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Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2015042587 | ISBN 9781578635771 (5
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OceanofPDF .comC O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
1. Origins
2. Alchemy East and W est
3. Hsien
4. Longevity and Immortality
5. The Elixir
6. Medicines
7. Minerals and Plants
8. The Alchemist as Midwife
9. Astrology
10. The Five Elements
11. Ch'i
12. Y oga
13. Magic
14. Allied Symbolism
15. The Esoteric and Exoteric
16. The T wo Great P owers
17. The Real Alchemy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
OceanofPDF .comA C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
I am greatly indebted to Professor Needh am for
permission to quote, and use illustrations, from his
monumental work Science and Civilization in China. My
thanks also to Mr. W. Greenhalgh for reproducing
photographs from old slides taken in China. OceanofPDF .comIn memoriam
Francis Clive-Ross
OceanofPDF .com– 1 –
O R I G I N S
There is little in Chinese alchemy that cannot be
associated with Taoism and although the exact origins of
that alchemy  may still be in dispute in the light of present
incomplete evidence, it is not questioned that it grew and
was nourished in the soil of popular and religious Taoism. It is also recognized that there are two distinct branches
of Taoism: the classical Tao Chia, the mystical,
metaphysical aspect, stemming from Lao Tzu and Chuang
Tzu, and the popular , religious, magical, alchemical side,
the Tao Chiao , which arose traditionally with the Yellow
Emperor and his Three Immortal Ladies, or Maids, who
taught him magic, mysticism and love. Lao Tzu and
Chuang Tzu probably represented a movement against
these earlier  animistic-m agico practices and founded the
Tao Chia as a protes t, or rather a correction, at a time
when such practices had lost their original meaning and
become loaded with superstition. Yet another viewpoint is that classical Taoism  was
original but was too austere and rareﬁed for the general
populace and later, meeting the shamanism which
ﬂourished in the tribes of the regions north and west of
China proper , absorbed shamanistic-animistic lore and
degenerated into the religious, ritualistic, magical and
alchemical branch, the Tao Chiao , which fulﬁlled the day-
to-day needs of the people and which still exists in modern
times as a popular religion. Thus, from being abstract
philosophy , it became a concrete religion with a
ceremonial Church, having a priesthood, liturgy and
theology , a Pope, and a Trinity known as the Three PureOnes. From the original non-theistic mysticism it became
not only theistic but polytheistic, adopting the pantheon of
popular Buddhism. While the origins and dates of Chinese alchemy are still
being resea rched and debated (there are literally
hundreds of Taoists texts as yet untranslated) it is known
for certain that it ﬂourish ed well before 144 BC, for at that
date the Emperor issued an edict which ordered public
execution for anyone found making counterfeit gold. The
making of counterfeit cash was also proscribed. However ,
in the year 60 BC the then Emperor appointed a well-
known scholar , Liu Hsiang, as Master of the Recipes so
that he could make alchemical gold and prolong the
Emperor's life. He failed  to make the gold and so was
disgraced. This points to an already well-establis hed and
widespread practice in alchemy . It was also said to have
been practise d in the fourth century BC by Tsou Yen, who
had a reputation as a miracle-worker and a following
among the aristocracy . He was also reputed to have been
the ﬁrst alchemist to combine the search for the Elixir
with the search for gold. The Later Han dynasty (AD 25-220) was a time of great
interest in science, astronomy , botany , zoology and
medicine and in this period there appeared the ﬁrst book
on alchemy, the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i of Wei Po-yang. Its date
was about AD 142 and its title is translated as ‘The Book of
the Kinship of the Three,’ but it was written in terms
which were too diﬀicult for the understanding of all but
initiates. But most of the alchemical texts derive from the
T'ang dynasty (AD 618-960), which maintained this
interest, especially in the alchemical branch of T aoism. The language of the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i being too
complicated and esoteric to be of general use, it is to Ko
Hung that we must turn for the earliest complete treatise. He lived about AD 260 to 340 and is regarded as the mostfamous of writers on Chinese alchemy . He is supposed to
have written  several hundred books but his known work is
the Pao P'u Tzu nei p'ien , usually referred to as the Pao P'u
Tzu, though this was, in fact, a pseudonym he adopted and
can be translated as ‘The Master who preserves his
pristine simplicity ,’ which has also been rendered as ‘Old
Sobersides.’ The work is in two parts, the nei p'ien ,
comprising some twenty scrolls, and the wei p'ien , some
ﬁfty. He says: ‘My nei p'ien , telling of gods, genii,
prescriptions and medicines, ghosts and marvels,
transformations, mainten ance of life, extension of years,
exorcising evils and banishing misfortune, belong s to the
Taoist school . My wei p'ien , giving an account of success
and failure in human aﬀairs and of good and evil in public
aﬀairs, belongs to the Confucian school.’1
It was Ko Hung who was responsible for the delightful
deﬁnitions of classical Taoism and Confucianism. He was
asked: ‘Of Confucianism and Taoism, which is the more
diﬀicult?’ He replied: ‘Confucianism is diﬀiculty  in the
midst of facility; Taoism is facility in the midst of
diﬀiculties; in it all annoyances are lifted with an inner
harmony that grows of itself; perfect freedom of action and
thought; no fear, no grief.’ Taoists ‘reject specialization in
worldly matters, wash away all trickeries, forget wealth
and neglect honours, block repression and encour age free
expression, are not concerned about the loss of anything,
do not glory in success and are not saddened by
denigration and take no delight in praise.’
Ko Hung regarded the existing scrolls for medicines as
incomplete, confused and often lacking in treatment for
many critical illnesses. He said that they employed
expensive ingredients only available to the rich, whereas
his scrolls would be found to mention all the medicines
and give full treatment for all serious illnesses: ‘Any
household possessing this book can dispense with theservices of a physician. Further , it is not always possible to
ﬁnd a physician at a moment's notice and when you do ﬁnd
one he may not wish to come immediately .’ (This strangely
modern passage was written nearly 2000 years ago!) Chinese alchemy , being more concerned with longevity
and immortality than with the making of gold, was
naturally involved with ﬁnding the Elixir of Immortality
and with prescriptions  for prolonging life. When
challenged that he was attempting the impossible in trying
to overcome  mortality in this life, Ko Hung replied that
although the deaf could not hear thunder or appreciate
music, and the sun and the splendour of the Emperor's
robes were invisible to the blind, it did not mean that these
things did not exist. His recipe for long life was the use of
appropriate medicines, breathing exercises and
philosophical thought. Alchemy , like all esoteric lore, had
to be learned from an adept and Ko Hung's master , Cheng
Yin, at over eighty , had black hair, a ‘full cheerful face’ and
could draw a strong cross-bow and shoot a hundred paces;
he walked hundreds of miles and could drink two
demijohns of wine without becoming drunk; he climbed
mountains with agility and crossed precipitous places and
dangerous heights which daunted younger men. He ate
and drank the same thing s as anyone else, but could go for
unlimited days without food and without feeling hunger . In his writings Ko Hung maintained that alchemical
change was only one facet of the universal transformations
in Nature. ‘It is clear , therefore, that transformation is
something spontaneous in Nature. Why then should we
demur at the possibility of making gold and silver from
other things? Look at the ﬁre obtained from heaven with
the burning-mirror , and the water got at night [dew] from
the moon-mirror; are they diﬀerent from ordinary ﬁre and
water? . . . I guarantee that mercury can vapourize and
that gold and silver can be sought successfully . . . theManuals of the Immortals tell us . . . that it is in the nature
of gold and silver that one can make them.’ In his time
there were treatises which contained recipes and formulae
for ‘melting jade,’ ‘transforming gold’ and making
‘talisman water.’ But these obscure and probably  esoteric
terms notwi thstanding, Professor Needham, the great
authority on the development of Chinese science, says that
Ko Hung's Pao P'u Tzu  ‘conta ins some scientiﬁc  thinking at
what appears to be a high level.’
