Xingming guizhi


The is a comprehensive Ming dynasty text on self-cultivation techniques, which syncretistically quotes sources from the Three teachings of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and is richly illustrated with over fifty illustrations that later texts widely copied. The classic has been republished for over four centuries, from its first woodblock edition in 1615 to digital versions in the present.

Title

is the full title of the. denotes the "joint cultivation" of and, which is the objective of Neidan schools. Although the promulgates the of and, it does not attach much importance to physiological practices and emphasizes the spiritual aspects of inner transformation.
Both titles use the common Chinese word, and the rare, if not nonce, word.

''Xingming''

Unlike, is found in Chinese dictionaries. For instance, the unabridged monolingual, which is lexicographically comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary, defines three meanings for :
  1. 中国古代哲学范畴。指万物的天赋和禀受。
  2. 生命。
  3. 本性。.
The English translation equivalents of the title's and are informative.
  1. Inborn; one's inborn nature, one's fundamental being.
  2. Native character, predisposition; one's endowment at birth; particular inherent quality; innate; inborn destiny.
  3. Call on one to do X; give orders to; bid; direct. Command, ordain; decree; injunction, mandate. Exhortation; advice, counsel.
  4. To name, call. Confer a title on, bestow a dignity.
  5. Heaven-ordained duration of life, life-span... Heaven-ordained circumstances of life, fate, destiny; "calling," vocation, mission.
As its title suggests, the is
principally concerned with the "endowment" and "vitality" of human life. Essentially, and together compose the most fundamental energy that animates the human body, and the purpose of this treatise is to return the secondary energies of the body to the primordial purity of this primary energy.

''Guizhi''

Compare the translation equivalents of and :
  1. Jade tablet or scepter, square-bottomed and round or pointed at the top, given by ruler in early times to trusted ministers or vassals;...
The Qing scholar You Tong's preface to the 1670 says this character, composed of doubled, is a pun for the Inner Alchemical, see the Yellow Court Classic.
  1. Purport, aim; meaning, significance. Opinion, slant, viewpoint.
  2. Directive, imperial rescript....
Most Chinese characters are classified as phono-semantic compound characters, which combine a radical that suggests word meaning and a phonetic that roughly indicates pronunciation. The first meanings of and above are illustrative., is an old variant character for. is an interchangeable variant character for.

English

Scholars have translated the Chinese title in many ways:
  • A Pointer to the Meaning of Human Nature and the Life-Span
  • Directions for Endowment and Vitality
  • Directions to the Balanced Cultivation of Inner Nature and Vital Energy
  • Principles of Balanced Cultivation of Inner Nature and Vital Force
  • Principles of the Innate Disposition and the Lifespan
  • Authoritative Decrees on Innate Nature and Life-destiny
  • Superior Pointers to Inner Nature and Destiny
  • Directions on the Unity of Xing and Ming
  • Jade Guide to the Mind-nature and Life
  • Talismanic Directives to the Cultivation of Nature and Vitality
  • Principles of the Tablets on the Innate Nature and the Vital Force
  • Pointers on Spiritual Nature and Bodily Life
These translations generally follow accepted philosophical meanings of and ; while diverging on how to render and . Kohn and Darga translate the full title.

