Shengtai
is a Chinese syncretic metaphor for achieving Buddhist liberation or Daoist transcendence. The circa fifth century CE Chinese Buddhist Humane King Sutra first recorded describing the bodhisattva path towards attaining Buddhahood; was related with the more familiar Indian Mahayana concept of [Tathāgatagarbha|] that all sentient beings are born with the Buddha-nature potential to become enlightened. The Chan Buddhist teaching master Mazu Daoyi first mentioned post-enlightenment, and by the tenth century Chan monks were regularly described as recluses nurturing their sacred embryo in isolated locations. The renowned Daoist Zhang Boduan was first to use the expression in a context of physiological Internal Alchemy, and adepts developed prolonged meditation techniques through which one can supposedly become pregnant, gestate, and give birth to a spiritually perfected doppelganger.
Terminology
Chinese is a linguistic compound of two common words:- peerless, incomparable, uniquely endowed; paragon; a conventional epithet for sovereign....
- possessing wisdom, judgment, and moral excellence; profoundly wise and virtuous; sage, sagacious; holy, sacred; holy person, saint....
- master practitioner of an art...
- fetus, embryo; womb; something encapsulated like a fetus.
- embryonic, fetal; source, origin; e.g., 胎息, embryonic breathing, technique of "pneuma circulation" in which an adept breathes in stillness, without using nose or mouth, as when in the womb; early stage of development; something in an unfinished state.
- give birth to; spawn; congenital....
The unabridged, which is lexicographically comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary, defines with two meanings:
- 圣人之胎。
- 道教金丹的别名。内丹家以母体结胎比喻凝聚精﹑气﹑神三者所炼成之丹﹐故名。
- "divine embryo"
- "holy embryo"
- "Embryo of Sainthood" or "Sacred Embryo"
- "Embryo of Sainthood"
- "sagely embryo" or "embryo of sainthood"
- "sagely embryo"
- "saintly embryo"
- "embryo of sagehood"
- "holy fetus"
In Daoist terminology, Sacred Embryo has several synonyms, including,,,, and.
Indian Buddhism
The Chinese Buddhist word was associated with the better-known Indian Mahayana Buddhist concept of referring to the inherent potential of any sentient being to become a buddha.is a Pali word that Gautama Buddha uses when referring to himself or other Buddhas in the Pāli Canon, and translated as Chinese. [wikt:गर्भ#Sanskrit|] is a Sanskrit word, sharing the ambiguity of Chinese. Buddhist scholars translated into the "awkward Chinese phrase" with, thus, the sexual and gestational connotations of the Indian Buddhist "doctrine of the embryo of the thus-come one were lost in translation".
Many Indian Buddhist scriptures portrayed the female body, especially the womb, as impure, and characterized fetal gestation as the "focal point of human suffering", representing the cosmic misery of . In response, Buddhists also developed elaborate legends about the Buddha Śākyamuni's supernatural birth. His mother Queen Māyā supposedly was impregnated while dreaming that a white elephant entered her body, her pregnancy was painless, and the Buddha was born from underneath her right arm. These narrative elements helped establish the Buddha not only as different from ordinary people but more specifically as "impervious to the pollution and suffering understood to ordinarily accompany sexual intercourse, fetal gestation, and birth".
The metaphysical terms of and Chinese were closely related to the concept of Buddha-nature, Sanskrit or Chinese, the latent potential to achieve Buddhahood that lies dormant in all sentient beings.
Medieval Chinese Buddhism
The, an apocryphal scripture composed around the fifth century during the Northern Wei dynasty, first used the expression describing the bodhisattva path towards attaining Buddhahood: "Buddhas and bodhisattvas cultivate and nourish the ten types of consciousness into a sagely embryo." While Indian Buddhist texts described the bodhisattva path as consisting of ten sequential stages or "grounds", the Chinese expanded this sequence to include thirty additional preliminary stages or "minds", resulting in a much longer path towards enlightenment. These thirty minds that precede entry into the ten grounds, "constitute an intermediate sequence of stages during which the aspirant's sagehood is already 'conceived' but nevertheless still 'embryonic'". According to the Humane King Sutra,"In these, the bodhisattva is capable of transforming sentient beings in small measure and has already surpassed all of the good stages of the two vehicles. All buddhas and bodhisattvas nurture these ten minds, which constitute an embryo of sagehood."