Ko Hung disapproved of the recluse-alchemists seeking
their own immortality to the neglect of their dependents,
as so many did: ‘To turn one's back upon wife and children
and make one's abode in the mountains and marshes,
uncaringly to reject basic human usage . . . is hardly to be
encouraged. If by some good fortune they can become
immortal and still go on living at home, why should they
seek to mount specially to the heavens?’ Once the
preparation of the divine Elixir has been achieved
successfully ‘you and your whole household, not just you
alone, will become immor tals.’ He also says that this state
of immortality cannot be attained without good deeds,
loyalty , friendliness and trustworthiness. This condition of immorality was known as that of the
hsien , the genie or immortal, and the alchemist aimed  at
achieving hsien -hood, of which there were several grades,
as will be seen later. Strangely , Ko Hung's death was said
to be consistent with the lowest grade, the shih chieh
hsien , the ‘corpse free,’ one whose corpse disappears,
leaving only the clothes or some identifying object behind. At his death he was encoﬀined but later it was found that
his body had disappeared, only his clothes remaining. While Ko Hung, Wei Po-yang and other early alchemists
can be traced in historical records, many of the early
names and the stages of alchemy are found only in legend,
for which the Chinese have the delightful phrase ‘wildhistory .’ The most important of these legendary characters
is undoubtedly the Yellow Emperor , Huang Ti, who
traditionally reigned from about 2704 to 2595 BC. He was
regarded as the ﬁrst and greatest of Taoist immortals and
alchemists and was said to have learned, not only from his
Three Immo rtal Maids, but also from an Immortal who
lived on a mountain, who, after considerable persuasion,
instructed the Emperor in the understanding of the Tao, of
sciences, meditation and medicines. Huang Ti was reputed
to have written the Inner Classics. He became an
Immortal, or hsien , himself and after reigning for over a
hundred years he ascen ded to heaven on the back of a
dragon, taking with him some seventy members of his
domestic household and court, in full view of the populace. Others of his retainers, anxious  to go heavenward with
him, hung on to the whiskers of the dragon, but they gave
way and the hangers-on, together with the Emperor's bow,
fell to the ground. The people gazed at the Emperor and
dragon until they disappeared into the heavens. The fallen
bow was collected and venerated. Although there was a
tomb and a shrine built for the Yellow Emperor it was said
that it was later found to be devoid of a corpse and
contained only a sword and shoes.Chang T ao-ling founder of the popular T aoism and
the ﬁrst T aoist pope
Another legendary character was the Emperor YÜ the
Great, tradit ionally known as ‘the happy miner .’ He was a
smelter who ‘pierced the mountains’ and ‘made the earth
healthy .’ He knew the diﬀerence between male and female
metals and employed the yin-yang  principles in all his
work, dividin g his cauldrons into yin and yang . There were
nine of these, four yin and ﬁve yang . Here it is of interestto note the early appeara nce of the yin-yang  doctrine, the
importance of the number nine, which runs through all
alchemy and Chinese lore, and the division of the number
into even (yin) and odd (yang ) numbers. As we shall see,
the yin-yang  symbolism is employed right through Chinese
alchemy as the two powers of mercury and sulphur , the
lunar and solar . The legendary accounts of the origins of alchemy are not
conﬁned to the Chinese ‘wild history;’ in the West there is
the story that fallen angels were responsible for teaching
the science of alchemy to the women they married on
earth. Anoth er tradition  claims that alchemy owed its
inception to Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth, God of Wisdom,
or that Isis won the secret from an angel in return for
sexual favours, and handed it to her son Horus. Yet
another legend is that God revealed the secrets of alchemy
to Moses and Aaron, both master magicians. OceanofPDF .com– 2 –
ALCHEMY EAST AND WEST
Chinese alchemy , while often running parallel with that of
the West, and showing considerable similarity with Indian
beliefs, for example the idea of a drug which could prolong
life, the Elixir of Immor tality , which appears in India a
thousand years before Christ, holds no deﬁnite proof of
common origins, but much of exchange of thought. The
same argument rages over the beginnings of alchemy as
over symbo lism: wheth er such ideas and symbols
‘migrated’ from one country to another in trading and
cultural contacts, or arose spontaneously in diﬀerent
civilizations and widely separated parts of the world. In view of the universal similarities in the content and
types of dreams and in the workings of the subconscious
mind, as demonstrated by Jung's work, it is reasonable to
suppose that in waking life the same types and ideas also
rise spontan eously in the human mind. In mythology ,
religion, symbolism, fairy tale and folklore and such early
sciences as alchemy and astrology , while the local
colouring of dreams and thoughts is naturally diﬀerent,
the basic contents, symbolism and psych ological
implications appear to be universal; but while there are
similarities, there are also diﬀerences in East and West. The answer to the question of migration versus
spontaneous growth lies probably in a degree of both. Military conq uests, trade  and cultural exchanges obviously
spread ideas  and knowledge, while, on the other hand, it is
only natural that people the world over should have asked
the same questions about their environment, the cosmos in
which they lived and their relationship with it.There seems to have been a considerable exchange of
knowledge between China and India; it is known that
alchemical practices were prevalent in both countries well
before the Christian era and there was deﬁnite evidence of
exchange when a Chinese Emperor of the T'ang dynasty
sent an envoy , Wang Hsüan-ts'e, to India between  AD 643
and 665; there are indications that he made two visits
during this time. He was a specialist in prolonging life—
that is to say, an alchemist—and a noted magician. He
brought back with him an Indian Brahmin,
Narayamasvamin, who was an alchemist and physician,
while another Indian magician came over from Kashmir in
664-5 on the orders of the Emperor Kao Tsung: this
magician was thought to have possessed the drug of
longevity . Waley maintains that there is no doubt that ‘a
deﬁnite give and take went on between China and India
during the T'ang dynast y,’ but that Chinese techniques
were already well deve loped long before any known
contact with India. Other branches of early  alchemy were establis hed in
Babylonia and Chaldea; the Persians were skilled in magic,
alchemy and medicine, while from Egypt came the great
Hermetic tradition which passed to Greece, Greek  culture
being spread widely later by the conquests of Alexander
the Great. Arabian alchemy also rose from the Alexandrian
School in Egypt but was, at the same time, in touch with
