Alchemy: Chinese Alchemy

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ALCHEMY: CHINESE ALCHEMY

Definitions of alchemy have generally been based on the experience of a single civilization—usually but not always Europe—and tend to imply that traditions that do not follow the chosen pattern are not the real thing. The sole exception is the definition of H. J. Sheppard: "Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which for metals is gold, and, for man, longevity, then immortality, and finally, redemption." This definition might be slightly qualified. Longevity and material immortality may or may not accompany salvation in a given time and place. The evolution of other substances from base materials may be more important than that of gold. In China, for instance, cinnabar was the prototype of elixir substances. Adding the specification that the alchemical art uses chemical change to symbolize the processes by which perfection is attained, one can recognize a pattern common to Hellenistic Alexandria, China, Islam, India, and early modern Europe.

The alchemy of each of the great civilizations was distinct in the knowledge on which it drew, in the symbols it created, and in the purposes for which it was used. These peculiarities depended on public structures of meaning as well as on the private discourse of the groups that took up alchemy.

Alchemy began in close alignment with popular religion, especially among educated groups in the Yangze region. It was considered one of several disciplines that could lead to individual spiritual perfection and immortality. Some Daoist movements took up its practice after about 500 ce; it influenced both Buddhist and Daoist symbolism and liturgy. The aims and means of alchemy, some important issues in its history, and its far from clear-cut relations with Daoism and with science are discussed below.

Aims and Means

Chinese ideals of individual perfection combined three ideas that would have been incompatible in Egypt or Persia. The desire for immortality, which long preceded formal philosophy or religion, was the first of these ideas. In popular culture, ideals of long life evolved into the notion that life need not end. This was not immortality of the soul in isolation, but immortality of the personality—of all that selfhood implied—within an imperishable physical body. In the most elaborate doctrines of immortality, this new physical self was nurtured within by a variety of disciplines including alchemy until, at the moment the "naked child" was fully formed, it would burst forth like a butterfly leaving behind an empty chrysalis, an almost weightless corpse.

The potent personal force that may linger on after someone dies was undifferentiated in the thought of the uneducated, but in the conceptions of specialists it was separated into ten "souls" (three yanghun and seven yinpo ). Their normal postmortem dissipation could be prevented only if the body, their common site, could be made to survive with them. That, as Lu Gwei-djen and Joseph Needham have suggested, is why Chinese immortality was bound to be material.

A second implication of immortality was perfection of the spirit. Because there was no dichotomy between the spiritual and the somatic, the refining of the body was not distinct from the activity of spiritual self-cultivation. Immortality was salvation from decrepitude and death. Piety, ritual, morality, and hygiene were equally essential to the prolongation of life. Regardless of whether one considers popular views or those of Daoist, Buddhist, or Confucian initiates, all these kinds of striving were also requisite for the proper orientation of the individual toward the transcendent Way, the Dao, as each tradition defined it.

A third implication of immortality, alongside spiritual and physical perfection, was assumption into a divine hierarchy. This hierarchy was bureaucratic, a mirror of the temporal order. In fact, the bureaucratic ideal—of a symmetrical organization in which power and responsibility belonged to the post, and only temporarily to the individual who filled it—evolved more or less simultaneously in politics and religion.

There were many paths to simultaneous longevity, salvation, and celestial appointment. Meditational, devotional, and ascetic exercises carried out communally by organized religious movements or privately by individual initiates could be supplemented by physiological disciplines, sexual techniques for augmenting the vital forces, dietary regimens, or alchemy.

Why should alchemy have a part to play in this spiritual quest? To rephrase the question, what could the symbology of chemical interaction contribute? Despite the worldly implications of appointment in the divine order, this aim was reached by a mystic path, a process in which the individual attained union with the Way. This process, itself called the Way, perfectly integrated the cosmos, society, and the person.