Instead of the transitional encompassing only the first ten minds, a subsequent passage more broadly associates it with all thirty,
" the embryo of sagehood's thirty stages of patiently subduing, the ten faiths, ten cessations, and ten firm minds, Among all buddhas of the three times who have practiced within, There are none who were not born from this patient subjugation."
These two quotes show that the Chinese concept of is entirely different from the Indian Buddhist concept of or Chinese, which is equivalent to . While buddha-nature refers to the universal buddhahood inherent in all sentient beings, the discusses as specifically referring to an exceptional aspirant's progress on sagely fetal growth along the bodhisattva path.
The Chinese term never seems to have been used to translate the Sanskrit word despite their apparent similarities. In Chinese Buddhism, "sage" and "thus-come one", uses the term referring to the embryonic Buddha Śākyamuni within Queen Māyā's womb, which suggests that some Chinese Buddhists may have connected the embryo of sagehood to the Buddha's miraculous fetal gestation.
and were not used interchangeably in China, and there was a verbal contrast in their usages. On the one hand, a "soteriology of sudden liberative vision" was associated with the words "embryo of the thus-come one" or "buddha-nature", typically used with the Chinese verbs or. For example, the popular Chinese Buddhist saying that. With the understanding that a buddha is instantaneous, it is categorically all or nothing. On the other, a "soteriology of gradual development" was associated with the "embryo of sagehood". Medieval Chinese Buddhist texts did not mention "seeing" the, but rather used the verbs,,, and most commonly or . "Nurturing the embryo of sagehood" derives from the ancient prenatal concept of. These verbs illustrate that "the embryo of sagehood" retained closer semantic connections to literal embryology than did the "embryo of the thus-come one", which was understood in China as equivalent to buddha-nature.
Vasubandhu's describes the Ten Stages of the original Indian Buddhist path of the bodhisattva as being "like pregnancy in a womb". The Chinese Buddhist scholar-monk Fashang explains,
" "like pregnancy in a womb" takes women as an example and takes pregnancy as a metaphor. In the first month, carries the embryo, and after ten months, is completely developed. Bodhisattvas are also like this: in the first ground, they attain the embryo of sagehood, and in the tenth ground, the body of sagehood is completely developed."
Instead of following the sequence of thirty minds preceding entry into the ten grounds/stages, Fashang connects the embryo of sagehood to the earlier Indian Buddhist understanding of the unfolding bodhisattva path as consisting only of the ten grounds themselves, with each progressive month of pregnancy corresponding to one ground.
The 594, Great Calming and Contemplation) Buddhist doctrinal summa, based on lectures given by Zhiyi, the fourth patriarch of Tiantai Buddhism, discusses meditation in terms of the.
Practitioners who skillfully regulate these three matters cause to be conceived within the womb of sagehood. Because the activity of their minds is not yet fully under their command, they ought to apply their minds to bringing together the father and mother of skillful means and the perfection of wisdom, who will conceive within the womb of sagehood. Why would allow themselves to be conceived within the wombs of denizens of hell, the three destinies, or the realms of humans or gods?
Zhiyi interprets not just as an analogy for gradually growing enlightenment but as a literal site for rebirth, that should be considered highly preferable to rebirth in the destinies of samsara.
Zhiyi also uses to explain that the describes as "peacefully abiding in worldly truth, when someone first emerges from the womb, this is called 'nonbirth-birth'."
Now to explain "worldly truth." when ignorance combines with dharma nature and all kinds of separations and distinctions are produced ; thus it is called "worldly truth." As for "peacefully abiding," if by means of calming and contemplation, one abides peacefully in worldly truth, then it becomes an inconceivable object, and the stage of practicing observation is completed; thus it is called "peacefully abiding." Because one peacefully abides, is called "being conceived within the womb of sagehood." When one first activates one's buddha knowledge and vision and recognizes that are unborn, this stage is called "exiting the womb of sagehood." Because one does not see worldly truth ignorance, says "not born." Because one obtains buddha knowledge and buddha vision, says "born." The Treatise says: "all [Dharma|] are not born, but is born," which is the meaning.
Zhiyi's disciple Guanding explains that "Peacefully abiding in worldly truth" has two meanings. Exoterically, it denotes the time from first thinking of conception in a womb until death. Esoterically, it means a bodhisattva who is at the stage of cultivating skillful means, which reiterates Zhiyi's notion of worldly truth as a womb within which the practitioner grows as a bodhisattva. "When cultivation gives rise to realization and ignorance is destroyed, this constitutes the first emergence from the womb; it is also nirvana, which is beginningless and yet is said thenceforth to begin.