Chinese thought. From Greek and Arabic culture alchemy
spread into Europe, but showed a direct inheritance from
Hermes/Thoth. Arabic and Byzantine alchemy were, like
the ancient Hellenic practices, a mixture of magic,
astrology and mysticism  touched with the tradition of
Hermes Trismegistus. Some authorities have maintained that all alchemy  came
from China originally and spread westward later ; others
believe that it arose in Egypt. Babylon has also beensuggested as the source, while others again, as has been
said, have propounded the theory that the same ideas and
concepts arose spontaneously and existed simult aneously
in diﬀerent countries. However , the idea most basic to
Chinese alchemy, the Elixir of Life, did not appear in the
West until the twelfth century AD, when it was introduced
there from China by the Arabs. Similarities between eastern and western alchemy are
seen in the concept of polarity and the universal symbolic
reverence for gold as the great solar power , with its
counterpart in the lunar silver . The Sol and Luna theme,
presented in various guises, runs through all alchemy:
Fludd, for instance, expre ssed this polarity as the Sun, the
father , the heart, the right eye, with the left eye as the
Moon, the mother , the womb, as well as the basic duality
of sulphur and quicksilver . All branches of alchemy
reverenced the Earth, the Great Mother , in whose womb
were nourished the metals and from which they were
born. The essential diﬀerence between Chinese alchemy and
that of the West was that while the latter was always
associated with gold, whether in the transmutation of base
metals into gold or the transformation of the base metal of
unregenerate man into the pure gold of the spiritual life
and realization, Chinese alchemy was primarily concerned
with the ﬁnding of the Elixir of Immortality—again, either
at the lower level of prolonging physical life for its own
sake, or for ﬁnding personal immortality , or, on the
spiritual side, prolonging life in this world in order to gain
more time to spiritualize the soul or to gain immortality as
the enlightened being, the ‘True Man’ at one with the T ao. The Chinese  approach was through the fundam ental
doctrine of yin and yang;  the inﬂuenc e of, and dependence
on, the I Ching , the Book of Changes; and the teaching of
the Five Elements School of thought, the whole outlookbeing more on a mental-spiritual level, even in its lower
branches, than the gold-seeking slant of western alchemy . Materialism came later as a decadent growth in Chinese
alchemy at certain periods; but, as Waley says, the work
with metals and elixirs had practically ceased by AD 1000
and given place to the mystical path, which still used
alchemical phraseology and symbolism. Of this stage he
says that: ‘Whereas in reading the works of western
alchemists one constantly suspects that the quest with
which they are concerned is a purely spiritual one; that
they are using romantic phraseology of alchemy merely to
poeticize religious experience, in China there is no such
disguise. Alchemy becom es there openly and avowedly
what it almost seems to be in the works of Böehme or
Thomas Vaughan.’ Chine se alchemy , with its emphasis on
longevity and immortality , is much easier to account for
than that of the West. Serious western scholars and
alchemists often had to cover their spiritual quest with the
trappings of the laboratory and the search for material
gold for fear of persecution as heretics; but the Chinese
searcher after the Tao could reasonably study and follow
experiments in which he ‘spiritualized’ himself: he did not
need to make concessio ns to the material gold cult. A
further diﬀerence between East and West lay in the
theistic attitudes adopted in the Work. The western
alchemist, if he were involved in the esoteric, spiritual
branch of the Work, invoked the God of monotheism. His
eastern coun terpart in classical Taoism was non-theistic,
living in accord with and working for Nature and the
impersonal Tao and calling on no god; but the ‘bellows
blowers,’ as the exoteric , personal seekers were  called,
invoked a host of gods, spiritual beings and powers and
were closely involved with spirits and demons, repelling
the latter and depending on the aid of benevolent spirits.There is no doubt at all that alchemy operated in two
distinct branches existing side by side: the physical and
the metaphysical. The true alchemy was the realm of the
mystic, its aim being the transmutation of base man into
perfection; but at the same time there existed the
materialistically motivate d gold seekers together with the
seriously scientiﬁcally-minded knowledge seekers and
experimentalists, of whom Paracelsus said: ‘They do not
give themse lves up to ease and idleness . . . but they
devote themselves diligently to their labours, sweating
whole nights  over ﬁery furnaces. These do not kill time
with empty talk, but ﬁnd delight in their laboratory .’1
Chinese alchemy , embedded in Taoism, was probably
mystical in character before it became a science or art; it
was sacred before it became profane, so that in a sense
the scientiﬁc -chemical aspect was a decadent stage. The
two branche s could have little in the way of contact or
mutual unde rstanding, since the esoteric, mysti cal side
could engen der no desires, for these do not exist in the
Tao; the reverse was true of the gold, or elixir , or longevity
seekers. Ko Hung, in the Pao P'u Tzu, wrote that the adept
in Taoism regards ‘a peerage as an execution cauldron, a
seal of oﬀice as a mourning dress, gold and jade as dirt, a
splendid hall as a prison. How diﬀerent from those pseudo-
alchemists who, clenching their ﬁsts, mouth empty
phrases and wait for good  luck, or who lead a leisurely life
in a gorgeous room, endowed with countless grants,
appointed to high oﬀice, and still are discontented with
their power and wealth!’
The Chinese made a crucial distinction between
external, inorganic, laboratory alchemy and the internal,
philosophical side; the former was concerned with the
Elixir , or Pill, of Immortality , with ingredients and recipes
using minerals or plants, a work which incidentally gave
rise to the experimen tal, metallurgic, chemical andmaterial aspects; the latter , which operated within the
adept's own body and soul, was concerned with the
psychological and spiritual side, with immortality and the
spiritual transformation into the True Man. The one was
the exoteric ‘outer elixir ,’ in Chinese the wei tan ; the other
the ‘inner elixir ,’ the esoteric nei tan; the one was
material, the other spiritual. Laboratory alchemy , dealing
with material experiments, was quantitative; the inner
alchemy , striving towards spiritual perfectio n, was
qualitative. For the spiritual work, the outw ard and
exoteric aspect was merely a symbol of the inner work. On the lowes t level were those motivated by greed and
hope of gain, either of material wealth or psychic powers;
those who mistook the real work of spiritual gold for
material riches. These were known in Chinese alchemy as
the ‘bellows blowers’ or ‘puﬀers;’ in the West they were
called ‘charcoal burners,’ ‘bunglers,’ or ‘messy cooks.’