To embody the Way one had to experience it, whether through direct illumination or through insight. This experience might begin with knowing, but deepened far beyond the limits of rational cognition. As an early alchemical poem from the Arcane Memorandum of the Red Pine Master (Chisongzu xuan ji, probably seventh century or earlier) put it,

The Perfect Dao is a perfect emptying of heart and mind.
Within the darkness, unknowable wonders.
When the wise man has attained the August Source
In time he will truly reach the clouds. (Yun ji qi qian 66.14a)

Adepts saw the nurturant aspect of the Way—activity that brings about perfection in the macrocosm or microcosm—in the life cycles of living things in nature. One could speak of life cycles not only in plants and animals but in minerals, which, as in Aristotle, matured from earth. Mineral evolution could transcend decay and death, for its end point was the immutable perfection of cinnabar or gold. The evolution of these two substances from base starting points was an obvious metaphor for the process that made mortals immortal. The elixir (dan ), originally cinnabar perfected by the Way of nature, came to embody in alchemical thought the potential of humans for perfection. Thus the elixir and the art of making it came to be named for cinnabar (dan ), even in instances when the latter was not an ingredient.

The work of the alchemist reproduced the perfecting activity of nature. As a text of circa 900 puts it, "natural cyclically transformed elixir is formed when flowing mercury, embracing [lead], becomes pregnant.… In 4,320 years the elixir is finished.… It embraces the qi of sun and moon, yin and yang, for 4,320 years; thus, upon repletion of its own qi, it becomes a cyclically transformed elixir for immortals of the highest grade and for celestial beings. When, in the world below, lead and mercury are subjected to the alchemical process for purposes of immortality, [the artificial elixir] is finished in one year.… What the alchemist prepares succeeds because of its correspondence on a scale of thousandths" (Dan lun jue zhi xin jian, p. 12b). In other words, the alchemist accomplishes in one year of 4,320 hours (12 Chinese hours per day for a round year of 360 days) what takes nature 4,320 years.

The alchemical process thus is a kind of pilot model of cosmic evolution. The seeker not only shrank time but reproduced the dimensions of the universe within the confines of his laboratory. He reduced the operation of the Way to spatial and temporal dimensions that he could encompass in contemplation, in the hope of becoming one with it.

The alchemist used a great variety of means—mainly quantitative and qualitative correspondences—to manipulate space and time in this way. His laboratory might be oriented to the cardinal directions, his furnace at the very center, both replete with uranic diagrams. The dimensions of the furnace, the emplacement of steps in its platform, the number and placement of doors for firing, all aligned it with respect to sky and earth.

Because the heat of the fire stood for the nurturant cosmic forces, recreating these forces required that he bind fire by time. He thus gradually increased and decreased the intensity of the fire in carefully timed cycles, using weighed amounts of fuel. He reproduced the seasonal cycle of warmth and cold, in the absence of thermometers, using the one precision measuring instrument readily available, the balance. Several carefully designed schedules for increasing and decreasing the weight of charcoal, and charging it into the furnace through a succession of doors, survive. They are not simple cycles, in which the end point is the same as the beginning. Successive end points slowly increase, embodying the notion of a change in the alchemical ingredients at once cyclic and progressive.

This cyclic approach to modeling was also apparent in the ingredients. The most influential early processes used two ingredients or two main ingredients that were yin and yang with respect to each other. They were conjugated and separated through one cycle after another, yielding (in the eyes of the alchemist) a series of progressively more perfect products. The mercury and lead mentioned earlier are examples; another frequently encountered pair is mercury and sulfur, which combine to form vermilion (artificial cinnabar), from which, by heating at a higher temperature, mercury can be recovered. As an alchemist about a thousand years ago phrased it, "That cinnabar should emerge from mercury and again be killed by mercury; this is the mystery within the mystery" (Bi yu zhu sha han lin yu shu gui of Chen Dashi, in Zhengtong dao zang, vol. 587). Sometimes the progressive cycle-by-cycle changes were achieved by adding additional ingredients, but in the alchemist's eyes the process remained in principle dyadic.

This does not exhaust the metaphors available to the alchemist for his use in reproducing the cyclical energetics of the Way. The figure of the cosmic egg, nurturing from the yolk the gradual differentiation of the fully formed chick, is familiar in all the great alchemical traditions. The alchemical vessel is often referred to as an egg. Persistently in China the alchemical ingredients were actually sealed inside an eggshell; the earliest detailed instructions come from the ninth century ce or somewhat later, the latest from the mid-seventeenth century. A Ming imperial prince of the early fifteenth century carried this approach to its logical conclusion by incubating his cinnabar-filled eggshell under a hen.