Chan Buddhism
With the rise of Chan Buddhism from the Tang through Song dynasties, Buddhist religious authority began to shift from translated and apocryphal Buddhist scriptures to the recorded sayings of indigenous Chinese Chan masters, and Chan tradition emphasized sudden over gradual enlightenment, namely,.The earliest recorded Chan usage of is in Mazu Daoyi's famous sermon about. The 952 version mentions :
What the heart/mind produces is called form. When one realizes that form is empty, production becomes nonproduction. Having understood this, one can act according to circumstances, dressing, eating, developing and maintaining the sagely embryo, and living in harmony with spontaneity.
The Tang scholar-monk Guifeng Zongmi, fifth patriarch of the Heze school in Southern Chan Buddhism, criticizes the apparent contradiction between Mazu's using the sacred embryo trope while claiming that enlightenment is instantaneous and need not be developed, Zongmi asks, "nature is like empty space, neither growing nor diminishing. By what means could it be supplemented?" Zongmi also mentions "feeding the soul and making the sagely embryo grow " in his.
Gufeng Zongmi notes the figurative resemblance between the embryo of sagehood and the impregnation of the storehouse consciousness—the eighth of the Eight Consciousnesses in the Yogācāra philosophical tradition, which is said to store the impressions of previous experiences, which form the seeds of future karma in this life and in subsequent rebirths. His later commentary on the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment says, the "awakened mind is the embryo of sagehood".
When by means of but a single thought one awakens to this perfect and wondrous mind, the storehouse consciousness is thereupon impregnated with the seed of sagehood, though conditions have not yet brought it to external manifestation; thus, it is like the beginning of pregnancy.
Although Zhiyi argued that the embryo of sagehood could be conceived through nothing more than proper meditation, Zongmi equated the embryo of sagehood with the awakened mind, metaphysically explained as the seeds of Buddhahood impregnating one's storehouse consciousness in order attain liberation.
By the tenth century, it became increasingly common for Chan monks to be described as recluses nurturing the embryo of sagehood in isolated forests or on mountains. For example, the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 describes "sitting on stones, gazing at clouds, and nurturing the embryo of sagehood." Elsewhere, he recounts a trip to the stone bridge deep in the Tiantai Mountain mountains in search of the legendary Eighteen Arhats, who he imagines "sitting together on green cliffs, nurturing the embryo of sagehood."
According to the 988, Song-dynasty Biographies of Eminent Monks), when the wandering monk Zhifeng met Yuquan Shenxiu, "… the ice of his doubts melted away" and he decided to "nurture the embryo of sagehood." He moved to the Anfeng mountains, where he passed ten years, "eating from trees and drinking from streams." After the provincial governor Wei Wen learned of Zhifeng, he invited him to return to the city, where he took up abbacy of the new Anguo Monastery. "From that time on, he rushed about in the padded robes." Subsequently, it became a literary trope that after a Chan monk's enlightenment was certified through lineage transmission, they would nurture the embryo of sagehood during a period of reclusion or aimless wandering before returning to public life.
After the early Chinese Buddhist reception of the "embryo of sagehood" was guided by the metaphysics of spiritual pregnancy and buddha bodies, Chan Buddhists gave the concept a more markedly metaphorical character, and Daoist Inner Alchemy, which emerged closely after the rise of Chan, gave a new role of embodiment in the pursuit of religious liberation.
Daoist Internal Alchemy
During the Tang dynasty, the Daoist practice of psychophysiological began to supersede the ancient, and sometimes dangerous, practice of chemical . Daoist Internal Alchemy practitioners developed the term "sacred embryo" into a complex process of symbolic pregnancy generating a spiritually perfected duplicate of oneself within oneself, which later became synonymous with the elixir of immortality in External Alchemy. This alchemical embryo "represents a new life, true and eternal in its quality".In Internal Alchemy, the "sagely embryo" is an amalgam of Buddhist ideas concerning latent spiritual qualities that are developable through a symbolic birth leading to awakening, and Daoist ideas of accessing immortality through to the cosmic matrix. is a basic concept in Daoist alchemical literature, for example, the term refers to mentally repeating one's embryonic development, emphasizing "the return of the physical freshness and perfect vital force of infancy, childhood, and even fetal life". Returning to the origin, the womb, or the embryo implies the idea of "rebirth and renewal as a kind of countercurrent to ordinary life". In distinction to Buddhism emphasizing the spiritual or psychological dimensions of an adept's experience, Daoism focuses upon corporeal metaphors for the physical or psychophysiological sensations such as inner breathing, inner flows, and inner heat.