There were also the charlatans who battened on the greed
or credulity of emperors, princes, or the public. Some
promised great results, or claimed to know of some place
where the required minerals could be found, persuading
princes and patrons to equip them with the money and
necessities for the journey, and then disap pearing. However , even here, on the lower level, experiments could
lead to knowledge of the properties of the metals and
herbs used in the processes and gave birth to early
metallurgy and chemistry , while genuine experim entalists
arrived at an understanding that was sometimes in
advance of present-day scientiﬁc achievement. The Taoism from which alchemy arose had as its main
teaching that humanity should learn to live in harmony
with Nature, with the Tao. Those who achieved this
harmony did so through a spiritual-mystical understanding
of the universe and its laws. The achievement naturally led
to a balanced outlook, an acceptance of Nature's way, andtherefore to a relaxed and happy temperament that was
naturally conducive to good health through lack of stress
and strain. Others, the less discerning, who saw the
results but were either incapable of or unwilling to follow
the Way, might assume that the mystic had some hidden
secret of success or long life and so might look for short
cuts in drugs, recipes and elixirs—an attitude still evident
today in those who seek spiritual or psychic experiences
through the medium of drugs: the lower alchemy . This lower alchemy appealed to all the least desirable
qualities in human nature: greed of gold, envy, unhealthy
curiosity , vanity . The true alchemy led to the exact
opposite, the recognition of the need for improvement in
oneself and the lot of others; it was the ‘hidden work’
which humbly sought for illumination and the
transmutation of the base leaden qualities into the gold of
the True Man, a work carried out away from any publicity
in the solitariness of one's own soul. In the West, societies
allied to alchemy , such as masonry and rosicru cianism,
were also insistent that the majority misunderstood the
true work and taught that: ‘Moreover the objec t of our
guiltless guild is not the making of gold . . . Rather we
remove the erroneous opinion from them [the disciples] in
so far as they are infected with it, even on the ﬁrst steps to
the temple of wisdom. They are earnestly enjoined against
these errors that they must seek the Kingdom of God and
his righteousness.’2
The Taoist aim was to become the True Man (chen jen),
‘true’ in the sense of puriﬁed—in alchemical terms, ridding
oneself of the dross of the base metals, which then
become' true.' The True Man is beyond the hsien ; he is the
fully realized individual who has attained enlightenment
and is beyond the need for, or the idea of, ‘powers’ and
personal immortality .OceanofPDF .com– 3 –
H S I E N
Running through popular Chinese alchemy was the belief
that it was possible to attain a bodily immortality; that the
body could be so rareﬁed that it took on the attributes and
possibilities of a spirit. It was not merely a matter of
arresting the normal processes of ageing and decay but,
through a lifetime of practices, creating a new subtle body,
capable of ‘ﬂying on the wind,’ of being in more than one
place at once, immune from harm from ﬁre, water or
weapons and able to assume invisibility; in fact having all
the supernatural powers. To achieve this was to become a hsien . The word is
usually translated as Immortal or Genie, but neither takes
on the whole meaning, so the term is best left
untranslated. As Giles says, it is ‘a word which in its
written form is a character composed of two pictographic
elements, “man” and “mountain,” thus it appeared that the
name was originally applied to men who had retired from
the world in order to live a hermit's life in the mountains. Their activities were mostly conﬁned to the gathering of
certain herbs and roots which, when eaten, would not only
cure disease but also rejuvenate the body and lengthen its
life beyond the normal span.’ Though, for the most part
hsien  were associated with the mountains, there were also
hsien  of the sea connected with the remote Isles where the
Immortals dwell and where the herb of immortality grows. But as Ko Hung says: ‘They simply make their abodes
wherever they prefer .’Supernatural powers also developed as a result of these
experiments with herbs and fungi—powers of
transformation, passing through solids of ﬁre, walking on
water , and so on. The reasoning behind the cult was that if
one became suﬀiciently in accord with the Tao, which was
eternal, it should be possible to become one with this
immortality . The material body was to be reﬁned away
gradually , made more and more subtle by diet, breathing
and other yogic exercises until it became wholly
etherealized. Nor is this belief dead, for John Blofeld, in
his travels in modern but pre-communist China, met a
Taoist recluse in a monastery , a highly erudite man, who
was seriously intending to transmogrify his body into a
‘shining, adamantine substance, weightless yet hard as
jade.’
The powers of the hsien  parallel those of the Theravadin
Buddhist disciplines as set out in the Satipatthana Sutra;
that is, that the yogin will attain the ability to become
invisible, or to ‘become many ,’ i.e., appear in several
places at once, to pene trate solids, ﬂy through the air,
walk on water or plunge into the earth. Other acquisitions
are the ‘heavenly ear,’ that is, being able to hear both
terrestrial and celestial sounds, near or far oﬀ, and being
able to see into other people's minds. These powers were,
naturally , used in an entirely benevolent way for the good
of humanity as well as for the hsien  him or herself . This
ability to transcend the elements was used by the hsien
not only in daily life but also in alchemical work; the earth
yielded its secrets to him and the powers of travelling in
supernatural realms conferred a knowledge of life and
death and abolished all fear of death. The techniques for achieving hsien -hood all aimed at
eliminating the factors which caused disruption and
degeneration in the individual. Diet, herbs or medicines,
and exercises were all used for arresting the ageingprocess, while emotional and psychological control and the
cultivation of ease of mind and peace of spirit would
confer freedom from the destructive tensions of life. Once
physical and mental balance and harmony had been
attained the disease-inducing and wearing-out inﬂuences
would be eliminated or slowed down. Above all, it was the
ability to live in harmony with Nature that was the goal
and means of attaining realization. Also, the hsien  would
be a true Taoist in refusing to take himself or life too
seriously , believing with Chuang Tzu that ‘I and the
universe are one,’ and that life and death were part of that
one and therefore both equally acceptable. The light-
hearted, gamin spirit of Taoism was seen in the poetry of
Li Po, who was called the ‘banished hsien ’ and who met a
characteristically hsien  end to his life by being borne
heavenwards on the back of a whale! There are, however , other positive qualities and
attributes necessary for achieving the state of the hsien . This is illustrated in the story of the hsien  Shao Chün,  in
the Han dynasty , who had found the secret of the elixir and
was summoned to the presence of the Emperor who
wanted to share it. Shao Chün told him:
So long as your Majesty cannot make an end of pride
and extravagance and renounce the allurements of
the senses; while smiting and killing go on unchecked
and the passions of joy and anger are not overcome;
while in your dominion there are spirits that are not
submissive and in the market place there are
executions and bloodshed, the great secret of the
celestial drug cannot be mastered. Like all true hsien  Shao Chün did not die a conventional
death but disappeared from his coﬀin leaving only his
clothes comp lete and fastened ‘like the slough of a cicada,’
having ‘undergone voluntary transformation.’ Hisconnection with alchemy is shown in his further
instructions to the Emperor to
sacriﬁce to the Furnace  and you will be able to
summon up the spirits. Having summoned up the
spirits you may transmu te cinnabar into pure gold. When you have produced pure gold, make it into
eating and drinking vessels, and you will prolong
your span of life. If your span of life is prolonged, you
may behold the hsien  who live on the Island of P'eng-
lai. When you have seen them and performed the
sacriﬁces of Heaven and Earth, then you will become
immortal. This is what happened to the Yellow
Emperor . Arthur Waley, commenti ng on this passage, suggests
that the statement that having prolonged your life you may
be able to see the hsien  implies that hsien  are only visible
to those who have increas ed their span of life to something
approaching the immortal; in other words, only like can
see like. This type of homoeopathy also seems to hold in
the recipes used in the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i  where it says: ‘The
way to make oneself a hsien  lies in the use of drugs of a
nature similar to oneself  . . . Things that are similar in
nature go together , strange things cannot be reconciled.’
