The Immortality Cult

 

 

            The attainment of immortality, though perhaps not invented by the Taoists, became their primary concern.  As such, the immortal "winged person" (yü-min) or "mountain man" (xian) were models of attainment equivalent to the Confucian "sage" and Buddhist "enlightened being" (Buddha).

 

            The quest for long or permanent life (early texts do not maintain a distinction between longevity and immortality) is so ancient that it was a natural aspiration of any Chinese by Han times.  As early as the Chou Dynasty, bronze bowls were produced with inscriptions such as "long life" (shou), "delay old age" (nan-lao), and "non-death" (wu-si).   Later, the tradition which has come to be known as "Religious Taoism" based its pursuit of immortality upon esoteric interpretations of the Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi books -- particularly, Zhuang-zi's ideal of the "Perfect One" (zhen-ren) and the practice of "sitting in forgetfulness" (zuo-wang). 

 

 

 

 

Outer Alchemy

 

 

            The first great alchemists were Wei Bo-yang (fl. 120-150 C.E.) and Ge Hong (fl. 300 C.E.).  The case of Ge Hong is worth noting here, since he was subsequently adopted by some Taoists as a seminal figure in their tradition.  He was the author of a work entitled Bao pu zi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity), one of the first alchemical treatises.  The Bao pu zi describes moral purification, the use of charms and incantations, and ingestion of various medicines and elixirs for the preservation of one's life. 

 

            Some of the techniques described in the Bao pu zi include the following:

 

 

 

The Mao-shan Revelations

 

 

            From 364 to 370 CE, a man by the name of Yang Xi received a series of extraordinary spiritual revelations in the Bucklebent Hills of Mao-shan.  These revelations were set in writing by Tao Hong-jing (456-536 CE), and became the foundation of the great collection of scriptures, essays, poetry, legend, and local history called the Taoist Canon (Dao-zang). 

 

            Tao was especially interested in the cultivation of immortality, and he was an expert on herbal pharmacology, editing a book of plants that survives to this day.  He described two kinds of immortal:  "superior" and "second class".  A superior immortal (shang xian) "ascends in broad daylight" (bai-ri shang-tian), i.e., while still living.  A "second-class immortal" transcends the world through "liberation of the corpse" (shi jie), in which the adept "appears to die" and is buried, but later when his or her coffin is examined it is discovered to contain a sword, or staff, or pair of sandals in place of the body.  Tao insisted that the world of the spirits and immortals and that of humankind were separated by "only a thin line" (xiao xiao zhi ge), so that beings move from one realm to the other with great frequency.

 

            It was the Mao-shan revelations and their written redactions that transformed Taoism and made it a truly national and fully developed religion, with standards of orthodoxy, established liturgies, and canonized scriptures.  The Dao-zang (our extant version of course only after many generations) is the product of those redactors, and it is no coincidence that every alchemical treatise known to us is contained in the Taoist Canon:  for the new dispensation represented by those fourth-century revelations is tied up in the social community of the aristocratic alchemists. 

 

Inner Alchemy

 

            By the Sung Dynasty, Taoists adopted a variety of methods to insure long life.  "Outer alchemy" (wai-tan) -- which died out after the Sung -- involved:

 

 

"Inner alchemy" (nei-tan) -- using the language of alchemy but actually refering to processes occuring within the body -- consists of:

 

 

and other esoteric methods of cultivation.  This tradition still survives today in the practices of Taoist "Red-head" priests of Religious Taoism.