Cosmic process could be reenacted not only in a single room but entirely within the adept's body. Meditative techniques of self-cultivation that involve visualizing the circulation of vital energies or cosmic effluvia within the body are ambiguously documented in the fourth century bce. By the first century ce, adepts were establishing relations with a hierarchy of gods within their bodies.

There is nothing intrinsically alchemical (or Daoist) about these exercises, but they provided a basis for internalizing the alchemical process. Metaphors were borrowed from the work of the furnace to express the union of opposites in full realization of the Way. As Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein puts it, "it is from his own body that the adept of internal alchemy (neidan ) constructs his laboratory. In fact he finds within himself all the ingredients and apparatus of traditional alchemy: furnace, reaction vessel, mercury, cinnabar, lead, and other minerals. By a mental and physiological process he furnishes the laboratory, lights the fire of the furnace, keeps watch over the heat, brings about the marriage of the ingredients in the reaction vessel and, once the desired result has been obtained, begins the process anew on a different level" (Hussein, 1984, p. 14).

In an important scripture revealed around 300 ce, the adept controls the movement of the solar pneuma connected with cardiac functions and the lunar pneuma connected with renal functions. The first of these pneumas is called "divine elixir" and the second "liquefied gold." This interiorization of alchemy grew naturally out of the prevalent belief that the body is a microcosm, its vital processes corresponding to those of the physical world, its spirituality embodied in inner gods organized as a mirror image of the celestial and terrestrial bureaucracies.

In the pursuit of these disciplines it is not the product that matters but the process. Even some texts of external alchemy either say nothing about ingesting the elixir, or assert that immortality results from witnessing the "great work." Some descriptions of the forms and colors of the elixir when the reaction vessel is opened suggest that alchemists contemplated the product in a heightened state of consciousness.

If a protracted personal experience is the means to immunity from death, the benefits of alchemy cannot be transferable. But alchemy had other dimensions that made the transfer of elixirs highly desirable. This art could be a source of patronage, whether to underwrite its substantial expenses or to yield profit. A pre-alchemical tradition in medicine made natural drugs of the highest grade effective means to immortality (the two lower grades of drugs replenish depleted vitalities and cure illness). By a natural extension of this line of thought, many physicians studied alchemy as a source of new medicines, and alchemists adapted established drugs to their work.

Many surviving alchemical writings aim at the straightforward preparation of economically or therapeutically desirable substances. Such sources tend naturally to discuss the preparation of alchemical gold as well as elixirs related to cinnabar. Gold is a matter of relatively minor concern in the central tradition of laboratory alchemy that emphasizes individual self-cultivation.

History

This section will explore three issues pertinent to the relations of religion and alchemy: the beginnings of alchemy in China, the character of change in alchemy, and the historical relations of external and internal alchemy.

Whether alchemy originated earlier in Hellenistic Egypt or China remains uncertain. The earliest testimony from either society has not yet been rigorously dated to within a century. Differing views about Chinese origins vary largely with willingness to accept legends as historical statements.

Cinnabar and similar blood-colored compounds have been connected with ideas of death and immortality since the Neolithic period; that is how most scholars interpret the archaic custom of sprinkling red powders on corpses to be buried. The splendidly preserved corpse of the Lady of Dai (died shortly after 168 bce, excavated 1972) contained high concentrations of mercury and lead. These elements were distributed in a way consistent with ingestion before death. Traces in the intestines include native cinnabar, frequently prescribed by physicians as an immortality drug, rather than an artificial elixir. Some historians claim that an edict dated 144 bce against falsifying gold proves the prevalence of alchemy, but it presents no evidence that anything more was involved than artisans' use of alloys. In 133 bce the Martial Emperor was told by an occultist that eating from plates of artificial gold would lengthen his life so that he could seek out certain immortals and, with their help, become an immortal himself by performing certain rituals. This request for patronage links gold indirectly with immortality and suggests that the direct alchemical linkage had not yet been made. As patronage increasingly became available in the decades that followed, the lore of immortals with whom patrons could be put in touch proliferated. "Medicines of immortality" were frequently mentioned, but without calling them artificial. Critical scholars find clear proof of the emergence of alchemy only in the earliest treatises on the subject: the first chapter of the Huangdi jiuding shendan jing (Canon of the nine-vessel divine elixir of the Yellow Lord), before the second century ce, and Zhouyi cantong qi (Token of the concordance of the three; the title originated by c. 140 ce, and the text after 700).