Ko Hung said: ‘No man ever got ﬁne grain without tilling
the soil and no man can ever attain hsien -hood without
diligence.’ So there are endless passages giving the
necessary preliminary qualities. One must be kind and
aﬀectionate, practise the Golden Rule, rejoice in the good
fortune of others and sympathize with their suﬀering;
utter no curse; regard other people's success or failure as
one's own; avoid pride, vaunting oneself , or concealing evil
intent with ﬂattery . Harmful things are sadness and
uneasiness, but also excess of joy; wasting time lying abed;
lying down after a heavy meal; drunkenness; celibacy;getting breathless after running; shouts of joy or weeping;
long convers ations and telling pointless stories; in short,
there must be no excess. In a treatise on ‘The Art of
Acquiring a Long and Healthy Life’ (the Pen Ts'ao Kang
Mu), four rules are laid down: one must ‘regulate the
aﬀections of the heart; be moderate in the use of food and
drink; carry out the day's  work to a system and plan; rest
and sleep to certain deﬁnite rules.’ In censuring the
luxurious hunting lifestyle of princes and potent ates, Ko
Hung said that in contradistinction ‘methods leading to
hsien -hood . . . depend on extending love to all things that
creep and crawl, so that nothing that breathes may be
harmed.’ This love should be extended ‘to the very
frontiers of the universe  and to view others as we do
ourselves.’ He also said that two Emperors, Shih Huang Ti,
who founded  the Chin dynasty , and Wu Ti of the Han, both
of whom encouraged alchemists and sought to ﬁnd
immortality and the Isles of the Blessed, ‘had a hollow
reputation for wanting hsien -hood, but they never
experienced the reality of cultivating the divine process . . . wouldn't it be most unus ual if they had managed to reject
ﬁne foods, neglect their desires, turn their backs on
splendours and go forth alone in search of the silence of
divinity and hsien -hood?’ He added that ‘those wishing to
enter the path of geniehood are as numerous as the hairs
on a buﬀalo, while the successful are as rare as the horn of
the unicorn.’
Genghis Khan was said to have asked a venerable Taoist
Immortal for the secret of longevity and was told that a
pure heart and few desir es were what was required. The
Khan then said that the Venerable Master had been sent to
awaken his conscience. This insistence on moral rectitude, puriﬁcation and
noble qualities points to the fact that the alchemy involved
was not a material matter; such attributes would  not benecessary for the carrying out of merely chemical or
laboratory experiments. That it was a spiritual quest is
also made evident in the West by such statements and
instructions as that of Basil V alentinus:
First there should be the invocation of God, ﬂowing
from the depth of a pure and sincere heart, and a
conscience which should be free from all hypocr isy
and vice, and also from  all cognate faults such as
arrogance, boldness, pride, luxury , worldly vanity,
oppression of the poor and similar iniquities, which
should be rooted out of the heart . . . that when a
man appears before the Throne of God, to regain the
health of his body, he may come with a conscience
weeded of all tares, and be changed into a pure
temple of God cleansed of all that deﬁles. There were distinct grades of hsien . The lowest was the
‘corpse free,’ whose body disappeared at death or
vanished after being placed in a coﬀin, which when
examined later was usually found to contain only the
clothes or identifying objects such as shoes, a sword, a
bamboo staﬀ or a bamboo tablet with red writing on it. One hsien  disappeared from his usual haunts but left a
bamboo eﬀigy to be buried in his place. An ancien t writing
says: ‘After the death of an adept seeking immort ality, the
form of the skeleton may remain behind while the
Immortal goes away; that is what is meant by “corpse
free” (shih chieh ). When one is ready to rise up as an
immortal, one leaves behind the malodorous house of clay,
hence the expression “corpse” (shih)  from which the hsien
is liberated.’ This stage is the shih chieh hsien . The second grade was the ti hsien  or earthly immortal,
who, having achieved hsien -hood, chose  to remain in an
earthly environment and who ‘resorted to a famous
mountain.’ The body became so reﬁned that the ti hsienlived a life of the spirit, wandering amidst the beauties of
the world and consorting with the like-minded. The highest was the t'ien hsien , the heavenly or celestial
immortal who ascended to heaven, rose to ‘the aery void’
and joined the supernatural spirits. It was said that some remained in the ﬁrst state of shih
chieh hsien  from choice. Such was the hsien  Mr. White-
stone, who was 2000 years old but looked like a man of
forty. He maintained that the joys of heaven were not
superior to those of earth, because on earth one was
greatly respected as a hsien  and would be no better oﬀ in
heaven. This sort of hsien  was probably one who
deliberately only took half a dose of the elixir; but if he
wanted to change his state he could always take the other
half and become a celestial immortal. There was also,
again, the vague and little mentioned class of aquatic
hsien  who were of the yin, water y, nature and lived in the
waters. Most hsien , whose biographies appear in the T'u Shu Chi
Ch'eng , which has the lives of more than a thousand such
immortals recorded, made their ﬁnal exit from the world in
a spectacular manner . They were people from every walk
of life and every type of person, male and female; from
princes such as Liu An of the Han dynasty , to humble
beggars; from high oﬀicia ls to peasants; but the manner of
their departure followed the same patterns. Sometimes
the ‘death’ was followed by an amazing reviviﬁcation such
as happened when a hsien  had been deliberately killed by
some ill-disposed person; but more usual was the
spectacular ride heavenwards, for example, as already
quoted, Li Po departing  on a whale. He, no doubt in
consonance with his gamin sense of humour , would choose
so incongruous a mount to go heavenwards! Lao Tzu
himself trave lled to the West; one account says he was
borne away on a yellow buﬀalo, another that hedisappeared into the heavens in a chariot drawn by a black
ox. Ma Shih Huang, who was a horse doctor in the Yellow
Emperor's reign and who also treated an ailing dragon,
was later taken up to heaven by the dragon. Lü Shang,
after living 2000 years, was placed in his coﬀin by a son,
but when the son set about performing the funeral rites
the coﬀin was found to be empty except for a jade seal and
six bamboo manuscript tablets. The beautiful girl Kou-i Fu-jen, who became the mother
of the Empe ror Chao Ti, was a hsien . She was murdered
but her body did not grow cold in death and emitted a
wonderful fragrance. Later , her coﬀin was found to contain
nothing but a silk slipper . Yü Tzu, on the other hand, never
died; he climbed a mountain and was seen to take oﬀ
heavenwards in broad daylight. The powers exercised by the hsien  are fully illustrated in
the story of the Eight Immortals who visited the Prince Liu
An, a noted patron of alchemists. They were refused
admittance by the Prince's gatekeeper when they