Textual history

The origins of the are obscure, but since it quotes several Ming dynasty writers, such as Luo Hongxian, it can be dated to the late 16th century.
After its first edition in 1615, the was frequently republished; notably 1622 during the Ming dynasty, 1669 and 1670 during the Qing dynasty, in Ding Fubao's 1922, and in the Beijing White Cloud Temple's 1989 edition. The text includes four prefaces, written by She Yongning, Zou Yuanbiao, You Tong, and Li Pu.
The book's author remains unknown. These four early prefaces all say the text was written down by master Yin Zhenren's : either literally or the disciple's proper name Gao Di. The identities of both this master and his disciple are ambiguous.
The name Yin Zhenren honorific term for a transcendent.
One authorial hypothesis is that Yin Zhenren conceivably dictated the through planchette writing or spirit writing. The Daoist Canon contains several texts supposedly produced from spirit-writing. Some examples are the, the, and the. If the was produced through spirit writing, two possible Daoist masters surnamed Yin are Yinxi, a legendary gatekeeper who persuaded Laozi to write the before leaving China to travel West, and Yin Zhiping, the second patriarch of Quanzhen School Daoism.
Besides the, another Neidan text retrospectively attributed to Yin Zhenren or Yin Pengtou edited it around 1830 from a manuscript preserved in the Qingyang Daoist Temple in Chengdu.
's lexical components are,, and. and were sometimes used interchangeably.
She Yongming's first edition 1615 preface explicitly refers to —using the name Di and. Both You Tong's 1669 and Li Pu's 1670 descriptions can alternatively be read as "high disciple" or as "Gao Di". Zuo Yuanbiao's 1622 forward writes Gao's given name as 第 instead of 弟. Needham and Lu translate Gao Di as a proper name.
One scholar tentatively identifies the disciple Gao Di with a Ming dynasty scholar. The 1739 History of Ming records that Gao Di received a degree in 1589 and opposed the eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian.

Contents

The syncretistic is notable for comprehensive explanations, numerous woodcut illustrations, and explicit depictions of the nine stages of transformation. The wide-ranging is praised by the historians of Chinese science Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen as, "a treatise of substantial size which might be regarded as the of physiological alchemy ."
The text is divided into four :,, and, which is a Classical Chinese allusion to the first sentence of the commentary on Hexagram 1 : "The Creative works sublime success, furthering through perseverance". These four books present an overview of basic principles.
Book 1 has twenty-three that outline the foundations of Internal Alchemy. Books 2-4 give diverse that explain practices in more detail; each book contains three main chapters, organized in correspondence with the Quanzhen of internal alchemical transformation. All four books contain accompanied by short texts, frequently in the form of rhymed poems. The textual organization "outlines the adept's progress in four clear parts." Book 1 begins with defining basic concepts and clarifying terms; Book 2, called "nourishing the original source," deals with cultivating and strengthening one's physical energies; Book 3 establishes an active relationship between the physical and the heavenly, described as the "union of and "; Book 4 describes liberation from the world, when the Sacred Embryo develops and grows, "goes beyond all, and merges with emptiness".
The quotes from Confucian, Lao-Zhuang, Daoist, and Buddhist sources.
One of the main concerns of the is to lead the adept through the multitude of alchemical methods and writings to the core of the true path of. This core is to be sought at the basis of all phenomena and is proof of the undivided unity and the unchanging nature of the Dao. The author approaches this core from a variety of perspectives, employing a wealth of concepts but always returning to the central theme. He does not give any practical instructions for practicing inner alchemy, however; in fact, he dissociates himself from specific exercises, as these belong to the phenomenal domain from which he tries to lead away his readers.

In the Quanzhen lineages the is usually classified as belonging to the or the of Ming and Qing. Its ideas are mainly based on Zhang Boduan's and Li Daochun's, and are also closely related to other Quanzhen School texts.
Despite the 's detailed coverage of Daoist Internal Alchemy, such as a "wonderful list of the chief varieties of the 'three thousand six hundred' techniques " practiced by men and women adepts, many Western sinologists have misconstrued it. John Dudgeon mistook the text for a manual of gymnastics, while Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung used it "iconographically without much understanding". Wilhelm and Jung's The Secret of the Golden Flower used four illustrations— without citing the source—to depict the stages of meditation, for example, the uncredited illustration is on the first edition cover, although the book does not mention the Internal Alchemical concept.

