi criticizes “the yin way that relishes the nine and one”; the Baopuzi (Inner Chapters) likens “the Mysterious Girl and the Pure Girl to water and fire”; Awakening to Perfection warns people that “if you do not know how to study it, do not force the attack,” lest “you lose the priceless treasure of our house”; and the Lyrics of the Rootless Tree says, “Not giving up meat and fish is no violation, but lust is; violating through lust loses the treasure of long life.” All of this is simply for fear that the cultivator will “be unable to hold the boat at the head of the rapids”—that lustful thoughts will arise and he will ejaculate, taking the road of “going with the flow to produce people.” “Going with the flow produces people; going against it makes immortals” is a basic principle of inner alchemy. Alchemists use the reverse and not the forward flow, and this too is the fundamental difference between the Great Elixir of the Human Element of the yin-yang school and the arts of the bedchamber.

In human society, life and death are undoubtedly the core of human concerns, and they are also the wellspring from which all religions arise. Human sexual life is connected both with life and with death; it is the most mysterious question of human life and likewise a concern of all religions. The practices of religion are mostly experiences of life and death, and naturally they cannot avoid the study of sexual life. To obtain mystical experiences of communion with the divine, religious figures all carry out some kind of self-cultivating “human-body engineering” to change the state of their body and mind.

There are signs that the three world religions (Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam) each have their own practices of cultivation, and that the highest level of these practices always transmits some secret arts of paired male-female cultivation.

Things under heaven often “reach the same destination by different roads, a hundred thoughts arriving at one conclusion.” Since the art of male-female qi union belongs to the highest level of human-body engineering, and religious figures of every faith in the world pursue high levels of bodily cultivation, it is in some sense inevitable that they should independently arrive at the art of male-female qi union.

Mr. Chen Yingning once investigated the secret transmission of arts of male-female qi union in the world's major religions and found that their practices differed in level. The secret practices of Islam were similar in level to the Chinese arts of the bedchamber; the practices of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and of yoga were of a higher level; but none was as exquisite and wondrous as the dual cultivation of the Great Elixir of the Human Element in Chinese Taoism. During a visit to Belgium, I came across a book published in New York in 1979, Sexual Secrets: The Alchemy of Ecstasy, which introduces secret sexual practices of some of the world's major peoples and religions. Judging from the bedchamber illustrations it presents from India, the Arab world, the Western peoples of Europe and America, and ancient China, all are indeed one level lower than the Chinese Great Elixir of the Human Element of the yin-yang school of paired male-female cultivation.

The arts of male-female qi union transmitted in the various religions are extremely secret. They are often treated as the means by which high priests (gaogong) of the highest attainment transmit their teaching; they are kept strictly from most believers within the religion and flatly denied to those outside it.

The ritual morality of Chinese society holds that “of all evils, lust is the first,” and Sinicized Buddhism prohibits lust as a major precept, so ordinary Buddhists and outsiders would never believe that Buddhism contains an art of male-female qi union. Yet the biography of the eminent monk Kumarajiva records that he asked the emperor of the Yao Qin for palace women, and the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch contains the saying “sentient beings come to sow the seed.” Such a Buddhist secret, “not to be spoken, not to be spoken,” will become suddenly clear to the practitioner once an accomplished monk points it out.

The line in Awakening to Perfection, “Know that the great recluse lives in the city market; why guard solitary stillness deep in the mountains?”, agrees with the Buddha's experience of six years of ascetic practice in the Snow Mountains that yielded nothing, showing that cultivating the Tao is joy, not suffering. Even the word kong (“emptiness”) in the Buddhist scripture's “emptiness is form, form is emptiness” can be broken open as “the work beneath the cave” (its character being read as xue, “cave,” above gong, “work”); and the Buddhist stories of the herdswoman offering milk, the subduing of the demon of desire, the dragon girl presenting her jewel, and the Chan master of the Five Precepts longing for Red Lotus carry still deeper meanings.

As for the Tantric lamas' practice of the Chan of Bliss and the method of the two bodies in union, that goes without saying. This is truly “once you have it in hand, keep your mouth shut,” and “turn a somersault, and the bodhisattva appears.” Taoist scriptures contain even more such suggestive language.