Although the gestational motif appears in Internal Alchemy texts around the middle of the Tang, it derives from earlier Buddhist and Daoist contexts. Many Daoist classics mention embryonic and gestational motifs. A famous example is the circa fourth century BCE praising infancy. "He who embodies the fullness of integrity is like a ruddy infant. Wasps, spiders, scorpions, and snakes will not sting or bite him; Rapacious birds and fierce beasts will not seize him." "By being a ravine for all under heaven, Eternal integrity will never desert you. If eternal integrity never deserts you, You will return to the state of infancy "; which suggests that "human vitality is fully charged upon parturition and constantly discharges with every natural cycle of breath". Both these words meaning "infant", and, sometimes refer to the embryo in Internal Alchemy.
The circa mid-second century CE, a fundamental treatise on Inner Alchemy, poetically describes the birth of a spiritual embryo, which is usually connected with its transcendence of the mortal body.
Similar in kind to a hen's egg, the white and the black tally with one another. It is only one inch in size, but it is the beginning. Then, the four limbs, the five viscera, the sinews and bones join it. When the ten months have elapsed, it leaves its womb. Its bones are weak and pliant, its flesh is smooth like lead.
Although Daoist texts describe body-centered meditations that recall the various stages of embryonic development, they are nevertheless describing psychological or spiritual processes. The four stages in the allegorical development of the closely follow actual gestations: ; for a duration of ten lunar months, corresponding to the 280 days of gestation according to traditional Chinese medical texts; ; and for three years.
Already in the second and third centuries, some Daoist writings referred to religious practices of or of nurturing an infant god, called the, that resides inside the body. The Shangqing School scriptures, believed to have been revealed to Yang Xi in the late fourth-century, developed these practices into formalized and complex meditative procedures for visualizing one's own spiritual rebirth.
The fourth or fifth century, Commentary to the Scripture on the Inner Effulgences of the Yellow Court) has one of the earliest references to an allegorical embryo, "the embryo-immortal dances to the three couplets of the heart-lute."
The circa ninth-century, which contains commentaries attributed to Ye Fashan and Luo Gongyuan, instructs an adept to "imagine the true essence of the two kidneys merging into a single and the blood of the heart descending to combine, whereupon the image of the infant is formed." The Ye commentary explains that the embryo of an immortal body is formed by visualizing the same and substances whose combination in sexual intercourse was understood to cause normal pregnancy. And the Luo-attributed commentary says that after creating the embryo of sagehood, one must fully refine the body of sagehood for ten months, after which it is capable of exiting the practitioner's physical body "from the crown of the head riding on a purple cloud and that it constitutes a second body identical in appearance to the material body."
In practices for transforming the body's energies, the formation of the embryo is closely related to the purification and merging of essence, energy, and spirit: ,, and . Beyond this, texts of different eras define the embryo and explain its formation in various ways. The embryo as the perfected elixir can denote the or which, according to Zhong-Lü sources, achieves fullness after three hundred days of transformation.
The late Tang describes how "the medicinal ingredients of the inner elixir come from the heart and kidneys, which all people possess." By combining them within oneself according to the proper timing and procedures, one "appropriates the efficacy of sexual intercourse between husband and wife, so that the embryo of sagehood is completed and true is born." As a result, "when the great medicine is complete, the yang spirit emerges and there is a body outside the body, like a cicada shedding its skin." This passage mixes alchemical and sexual themes. Its basic sequence involves manipulating bodily substances originally found in the heart and kidneys toward the center of the body, where they fuse together; then refining the resultant Inner Alchemy or embryo of sagehood ; and finally giving birth from the crown of the head to an immortal body, the. In these meditation exercises, the constitutes the adept's male component, that which becomes the Yang Spirit. is the feminine component, relating to spirit not as a wife to a husband but rather as mother to a son.
Zhang Boduan, one of the most famous Inner Alchemists of the Song period, was the first to use the expression in the context of Internal Alchemy, and the first to have explicitly referred to a symbolic pregnancy process. Even though Zhang extensively studied Chan texts, his work was "a synthesis of Buddhist and Daoist methods in which the former are assimilated to the latter, so that the final package is essentially Daoist". Zhang's advocacy of implies the inadequacy of any Buddhist practice that focuses exclusively on witnessing buddha-nature. Inner Alchemists regularly criticized Buddhists for focusing exclusively on while failing to cultivate, they fail to fabricate the spirit and, in the end, become nothing more than. This is illustrated in the legend of Zhang Boduan's contest with a rival Buddhist master to see who could travel farther in an externalized spiritual body. The monk's Yin Spirit could leave his body during meditative trances, and after travelling to a faraway land and returning, he described its beautiful flowers. Not to be outdone, Zhang's Yang Spirit travelled to the same place the monk described, plucked an actual flower and returned with it. "In the great way of the Golden Elixir, life and nature are jointly cultivated. Thus, by accumulation, the body is accomplished, and by dispersion, is accomplished. In the place to which he travelled, Zhang's perfected soul was manifested in a body. This is what is called the 'Yang Spirit.'"