appeared as old men, so they immediately changed into
boys of ﬁfteen with black hair and peach-blossom cheeks;
this so frightened the gatekeeper that he ran to Liu An
who in turn hastened to greet his visitors without even
pausing to put on his shoes. He conducted the Immortals
indoors and established them on furnishings of silk, gold
and jade and burned incense of ‘a hundred ingredients
harmoniously compounde d.’ The hsien  then changed back
into old men and the Prince took up the position of a
disciple, facing North, with hands raised in salutation. Introducing themselves the hsien  said:
One of us can cause wind and rain by sitting down,
can raise clouds and fog by standing up, can make
rivers and lakes by drawing lines on the ground and
can create mountains by piling up sand.One of us can crumble heights and ﬁll up deeps, can
control the tiger and leopard, and can catch the
dragon and the snake and can master gods and
ghosts and make them serve him. One of us can separate his form and change his
appearance, can cause life by sitting down and death
by standing up, can cover a complete army from sight
and can turn broad daylight into darkness. One of us can ride in space and walk on emptine ss,
can go into the sea and the deep, can go in and out
through any partitions and can breathe a breath of
one thousand miles. One of us can go into the ﬁre without being scorch ed,
into water without getting wet, can be stabb ed
without being hurt, can be aimed at but never hit by
an arrow and is not cold in freezing water and does
not sweat in summer . One of us can perform thousands of changes at will,
can bring forth birds and animals, weeds and woods,
in a moment, and can move mountains, heights and
rivers. One of us can prevent havoc, reclaim from dangers,
dispel evils, do away with harmful things and can
cause longevity . One of us can boil mud to get gold, assay lead to get
silver , can fuse the eight minerals of the alchemist
into a liquid form from which pearls ﬂow and can ride
the dragon and harness the clouds to travel aﬂoat in
the Great Clearness. They then oﬀered gifts to Liu An who made obeisance
and served wines and fruit to them with his own hands. The abilities of the hsien  were tested  and conﬁrmed andthe Prince was given the Book of Medicines. The elixir was
made up, but Liu An did not take it until later, when a
jealous court ier informed  falsely against him. The courtier
persuaded the Emperor that Liu An had plotted against
him and the Emperor , believing the informer , sent to bring
the Prince to justice. The eight hsien  then said: ‘You must
go now, this is a heaven- sent message for you to depart.’
They all went together to the mountain, Liu An took the
medicine and they all made a ceremonial oﬀering, burying
gold in the earth; then all rose heavenwards in broad
daylight. Liu An's dog and the chickens in the courtyard
picked up some of the pills and were immediately
transported to heaven with him. A diﬀerent version of Liu An' s end is that, when the
Emperor ordered him to commit suicide, he simply
disappeared, ascending to heaven complete with his family
and all his domestic animals, who had all taken the elixir . The same happened with Huai-nan Tzu, who wrote a
treatise on alchemy and was said to have discov ered the
elixir of immortality , which he took and at once ascended
in broad daylight in the presence of witnesses. As he rose
in the air he dropped the jar containing the rest of the
pills, which were picked up by his dog and hens who all
promptly rose to heaven after him, where their barking
and crowing was heard. This disappearance of an adept
heavenwards is a familiar event in other cultures; the
translation of Elijah to heaven in a ﬁery chariot, for
example, and the case of the patriarch Enoch, who ‘walked
with God and was not.’
There are endless accounts of the wonder-w orking
powers of the hsien . One crossed the Yangtze river in ﬂood
by pointing his fan at it, whereupon the waters divided and
left him a passage on dry ground. Another hsien  ambled
oﬀ in an old donkey cart, which, when followed, could not
be overtaken by a galloping horse. There was also a PiedPiper among them who charmed away a plague of rats,
and there are accounts of feasts at which the wine jar was
inexhaustible and the meat and delicacies never gave out. In his Pao P'u Tzu, Ko Hung describes the state of the
hsien:
Now once we can mount into the empty air and tread
upon the light, with the clouds as our vehicles and
rainbows for canopies, we shall be able to taste the
dews of roseate morning vapours and quaﬀ the
intoxicating essences of the deep blue heavens and
the yellow earth. For drink we shall have nectar of
jade and ambrose of gold, for food we shall taste
cerulean iridescent mushrooms and vermilion-red
ﬂowers; our dwellings will be of jasper and sardine-
stone, with rooms composed of rubescent gems; and
we shall wander in the realm of Great Purity . There is much in common  with the traditional spirit and
fairy world in the powers exhibited by the hsien— in their
powers of invisibility , shape-shifting and ﬂying, and in their
ability to pass through solids and summon up the magic
table that provides unlim ited food and drink. There is also
the phenomena of time-loss and timelessness, as in fairy
stories, when mortals disappear for what seems a few
moments or hours only to return and ﬁnd a world
hundreds of years older . The hsien  Tung- fang went missing for a year as a child;
on being reproached by his foster-mother , he gave an
account of wanderings in supernatural realms, though he
insisted that he had gone  out in the morning and returned
at noon on the same day. Two friends who went into the
mountains to collect herbs for recipes got lost for thirteen
days but ﬁnally found a peach tree and ate its fruit and
drank from a stream; they then came across two
amazingly beautiful maidens and stayed in theirmagniﬁcent abode for ten days, after which they decided it
was time to return home. The fairy women had them
escorted on their way with music and singing,  but on
reaching ‘home’ found that seven generations had passed,
though they managed to ﬁnd a descendant of the family
who rememb ered the story of a distant ancestor who had
disappeared into the mountains and never returned. Another hsien , Wang Chih, was given a date stone to suck
when he went into the forest to cut wood. There he stayed
for a short time with the fairies, but when he arrived back
in the morta l world his axe-handle had crumbled to dust
and several centuries had gone by . The idea of the hsien  greatly appealed to the Chinese
mind and there were countless stories of the Immortals or
Genii. But although legends and interest abounded, few
actually unde rtook the work of transformation. A passage
from a Sung dynasty treatise, on alchemical techniques,
reads: ‘As for the aﬀairs of elixirs, chemicals and the
furnaces, scholars, high-ranking ministers and learned
Taoists, ensconced in mountain and forest retreats, all love
talking about them and searching them out. I should think
that seven or eight out of ten are like this, but I doubt
whether all of them are bent upon getting the chemical
medicines of immortality to become hsien .’