The Tao Te Ching says: “When the superior person hears of the Tao, he practices it diligently; when the average person hears of the Tao, he half believes it; when the inferior person hears of the Tao, he laughs loudly at it. If he did not laugh, it would not be the Tao.” Hence Taoist books such as the Gourd Song contain verses like “The Tao that can be told is not the constant Tao; spoken of, it sounds dirty; practiced, it is wondrous.” Other sayings such as “the wine of the west, the flower of the north,” “seek the Perfected in the flower streets and willow lanes,” “people of the time do not grasp the principle within the flower; one instruction of heaven's secret is worth ten thousand in gold,” and “the immortals will not say it plainly; if they said it plainly, people would die laughing” all amount to nothing but “I urge you to search out the place where your body was born,” achieving the same effect as the Chan riddle of an eminent monk asking you “Where did your body come from?” The Buddha said: “I have a treasure hidden in the mountain of form; do you all recognize it?”

Had the Tang monk on his journey for the scriptures not entered the Bottomless Cave or passed through the Kingdom of Women, he could not have reached the Western Heaven.

The Instructions on the Metal-and-Fire Elixir says: “Cultivating one thing alone, the elixir is hard to form; to form the elixir, you must examine the wondrous place. May I ask whether you gentlemen are willing to believe? Listen to me explain yin and yang from the beginning.” “Yin and yang, spirit and qi, are originally Qian and Kun; the Laozi calls them the gate of mysterious transformation. The great Book of Changes has said it plainly; how can students fail to awaken to the numinous root?” As we know, Taoist culture was originally a compendium of the learning of the three teachings and nine schools, so it is not surprising that such a work as the Zhouyi Cantong Qi has been handed down in it.

Zhang Boduan's essay “On Reading the Zhouyi Cantong Qi” comes closest to the original meaning of the Cantong Qi. It says: “The wondrous use of the Great Elixir follows Qian and Kun; as Qian and Kun revolve, the Five Phases divide. When the Five Phases go with the flow, the ordinary way has birth and death; when the Five Phases go against it, the body of the elixir is ever numinous and ever enduring.” “The common people use it daily without knowing it; the sage can trace its source. Seeing that the Way of the Changes fully exhausts the principles of Qian and Kun, he entrusted his images to this text.” “Words are set up to make the images clear; once the images are grasped, the words are forgotten. Images are set up to point to the meaning; once the meaning is understood, the images are discarded. For the adept it is simple and easy; for the deluded, the more confused, the harder it becomes. Thus we know that the superior cultivator of perfection who reads the Cantong Qi does not cling to the images or hold fast to the words.”

In fact, Wei Boyang, Xu Congshi, and Chunyu Shutong of the Eastern Han were all followers of the Huang-Lao Way. They were versed in the image-and-number learning of the Changes of the Han and familiar with the outer alchemy of gold and silver (the furnace and fire). Wei Boyang discovered that the immortality art of male-female stimulation and qi union secretly transmitted in the Huang-Lao Way shared the same principle as the chemical reaction of lead and mercury in the art of the Golden Elixir (the furnace and fire), and also accorded with the way of pairing yin and yang in the study of the Changes. The principle of the pairing of Qian and Kun in the Way of the Changes, the images of the rising and setting, waxing and waning of the sun and moon in the Way of Heaven, and the experiments on the quantities of lead and mercury and the arising and passing of the Five Phases in the firing of the furnace all conceal the fundamental law of the mutual stimulation of yin and yang in the cosmos. This law permeates the daily life of ordinary people yet goes unnoticed; only a sage can, following this universal law, transmit the immortality art of paired male-female cultivation.

In the Cantong Qi, Wei Boyang joined together Huang-Lao, the great Changes, and the furnace and fire, using the hexagrams and lines of the study of the Changes as symbols and the lead and mercury of the furnace as images, to expound the secret art of male-female stimulation and qi union of the Huang-Lao Way.

The Cantong Qi uses the symbols of the hexagrams and the images of the movements of the sun and moon as its theoretical framework, and the lead-mercury reaction of the art of the Golden Elixir and its quantities as a model for the fire timing of the art of male-female stimulation. The real immortality art is not written on the surface of the text at all. The reason no one understood the Cantong Qi for so many years is that they were bewildered by the symbols used as metaphors—the images of the Changes, the dragon and tiger, lead and mercury. That is why Zhang Boduan explained that the key to unlocking the riddle of the Cantong Qi lies in grasping the image and forgetting the words, grasping the meaning and discarding the image, and not clinging to the images or holding fast to the words.