Zhang Boduan's 1075 defines the embryo as the energy of the One. In this text, the embryo also represents the female within the male, i.e., the Yin of the human being that is enclosed and transformed by the Yang. A commentary to this text, the, although the majority of alchemical sources refer to the . "When the three families meet, the infant coalesces; the Infant is the One, holding true. After ten months, the embryo is complete; this is the foundation for entering sagehood."
The 1078 details how the sagely embryo transforms into the adept's physically and mentally identical doppelganger:
When the numinous rotation occurs in the sagely embryo, the face of the immortal is produced. The commentary says: "At the third revolution, Yang is nourished and the visionary [Hun and po|] soul arises in the sagely embryo. At the fourth revolution, Yin is nourished and the [Hun and po|] soul arises. When the Elixir reaches this point, the and the are complete; the embryo's essence and spirit of the Five Peaks match with the appearance of one's inner body. The egress of the spirit is one's true self."
The birth of the completed embryo, the perfect double, exits through the head in a process called the. It contrasts with conventional delivery through the vagina, which alchemical texts refer to as the. Chen Niwan 陳泥丸 describes egressing his spirit through the fontanel: "I have put into practice the work of old for a full year, and the six vessels have already stopped, the breath has returned to its root, and in the Cinnabar Field there is an infant. Its body and appearance are similar to mine." Then comes the climax of the entire process: "As this infant grows, cannot reside in this cavity any longer; so a fissure and then an orifice naturally appear, and it emerges through the top of the head. This is known as 'exiting and leaving the sea of sufferings.'"
After various embryonic transformations, practitioners of Internal Alchemy are supposedly reborn as perfected, luminous replicas of themselves. Men and women both refine their bodies into Pure Yang, eliminating all Yin to the extent that they no longer even have a shadow. That which they generate within themselves is not strictly the ethereal body of a transcendent because it is also visible to others.
Subsequent Song and Yuan inner alchemists, such as Xue Daoguang 薛道光 and Chen Zhixu 陳致虛, both praised Chan Buddhism but explicitly criticized the widespread notion that alone is sufficient to turn one into a buddha.
texts of the Ming period frequently compare the development of the embryo to the revelation of Buddhahood. For instance, the 1615 uses as a synonym for. The birth of the embryo represents the appearance of the or Buddhahood and is understood as enlightenment. The process leading to the birth of the embryo consists of the purification of and . Thus, the true inner nature and vital force come into being, which in turn is equated to the return to emptiness. The embryo also indicates the unity of body,, and in a state of quiescence without motion.
Lastly, the embryo is related to the Inner Alchemy practice of Taixi (embryonic breathing), which denotes breathing like a child in the womb. Daoists have developed various methods of embryonic breathing but most of them share the fundamental idea that breath nourishes the body by circulating through its vital centers.> To "breathe like an embryo" refers to a manner of respiration that does not involve the nose or the mouth but rather the pores of the skin. This expression may also denote the sensations experienced by adepts of something expanding and contracting, or "breathing" somewhere inside their bodies.
The Chinese Buddhist concept of the "embryo of sagehood" originated in medieval China as a trope describing the complex bodhisattva path invented in the apocryphal Humane King Sutra. This doctrine was differentiated from the better known and linguistically similar Indian Buddhist concept that came to be equated with buddha-nature in China. The embryo of sagehood implies the "need not only to see one's inherent buddha-nature but also to nurture a buddhahood that has to be conceived, gestated, and birthed." In Chan Buddhism, nurturing the embryo of sagehood became a metaphor for a liminal period of idealized mountain and forest reclusion undertaken by enlightened masters who were still awaiting appointment to an abbacy. Daoist inner alchemists combined early Shangqing School sacred embryology with contemporaneous Chinese Buddhist conceptions about the sacred embryo, resulting in a belief that a practitioner could conceive, gestate, and give birth to a supernatural body.