Not only were there the dilettantes, there were also the
charlatans, the ‘false teachers’ against whom Ko Hung
inveighed as those who ‘utter clever and eloquent
inanities.’ He instances cases of false teachers and casts
doubt on some of the accounts of hsien  leaving empty
coﬀins. He wrote of one pseudo-teacher who fooled many
of his followers during his life and ‘the crowd believed
everything they heard of him,’ while ‘those of us who knew
the stories he told treate d them as a matter of laughter .’
This false teacher grew old and forgetful (which  a hsien
should never  do), fell ill and died. It was assumed that hehad been transformed, but when a pupil, at whose home
he had died, bored a hole in the coﬀin a year later, the
corpse was still there. That several hsien  were executed by emperors or killed
by jealous or vicious enemies does not in any way imply
lack of powers, either prophetic or magical, on their part
for not avoid ing such a fate. Execution was often regarded
as a means of release from the body by the ‘sword
method,’ and in such cases the hsien  was always seen to
be alive and well some days later, or the coﬀin found to be
empty except for some identifying object. One such hsien ,
Kung-yüan, who was beheaded by the Emperor in a ﬁt of
fury, reappeared and told the Emperor that it was all a
joke to him: ‘One who has attained to hsien -hood is
immune from all calamity . Heaven and Earth might be
engulfed and still he would remain unscathed; how much
less could he be injured by ordinary weapons.’
OceanofPDF .com– 4 –
LONGEVITY AND IMMORTALITY
The desire for longevity , immortality and the conquest of
death occurs in most civilizations, religions and
mythologies, but is parti cularly prevalent in Chinese life
and literature. In the conventional greeting of wishing
‘long life, health, wealth and happiness,’ it is the long life
that is the most important and the character for longevity
appears everywhere, stylized in literally dozens of ways in
art, on talismans and ornaments. The Chinese having
always had an extreme reverence for old age, the
pictograph also stands for old age, ‘enduring forever ,’ a
long life and prosperity ; but in the popular branch of
Taoism its immortality aspect can also signify death, with a
religious immortality meaning. Some idea of the extent  of the longevity aimed at in
alchemy may be given by the story of Huang An, who
preserved his body by eating cinnabar . He sat on the back
of a tortoise for so long that its shell became quite ﬂat. When asked how long he had been there he replied: ‘The
tortoise fears the light of the sun and the moon and puts
its head out only once in 2000 years. This I have seen it do
ﬁve times already since I have been sitting here.’ When he
was wandering about instead of sitting he carried the
tortoise on his back. In the classical Taoism of Chuang Tzu this prolongation
of life was not advocated. He wrote: ‘How do I know that
loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that by hating
death I am not one who, having left his home in his youth,
has forgotten  the way back? . . . How do I know that thedead do not wonder why they have ever longed for life?’
He also said that ‘What makes my life good makes death
good . . . the Sage delights in early death, he delights in
old age; he delights in the beginning; he delight s in the
end,’ and ‘The True Man of ancient times knew nothing of
loving life and hating death. He who clearly apprehends
the scheme of existence, does not rejoice over life nor
repine at death, for he knows that these are not ﬁnal.’
There is no doubt, though, that in alchemy the long life
of the body played an important part. At one level  the cult
of longevity had the objective of prolonging life in the body
for the sake of gaining more time for the development of
the spirit. This attitude also occurs in Indian and Tantric
alchemy . There are accounts of Indian yogins living for
more than three hundred and ﬁfty years. The theme also
appears in Muslim writings, probably having been  spread
westward from China via Turkistan. Talismanic characters for Longevity and HappinessAs to immortality , ‘The body must be brought into
complete subjection to, and into complete harmo ny with,
the principle s of the Tao. Through this process the body
would eventually acquire the attributes of the Tao, and
since Tao is immortal, immortality of the body would be a
natural and logical result. Death would not ensue, for after
the complete process of acquiring Tao, the physical
essence of the human organism would become reﬁned and
might no longer be distinguished from the spiritual
essence. Through the agency of Tao, therefore, man might
become, truly and completely , an immortal being.’ O. S.
Johnson, from whose study of Chinese alche my this
passage is quoted, sees in this stage of the development of
Taoist thought the crucial transition period from the
classical, philosophical Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu
to a utilitaria n and popular religion, having in it the seeds
of Chinese alchemy . Chinese religion and philosophy did not have the
otherworldly outlook of the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean
beliefs, since in Chinese thought spirit and matter were
not sharply divided; both were held to operate together in
the world of Nature, so when the body had been
suﬀiciently puriﬁed and etherealized it could continue to
exist in this world, or in the heavens, or both. Thus, having
reached this state, some of the Immortals ascended to
heaven while others chose to remain on earth . In the
Mesopotamian-Mediterranean religions this conquest of
death took the form of the perennial theme in mythology
of the cult of the Dying God who dies only to come to life
again; such are Osiris, Dionysos, Attis, Odin and all the
messiahs and culture heroes. In the Pao P'u Tzu, Ko Hung argues the case for
immortality from observations of metempsychosis:
‘Creatures which ﬂy and run, and creatures which crawl,
all derive a ﬁxed form from the Foundation of Change. Yetsuddenly they may change the old body and become totally
diﬀerent things. Of those changes there are so many
thousands and tens of thousands that one could never
come to the end of detailing them.’ In his autob iography
he also argues that:
The shallow-minded . . . merely say that because they
see no genii in their world it is not possible that such
things exist But what is so special about what our
eyes have seen? Why should there be any limit to the
numbers of marvellous things that exist between sky
and earth, within the vastness of the Unbounded? All
our lives we have a sky over our heads but never
know what is above it; to the end of our days we walk
the earth without ever seeing what is below it. Our
bodies are our very own, but we never come to
understand how our hearts and wills become what
they are. An allotment of life is ours, but we never
understand how its actual measure is achieved; and
this is even more true in the case of the more
abstruse patterns governing gods and genii . . . isn't
it a sad spectacle to see people relying upon the
surface perceptions of eyes and ears in judging the
existence of the subtle and the marvellous? The famous  Eight Immortals or Genii, the most
celebrated of all the hsien , seem to be a later form of the
Eight Worthi es of the Early Han dynasty , since they do not
appear until the thirteenth century , though most of its
members are associated with the T'ang dynasty . They are
immensely popular ﬁgures in Chinese art, being portrayed
in every medium: painting, embroidery , scrolls, fans, jade
and wood carvings, on vases and all ceramics. They
represent a complete cross-section of the people, as has
been said, male and female, rich and poor, old and young,
military and scholarly , noble and peasant and they alsocover a wide historical range, though only three of them
can be ident iﬁed as historical ﬁgures; the others  are the
stuﬀ of legend and fable, ‘wild history;’ but all are subjects
of a huge volume of romance, legend and popular
veneration. They are said to be ‘the embodiment of the
ideas of perfect but imaginary happiness which possess
the minds of the Chinese people.’