Examples

The following four sample illustrations demonstrate the text's comprehensive treatment of Internal Alchemy. Two examples depict alchemical reaction-vessels and culturally symbolic animals, and two others show Daoist "inner landscape" diagrams of the human body.
The first two examples, called the "Illustration of Bringing Together the Four Symbols" and "Illustration of the Marriage of the Dragon and the Tiger" both depict Chinese mythical animals and an alchemical [Ding (vessel)|] cauldron, either round vessels with three legs or rectangular ones with four. In Outer Alchemy, the laboratory cauldron was originally used to heat elixir ingredients, while in later Outer Alchemy, Daoist practitioners semantically extended the word to mean the metaphorical cauldron allegedly located in the lower of the human body, wherein an adept cultivated the Three Treasures of Jing, Qi, and Shen.
The Four Symbols are mythological creatures appearing among the Chinese constellations along the ecliptic, and viewed as the guardians of the four cardinal directions. The Black Tortoise of the North shown on the bottom, represents water and the kidneys; the Vermilion Bird of the South on the top, represents fire and the heart; the Azure Dragon of the East on the right, represents wood and liver; and the White Tiger of the West shown on the left, represents metal and the lungs This directional representation of top as bottom and right as left is inverted, "like so much else in physiological alchemy".
This Four Symbols illustration shows the symbolical animals of the four directions surrounding and influencing the bodily alchemical crucible, here labeled. The realized will is explained in the text as "the prime of the trigram, the mother of the heavens and the earth, the root of and, the source of water and fire, the ancestor of the sun and moon, the font of the three materials, and the progenitor of the Five Phases." In the top right inscription, the word ; or "passionless", from Sanskrit ) refers to that which "normally 'leaks out' through the sense-organs and other parts of the body"
The "Illustration of the Marriage of the Dragon and the Tiger", or "The Love-Making of Dragon and Tiger" and, ☵, two broken lines enclosing an unbroken line), which represent toxic mercury and lead, the two fundamental elements transformed in Inner Alchemy. The dragon and tiger symbolizing the Yang and Yin was shown on many old Chinese numismatic charms and amulets.
The last two examples, called the Illustration of Broad Illumination and the Illustration of Reverse Illumination—or "Universal Radiance" and "The Glory of Reversion"—show the inner landscapes of the anterior and posterior human body.
The front Illustration of Broad Illumination depicts a meditator sitting cross-legged, and shows three circles. His right hand holds a hare enclosed in a circle, symbolizing of the mythological moon rabbit, and his left hand holds a crow enclosed in a circle, an ancient symbol of the three-legged sun crow. On his forehead the three-character phrase is enclosed in another circle. These three circles represent the and energies of the body to the left and the right, and their union in the center. The crescent shown on the meditator's abdomen represents the alchemical reaction vessel in the lower . However, the 1615 first edition more complexly pictured the crescent above a rectangle and a crucible in the lower. According to Needham and Lu, this illustration shows "the triumphant adept with the sun in one hand and the moon in the other, Yin and Yang united" within the elixir; and in this context, and the in means "vital internal warmth", thus, could be thought of as production centers of "animal heat".
The back Illustration of Reverse Illumination shows the vertebral column, which is flanked by the "kidneys" in the lower back; which are respectively labeled as on the right, a symbol of energy within the side of the body, and on the left, a symbol of energy within the side of the body. The head circle, which corresponds to the "to join endowment and vitality" above, encloses the word, one of the .
This Reverse Illumination drawing shows twenty-four "vertebra", labeled with the traditional Chinese medical acupoint names for fourteen of the twenty-eight points on the Governing Vessel, from GV-1 to GV-14, between the coccyx and the anus. This location is associated with the ancient Daoist sexual theory of male avoidance of ejaculation, called ; Daoist physiologists imagined that unejaculated could rise up the spine into the brain in order increase health and longevity. The common method of preventing ejaculation was to apply pressure on the perineum, halfway between the anus and the scrotum, resulting in retrograde ejaculation redirecting semen into the urinary bladder, where it was subsequently voided.