The chronological priority of East or West is not in fact a pressing issue unless the undertaking in question is substantially the same in both parts of the world. That is not the case. Needham pinpoints one significant difference when he defines Chinese alchemy as a combination of macrobiotics (the quest for material immortality through drugs) and aurifaction (the attempt to make true gold by artificial means, as distinguished from "aurifiction," in which gold is consciously faked). These definitions ignore the centrality of cinnabar. Needham notes that macrobiotics was conspicuously missing from the early occidental art, which he therefore does not consider "true" alchemy.

Other scholars evaluate not only the techniques of the alchemists but also their beliefs. The types of spiritual experience outlined above and the relation of alchemical success to appointment in a divine hierarchy are unique to China. They suggest that the alchemical quest in East Asia, as in Alexandria, cannot be adequately defined by technical goals. Both civilizations used chemical methods and metaphors for redemptive ends. The goals differed because Chinese and Hellenistic Egyptian structures of meaning and values differed. It is fitting to speak of the corresponding arts of both as "true" alchemy and to conclude that—on present knowledge—they emerged at roughly the same time.

The alchemists, unlike modern historians, did not believe that their art evolved or changed. As in any other Chinese religious or technical tradition, its practitioners assumed that its every possibility had been laid out in the archaic, divine revelations that founded it. In alchemy there were several of these seminal works, including the two already mentioned. These scriptures were to be passed down intact to those worthy to receive them, supplemented by oral explanations. Much explanation was needed, for the Zhouyi cantong qi was packed with metaphor and symbol, its density multilayered. In a degraded age, alchemists could grasp the inexhaustible meanings of the Sages only approximately. The issue was not progress in knowledge but regaining ancient wisdom.

Nevertheless, when a modern scientist reads them, alchemical writings over the centuries exhibit an increasingly comprehensive knowledge of chemical processes. They were also increasingly able to accommodate new impulses from popular religion. Some adepts were aware of this new content in alchemy. They attributed it to additional (but in principle timeless) revelations. It is often immortals in disguise, "remarkable men" met in strange circumstances or seen in dreams or visions, who grant them. The static ideal did not rule out change.

Current understanding suggests that, although the earliest alchemy was that of chemical processes, external and internal alchemy fused by the time of the Zhouyi cantong qi. This book brings an elaborate symbolism to bear on processes that can be understood equally well as external or internal to the body. The book refers not only to the internal alchemy of imaginative visualization but also to sexual disciplines that give the marriage of opposites its ultimately literal expression. Later alchemists disagree about whether sexual practices further or hinder immortality, but a number of important adepts follow the Zhouyi cantong qi in seeing external, internal, and sexual alchemy as aspects of a single process. In fact, the language of certain texts makes it impossible to be certain whether they are concerned with operations on mineral ingredients.

External alchemy did not retain the vitality of its internal analogue. Writings that reflect new knowledge of chemical processes became rare after about 1000. Later writers often said that only outsiders believe that alchemy is to be done—or was ever done—in the laboratory. It thus appears that innovation in the procedures of external alchemy—although not in their meanings—had largely ceased. This has been explained by a revival of Confucian ideals that discouraged educated people from doing artisanal work. Another reason may be the ascendancy of meditation and visualization over practical operations in the Daoist movements that attracted elite enthusiasts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Occult and manual practices, as noted above, were not mutually exclusive earlier. Another likely cause is widespread awareness that a number of emperors and high officials had died as a result of taking alchemical elixirs. To the adept the appearance of death was a sign that the perfected self had hatched out of the old body and taken office among the immortals. To secular humanists intolerant of popular beliefs, this seemed a foolish rationale for suicide.

Alchemy, Science, and Religion

Alchemy has been studied mainly by historians of chemistry, who have shown that the Chinese art exploited the properties of many chemical substances and even incorporated considerable knowledge of quantitative relations. Scholars of medical history have demonstrated close connections between alchemy and medicine, in the substances and processes on which both drew and in the use of artificial, mainly inorganic "elixirs" by physicians to treat disease and lengthen life. Historians have tended to see alchemy as a fledgling science, a precursor of modern inorganic chemistry and iatrochemistry. Lu and Needham speak of internal alchemy as "proto-biochemistry."

