The Secret of the Golden Flower
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The Secret of the Golden Flower (
History
Origins
Studies by Monica Esposito and Mori Yuria,
At the beginning of the Qing dynasty, there were followers of Xu Xun who received texts on contemplative alchemical practices (internal alchemy) and self-cultivation through spirit writing. The Secret of the Golden Flower was initially received incompletely in a first group in 1688; it remained unfinished when seven of its recipients died. In 1692, it was continued by the other group. It is claimed that the teachings of Xu Xun were transmitted by intermediate spirits, such as Lü Dongbin, Qiu Chuji and Chuduan. As Xu Xun's writings had disappeared for generations, the text was considered by Pure Brightness members to require the founding of a new Taoist sect, which was called the "Ritual Lineage of Great Oneness". Pan Yi'an (彭伊安), one of the recipients of the work, describes the initial composition process of its first part:[2]
"As I remember, it was in the wushen year [1668] that our holy patriarch Chunyang [i.e., Lü] began to transmit the 'Instructions.' The seven people who made a commitment to him bowed deeply and obtained [his teachings]. None but these seven received this transmission. The most profound teaching was [expressed in] no more than one or two words. It could not be put into words and letters. Afterwards, the seven questioned the Patriarch in detail. As our holy patriarch spared no mercy in giving clarifications, [his teachings were] compiled for days and months. Eventually they composed a volume."
There are six different remaining editions of the text, and it was fundamental to several lineages of Taoism. It became a central doctrinal scripture of the Longmen school canon through popularization by Min Yide (1758-1836), who attributed to its importance as a "blueprint for healing of the world".[9]
Wilhelm's speculations
Richard Wilhelm, while a missionary in China, obtained a reprinted copy in Beijing in the 1920s from members said to be an "esoteric group". According to Wilhelm, the Chinese publisher (Zhanran Huizhenzi) relied on an incomplete 17th-century version of a woodblock he had discovered in a bookstore, which he later completed with a friend's book. The Beijing bookseller only printed a few thousand copies of the work for a select audience, which included Wilhelm. Wilhelm translated the text into German in 1929, which was read by his friend Carl Gustav Jung. The English version, translated from the German by Cary Baynes, was published in 1931 with comments by Jung.[10][1]
Richard Wilhelm had raised the hypothesis (now considered erroneous due to newer academic researches, as seen above) that the text expounded an orally transmitted philosophy found in early esoteric circles of China in the eighth century during the Tang dynasty. According to him, the arrival of
"Perhaps it will strike many a European Reader as remarkable that appear in the texts sayings familiar to him from Christian teachings. While on the other hand these same well known things which in Europe are often taken as Ecclesiastical phrasing are here given quite a different perspective. Because of the psychological connection in which they are used..." (Page 8 of the Secret of the Golden Flower)
"In T'ang period the religion of a Turkic tribe, the Uigurs, who were allied with the Emperor, was the Nestorian branch of Christianity; it stood in high favor, as is witnessed by the well-known Nestorian monument in Sianfu erected in 781, and bearing both a Chinese and a Syriac inscription. Thus connections between the Nestorians and Chin-tan-chaio are quite possible..." (Page 9 of the Secret of the Golden Flower)
"Timothy Richard went so far as to consider the Chin-tan-chiao simply a survival of the old Nestorians. He was led to his view by certain agreement in ritual and certain traditions of the Chin-tan-Chiao membership which approach closely to Christian practice..."
Wilhelm suggested that the alleged author of the book, Lü Dongbin, who was previously referred to as Lü Yen, could have been of the Nestorian Christian Faith.[13]
Methods
Despite the varieties of impressions, interpretations and opinions expressed by translators, the meditation technique described by The Secret of the Golden Flower is a straightforward, silent method; the book's description of meditation has been characterized as "Zen with details". The meditation technique, set forth in poetic language, reduces to a formula of sitting, breathing, and contemplating.[10]
Christopher Cott and Adam Rock describe it in the context of Taoist doctrine. The practice involves meditative exercises on the spiritual soul (hun) and the primordial spirit. In contrast to the material soul (po), the spirit soul resides in the heavenly heart-mind (xin) and is the Yang qi obtained from the cosmos. It is described as a house where "the light" is the master, being the stage for the "turning the light around". The procedure consists in refining the material soul and interrupting conceptual thought (of the world of the senses) through this meditation; thus, the true nature of the primordial spirit would be revealed. Practitioners should be aware of states such as "submersion in darkness" (cessation of conceptual thinking). They summarize the work in three stages: the initial stage is "harmonizing the breath", in which the conceptual mind still predominates, but the breath in the heart-mind and the heart-mind in the breath are used to calm this awareness. A second stage involves energetic and mental aspects (a metaphor of the interaction between Water and Fire). The third stage ("turning the light around") is finalized by the culmination of mental quiescence, the spirit incubating in qi ("Heaven entering Earth").[4]
Sitting primarily relates to a straight posture. Breathing is described in detail, primarily in terms of the esoteric physiology of the path of qi (also known as chi or ki). The energy path associated with breathing has been described as similar to an internal wheel vertically aligned with the spine. When breathing is steady, the wheel turns forward, with breath energy rising in back and descending in front.[14][full citation needed] Bad breathing habits (or bad posture, or even bad thoughts) may cause the wheel not to turn, or move backward, inhibiting the circulation of essential breath energy. In contemplation, one watches thoughts as they arise and recede.[15][full citation needed][1]