According to research by Mr. Liu Zhongyu, Xu Congshi of Qingzhou, who received Wei Boyang's secret transmission, was the first to “annotate the Cantong Qi in terms of yin and yang” (Liu Zhongyu, “A Study of the Profound Meaning of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi,” in Explorations of Religious Questions, 1984 collection). This commentary still existed in the Song: Zheng Qiao's “Treatise on Literature” in the Comprehensive Treatises records it as Comprehensive Outline of Yin and Yang in the Zhouyi Cantong Qi, three scrolls, attributed to Xu Congshi; it also appears in the Catalog of Scriptures Missing from the Taoist Canon (whose compiler is not named). Ge Hong had seen this commentary, which is why the entry on Wei Boyang in the Biographies of Divine Immortals says: “But the Confucians of the world, not knowing the matter of the divine elixir, mostly annotated it in terms of yin and yang, quite missing its meaning.” This shows that before Ge Hong people did not doubt that the main theme of the Cantong Qi was “yin and yang.” The words “yin and yang” here can only have the same meaning as in the Mawangdui bamboo text Uniting Yin and Yang—that is, the art of male-female qi union. This is an important piece of evidence establishing that the secret art of the Cantong Qi is the Great Elixir of the Human Element of the yin-yang school.

Ge Hong believed only in the Golden Elixir (outer alchemy) as the key to becoming immortal and did not agree with annotating the Cantong Qi in terms of “yin and yang.” In fact, although the Cantong Qi focuses on describing the secret art of the Great Elixir of the Human Element, it also holds that this theory is connected with the Numinous Elixir of the Earth Element and the Divine Elixir of the Heaven Element, and so it does not reject the art of the Golden Elixir.

Among Zhang Boduan's alchemical poems in Awakening to Perfection, fourteen treat inner and outer together. Qiu Zhao'ao comments: “The inner elixir of the Human Element must take the prior-heaven Ren water. The outer elixir begins with the Earth Element and gradually leads to ingestion of the Heaven Element, which likewise relies on the true water within Kan; thus all Three Elements use Ren.” The theory of the Cantong Qi is a sublimation of the three ancient schools of immortality arts—ingestion, the bedchamber, and circulating qi—which is one reason for the great number of later commentaries on it.

Of the surviving commentaries on the Cantong Qi, I have seen more than forty, of which the better known are those of Peng Xiao, Yu Yan, Chen Xianwei, Chen Zhixu, Lu Xixing, Qiu Zhao'ao, Tao Susi, Liu Yiming, Zhu Yuanyu, and Dong Dening.

Probably because the oral instructions for the highest Great Elixir of the Human Element of paired male-female yin-yang cultivation have been passed down secretly from master to disciple since ancient times, after Zhang Sanfeng and Lu Xixing most alchemical masters had only a partial understanding of these instructions, and few obtained the complete instructions. Among modern alchemical masters, even more enjoy an empty reputation while few have real learning. Some call themselves famous masters but are not enlightened masters; sincere seekers who travel everywhere to find a master and seek instructions are in the end put off by such people and cannot recover the complete yin-yang instructions. The alchemical scriptures say that the work on nature depends on one's own awakening, while the work on life must be transmitted by a master; yet true masters are hard to meet, and those one does meet are mostly frauds who deceive the world to win fame.

Mr. Chen Yingning, who devoted his whole life in modern times to the study of inner alchemy, sought masters everywhere for alchemical instructions. He said that he had “five formal teachers in all: two of the Northern school, one of the Southern school, one of the Hidden Immortals school, and one Confucian,” without naming them; whether these people were truly qualified to be his teachers is unknown.