This view overlooks the fact that the goals of alchemy were not cognitive. They were consistently focused on spiritual cultivation and immortality, and largely concerned with reenacting cosmic process for purposes of contemplation. It is impossible to be certain that alchemists discovered any new chemical interaction or process. Because alchemists were literate and craftsmen were not, it is only to be expected that innovations by the latter would be first recorded by the former (who were almost the only members of the elite greatly interested in the chemical arts). Claims that alchemists played major roles in developing gunpowder and distillation apparatus are not supported by independent evidence about the state of contemporary industrial processes, which are still poorly explored for the first millennium ce. Similarly, too little of the medical literature has been studied to confirm that alchemists gave more to medicine than they took from it.

The idea that alchemy is Daoist by nature, or was invented by Daoists, has not survived advances since about 1970 in historical studies of Daoism. In the Celestial Master sect and other early Daoist movements drugs (including artificial preparations) were forbidden; only religious rituals and confession of sins could procure health and salvation. Upper-class initiates gradually began to use immortality drugs already fashionable in the north. As refugees after the fall of Loyang in 311 they encountered elixirs in the Yangtze region, where alchemy had long been established among popular immortality practices. The aristocratic southerners they displaced in positions of temporal power invented new religious structures to assert, by way of compensation, their spiritual superiority. Michel Strickmann has demonstrated that in doing so they adapted northern Daoist usages to local popular practices, in which immortality and alchemy were central, and in which the religious use of inorganic drugs was usual. Tao Hongjing, a man of noble southern antecedents, drew on revelations inherited from fourth-century predecessors when he founded the Supreme Purity (or Maoshan) Daoist movement under imperial patronage in about 500. Tao adapted not only old southern techniques but elaborate structures of alchemical and astral imagery. He thus formed a movement that captured upper-class allegiance, supported state power, and was supported in return for more than five centuries. He incorporated alchemical practices and symbols with Daoism—the particular Daoism that he created—for the first time. Alchemy did not originate in the Daoist milieu, and was never confined to it. Similarly, the role of alchemy in movements other than Dao's varied too greatly to constitute a fixed relationship.

Bibliography

Primary sources are cited from the Daoist Patrology (Zhengtong dao zang, 1445), s.v. The most detailed modern study of Chinese alchemy is in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, 1954-), vol. 5, pts. 2–5, but much of it is now obsolete. See the discussion of research issues in Sivin, "Research on the History of Chinese Alchemy," in Alchemy Revisited. Proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Alchemy at the University of Groningen. 17–19 April 1989, edited by Z.R.W.M. von Martels, pp. 3–20 (Leiden, 1990). For a comprehensive and regularly updated bibliography of recent studies see Fabrizio Pregadio, "The Golden Elixir," at http://helios.unive.it/~dsao//pregadio/index.html. The best scholarly introductions are the essays on alchemy and related topics in Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn (Handbuch der Orientalistik. IV. China. 14; Leiden, 2000), and the discussions of alchemy and spiritual cultivation in Lowell Skar, "Golden Elixir Alchemy: The Formation of the Southern Lineage and the Transformation of Medieval China. Asian Studies" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003). For discussion of of internal alchemy, see Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein's Procédés secrets au Joyau magique: Traité d'alchimie daoïste du onzième siècle (Paris, 1984) and Skar. I discuss the symbolic structures used in alchemy at length in volume 5 of Science and Civilisation in China, pt. 4, pp. 210–305, summarized in more final form in "Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time," Isis 67 (1976): 513–526, and reprinted in Science and Technology in East Asia, edited by me (New York, 1977).

Pre-Daoist southern occult traditions, including alchemy, are discussed in Isabelle Robinet's "La revelation du Shangqing dans l'histoire du taoïsme" (Ph.D. diss., University of Paris, 1981). The relation between alchemy and Daoist movements has been trenchantly analyzed in Michel Strickmann's "On the Alchemy of Tao Hongjing," in Facets of Daoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, edited by Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 123–192; see also his Le taoïsme du Maozhan: Chronique d'une révélation, 2 vols., Mémoires de l'Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, no. 17 (Paris, 1981).