The meditation technique is supplemented by descriptions of affirmations of progress in the course of a daily practice, suggesting stages that could be reached and phenomenon that may be observed such as a feeling of lightness, like floating upward or slight levitation. Such benefits are ascribed to improved internal energy associated with breath energy circulation, improvements that alleviate previously existing impediments. Several drawings portray imagery relevant to the personal evolution of a meditation practitioner, images that may be somewhat confusing in terms of pure rational analysis. "Only after one hundred days of consistent work, only then is the light genuine; only then can one begin to work with the spirit-fire."[16][full citation needed][1]
The first such illustration represents the first one hundred days, or "gathering the light". The second one represents an emergence of meditative consciousness. The third stage represents a meditative awareness that exists even in mundane, daily life. Stage four represents a higher meditative perception, where all conditions are recognized. Then, varied conditions are portrayed as separately perceived, yet each separate perception is part of a whole of awareness.[12][1]
Translations
The Secret of the Golden Flower was first translated into German by sinologist
The version that Wilhelm used for his German translation had eight chapters. According to Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn, this edition was that of a "Supplement to the Taoist Canon" from 1834. Thomas Cleary (1991) used a different 13-chapter version, which he translated into English directly from Chinese. The five chapters missing from Wilhelm's translation are very short. According to Mori Yuria, it is possible that the prototype had 20 chapters, which would have been reduced to 13 by Shao Zhilin because they were considered redundant or less organized.[1]
Cleary criticized the validity of Wilhelm's translation, characterizing it as incomplete and inaccurate:[19]
Because the still-current Wilhelm/Jung/Baynes edition of this manual contains dangerous and misleading contaminations, a primary consideration was to make the contents of The Secret of the Golden Flower explicitly accessible to both lay and specialist audiences.
According to Cleary:[1]
Although Jung credited The Secret of the Golden Flower with having clarified his own work on the unconscious, he maintained serious reservations about the practice taught in the book. What Jung did not know was that the text he was reading in fact was a garbled translation of a truncated version of a corrupted recension of the original work.
Cleary gives some examples of the way that the text, in his view, was commonly misinterpreted by Wilhelm and Jung, and describes such an instance in the very beginning of the text:[20]
In the first section of this text, for example, Wilhelm translates zhixu zhiling zhi shen, which means a spirit (i.e. mind) that is completely open and completely effective, as "God of Utmost Emptiness and Life." Based on this sort of translation, Jung thought that the Chinese had no idea that they were discussing psychological phenomena. He then tried to repsychologize the terminology, but since he did not quite understand it to begin with he could not but wind up with a distortion in the end.
However, Cleary's translated version did not provide enough information about its source documentation. Jing Haifeng (1999) and J. J. Clarke (2000) excused Jung for not being a Sinologist, and for his humanitarian concerns in alleviating suffering by providing psychological insights. Clarke also did not follow Cleary in considering that the translation used by Wilhelm was problematic.[1]
In his autobiography
Notes
- ^ S2CID 30771486. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
- ^ S2CID 78876025. Archived from the originalon 8 October 2017.
- ISBN 9780824825041.
- ^ ISBN 9781931483209.
- .
- ^ Chang, Chung-Yuan (1956). "Self-Realization and the Inner Process of Peace". In Fröbe-Kapteyn (ed.). Eranos Annales (in German) (Olga ed.). Rhein-Verlag. p. 429.
- ISBN 978-3-906000-07-7.
- ^ Irwin, Lee (2004). "Daoist Alchemy in the West: The Esoteric Paradigms". Esoterica. 6: 31–51.
- ISSN 0737-769X.
- ^ ISBN 9781000156560.
- ISBN 978-1614277293.
- ^ OCLC 1057554088.)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ISBN 978-1614277293.
- ^ "The rotation method makes use of breathing to blow on the fire of the gates of life... The way leads from the sacrum upward in a backward flowing way to the summit of the Creative, and on through the house of the Creative; then it sinks through the two stories in a direct downward-flowing way into the solar plexus, and warms it." Page 61, 1962 edition.
- ^ "Only one must not stay sitting rigidly if worldly thoughts come up, but must examine where the thought is, where it began, and where it fades out." Page 36, 1962 edition.
- ^ Page 39, 1962 edition.
- ^ In Carl Jung's autobiography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 373–377), he wrote a section about his friend Wilhelm and said, in relevant part, "In China he had the good fortune to meet a sage of the old school whom the revolution had driven out of the interior. This sage, Lau Nai Suan, introduced him to Chinese yoga philosophy and the psychology of the I Ching. To the collaboration of these two men we owe the edition of the I Ching with its excellent commentary." Presumably, the same is true of the yoga philosophy of The Secret of the Golden Flower. Although Wilhelm's original German edition first appeared in the autumn of 1929, just months before he died (according to the Preface by Baynes), Jung indicates in his Foreword to The Secret of the Golden Flower that Wilhelm had sent him the text earlier, and also indicates that it was on Jung's initiative that the book was published.
- ^ Carl Jung on Richard Wilhelm Archived 2015-04-19 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved August 27, 2010
- ^ Cleary, Thomas. The Secret of the Golden Flower. 1993. p. 5.
- ^ Cleary, Thomas. The Secret of the Golden Flower. 1993. p. 82.
Bibliography
- Contemporary Academic Research, page 24, Jan. 2008, written by Tingjun Wang, "Study of the Secret of Golden Flower internal alchemy practise". in Chinese Romanian Translation
See also
External links
- The Secret of the Golden Flower (Chinese Alchemy)
- The Secret of the Golden Flower English and Chinese text with explanation