In his later years, Mr. Chen Yingning wrote in his Autobiography that, in search of alchemical instructions, “I left my family and sought guidance everywhere. First I visited famous eminent monks of Buddhism, such as Dharma Master Yuexia of Mount Jiuhua, Dharma Master Dixian of Ningbo, the Eight-Fingered Ascetic of Mount Tiantong, and Monk Yekai of Changzhou. But I found that the Buddhist methods of cultivation all emphasized the mind and nature and still had no method for the body, so they could not achieve the goal of curing illness and prolonging life. So I sought out Taoists, such as those at Mount Qionglong in Suzhou and Mount Mao in Jurong County—but these were all places of incense worship, and the Taoist priests did not understand cultivation. At the Wudang Mountains in Junzhou, Hubei, and Mount Lao in Jimo County, Shandong, there were a few people doing cultivation practice, but the methods they knew did not match mine, and they could not answer many of my questions. Other little-known places, such as Mount Tu in Huaiyuan County, Anhui, and Mount Jingai in Huzhou, Zhejiang, were all wasted trips with no result. I thought that searching this way was a waste of time, and that I would do better to read and study on my own, so I resolved to read the Taoist Canon.” Among alchemists there has long been a saying that “there is no immortal who does not read books,” so reading the alchemical scriptures thoroughly is indeed a fundamental path to obtaining the instructions of inner alchemy.

But the books of inner alchemy are piled up like mountains; the commentaries on the Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection alone number several dozen, many of them erroneous and fanciful works by alchemical masters without real learning. Without someone to point the way, it is very hard for students to break through to the higher states.

As for the alchemy of the pure solitary school, the alchemical books written after the Song are plain and easy to understand, and most of their instructions have been fully revealed. Mr. Wang Mu's Essentials of Inner-Alchemy Health Practices has made a preliminary compilation of them. Only for the practice of the yin-yang school of paired male-female cultivation is there as yet no alchemical book that states its methods plainly. Fortunately, the two books the Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection contain the complete instructions for the Great Elixir of the Human Element.

Probably because the two Perfected, Wei Boyang and Zhang Boduan, feared that the supreme alchemical method of paired male-female cultivation would be lost, they deliberately hid all its instructions in their books, leaving later generations to decipher them for themselves. Inner alchemy has always been unwilling to commit its instructions to writing; only these two books are exceptions.

But these two books are written in rhymed verse, poems, and lyrics, with coded terms such as dragon and tiger, lead and mercury, as their symbolic images, and ordinary people cannot understand them. The Cantong Qi says: “Ponder it until you know it well; look over it again and again, from top to bottom. After a thousand readings it will glow; after ten thousand, it will come into view. The spirits may tell you, or your mind may suddenly awaken of itself. Trace the thread to its end, and you will surely find the gate. The Way of Heaven has no favorites; it is always passed on to the worthy.” This teaches people to read it a thousand, ten thousand times, and they will surely find the gate and go deep within.

Zhang Boduan's “Preface to the Scripture of the Ancestor of Fuli” also says: “Heaven does not begrudge the Tao, earth does not begrudge its treasures; how dare I keep it to myself? Embodying the heart of the Most High and wishing that everyone may attain the Tao and every person return to the truth, I set out these unrevealed secrets in full detail, leaving nothing out. May those in the world who care about nature and life and devote themselves to the Tao and its virtue, if they are fated to meet a master, find confirmation in this book, and only then set their hands to the work in sincerity. Though I have not taught them face to face, they too are my disciples!”

Examining the various commentaries on the Cantong Qi and Awakening to Perfection, the best is that of Lu Xixing; next, one may consult Qiu Zhao'ao's Collected Commentaries, which does not lose the main purport either. Readers who study deeply with these commentaries will surely obtain the orthodox instructions of the yin-yang school and be able to begin cultivation.

For Lu Changgeng (Lu Xixing) was the founding patriarch of the Eastern school and received the true transmission of the yin-yang alchemical method. Later, Li Hanxu founded the Western school of alchemy, which pursued the Eastern school closely but remained a step behind. Therefore Lu Changgeng's Oral Meaning of the Cantong Qi and Conjectural Commentary on the Cantong Qi are the orthodox transmission that breaks open the gate of the Cantong Qi. Following this thread, readers will be able to uncover the age-old secret hidden in this extraordinary book. May learned gentlemen at home and abroad pay heed to this!

The Cantong Qi gives the Way of the elixir a fairly systematic theoretical framework, and its argument encompasses all Three Elements. To insist that its theory refers to one particular method and to take that as orthodox is of course one-sided. Moreover, the commentaries on the Cantong Qi through the ages cover all Three Elements.