The Eight Immortals crossing the sea.The earliest,  said to be the founder of the group, was
Chung-li Ch'üan. He was reputed to have been a Han
marshal, but there is no historical evidence for this. His
birth was accompanied, traditionally , by various
marvellous phenomena. He was converted to the Tao by an
aged man and left his rank and profession to become a
wanderer . He became an alchemist, transmuted metals
into silver in a time of famine and distributed it among the
poor, so saving many lives. The secret of immortality was
revealed to him while meditating; a stone wall broke and
revealed a jade casket containing the secret. After
following the instructions his room was ﬁlled with rainbow
clouds and music; a crane then came to carry him
heavenwards. During his journeyings he met the Taoist
adept T'ao Hung-ching, who gave him ‘a pinch of the Great
Monad,’ a ﬁre-charm and some spiritual elixir . (The Great
Monad is the Tao, the cosmic force that pre-ex ists the
manifest world.) Chung-Ii Ch'üan's attributes are a
feathered fan and a ﬂywhisk, or sometimes a two-edged
sword and the peach of immortality . He is depicted as a fat
and bearded old man scantily clad. Chang Kuo was a hermit who rode a miraculous white
donkey that could cover immense distances in a day. Sometimes he rode facing the head, sometimes the tail of
the donkey . When Chang Kuo dismounted he folded the
donkey up like paper and put it away; when he wanted it
again he sprayed water over it from his mouth and it
became a donkey once more. Various emperors tried to
lure the adept to the court, but he refused all invitations,
even to marry an Imper ial Princess, until the ﬁnal one
from the Empress Wu Tse T'ien. He went to court, lay
down and died; but this was only a ruse for escaping from
imperial importunities. His body was seen to decompose (a
diﬀerent version of the empty-coﬀin theme), but this, too,
was a trick as he was seen alive and well in the mountainsa short time afterwards. He is portrayed seated on his
donkey and holding a ﬁsh-drum and castanets or a phoenix
feather . Lü Yen, or Lü Tung-pin, was a scholar of the T'ang
dynasty who came from an oﬀicial family; in spite of failing
his degree he became a patron of literature. He had a
dream of future success, high oﬀice and glory followed by
disgrace, exile and misery , so he renounced worldly
ambition and retired to the mountains. He met, and
became a pupil of, Chung-Ii Ch'üan and was tested by
ordeals and a host of demons. He experienced the time-
illusion when cooking some millet, dreaming a life-time of
history; but on waking he found the millet still uncooked. He is depicted as a scholar and his attribute is a magic
two-edged sword which  conferred invisibility and with
which he defeated demons. He founded the traditio n of the
Elixir of Life which is associated with the T'ang dynasty ,
during which it was developed but kept esoteric. Lü Yen
claimed that he obtained his knowledge from the Master of
the Pass, Kuan Yin-hsi, the man who had asked Lao Tzu to
write down his wisdom before disappearing over the Pass
to the West. This was the traditional origin of the Tao Tê
Ching . Li T'ieh-kuei, ‘Li with the staﬀ,’ is portrayed as an ugly
beggar , leaning on a crutch. Originally an imposing and
handsome man, he left his body behind when he went oﬀ
in spirit to meet Lao Tzu in a sacred mountain. One story
is that he was gone so long that a disciple had his body
cremated. Another version is that he left instructions for
his body to be cremated after seven days; on the sixth day
the disciple who was looking after the body had news that
his mother had died and, feeling sure that Li would not
return, cremated the body. Returning on the seventh day,
Li's spirit saw only a heap of ashes, and so he entered the
body of a beggar who had just died by the roadside. Hethen lived on in the disgu ise of a crippled beggar , leaning
on a staﬀ. He is often accompanied by a crane of
immortality and has a gourd-bottle from which a vapour
(his spirit) rises; he used to hang the gourd up at night and
jump into it and stay there till morning. After entering the
beggar's body Li went to the disciple's house and stopped
the preparations for the mother's funeral by restoring her
to life. One version of his departure from the world was that he
changed into a dragon  and ascended heave nwards;
another was that he told a disciple that if he stepped on a
leaf ﬂoating on the water it would bear him safely . The
disciple refused, whereupon Li said he was obviously too
heavy with the cares of the world and then steppe d on the
leaf himself and vanished.The Immortal Wnag-tzu Ch'iao playing the sheng
while riding through the clouds on a crane. Han Hsiang Tzu was a nephew of the renowned  T'ang
poet Han Yü. He was born with all the marks of a hsien
and devoted himself to alchemy and to ﬁnding the elixir . He was killed falling from the Peach Tree of Immortality ,
which he had climbed in an attempt to pluck the fruit. He
was immedia tely transﬁg ured and then reappeared as aTaoist priest . His attributes are a ﬂute, castanets and the
alchemist's crucible. Lan Ts'ai-ho appears as either a good-lookin g but
unkempt youth or as a girl whose life was spent  in wine
taverns as a ﬂautist and singer , giving away the money
earned to the poor and sleeping in the snow in winter . When depicted as a girl her breath rises in brilliant
colours. She wrote poetry condemning the delusions of the
world's pleas ures and ended by soaring up to heaven from
a wine tavern on the back of a crane, her dress, belt and
castanets falling to earth. Attributes are a basket of
ﬂowers associated with immortality , such as the plum or
peach blossom, chrysanthemums, the pine and bamboo . Ho Hsien Ku was a girl of fourteen or ﬁfteen when she
was visited by a divinity who gave her powdered mica to
eat to etherealize her body. She also experienced the time-
illusion when  she was given a peach to eat and found she
had been away for a month instead of a day, as she had
supposed; she had gone without food all that time with no
ill eﬀects. Afterwards she lived on a rainbow powder made from
oystershells and moonbeams and returned to the
mountains, ﬂying backwa rds and forwards from her home
like a bird, ﬁnally ascending to heaven in broad daylight. Her attribute  is the bamboo ladle she was using in the
kitchen at the time when she was translated. Her story has
Cinderella-and-stepmother nuances. That the hsien  could be translated to the land of the
immortals without going through the experience of
physical death assumed the existence of that land, an
assumption not conﬁned to China but prevalent the world
over in the belief in Paradise, the Isles of the Blessed, the
Abode of Song, the Green Isle and the Elysian Fields to
give a few of its names.There were various parad ises in Chinese mytholo gy: for
the earthly hsien  there was the Earthly  Paradise; an
account of this is given when Yü the Great lost his way and
‘came to a country which lay on the North shore of the
Northern Ocean . . . it was called “Northernland” and we
don't know what lay on its boundaries. There was neither
wind nor rain there, neither frost nor snow . It did not
produce birds, animals, insects, ﬁshes, plants and trees
the same as ours. All around it seemed to rise into the sky.’
In the centre of this land there was a mountain from which
streams of water ﬂowe d continually . ‘This was called
“Divine Spring.” The perfume of the water was more
delicious than that of orchids or pepper , and its taste was
better than that of wine  or ale. The spring divided into
four rivers which ﬂowed down from the mountain and
watered the whole land . . . the people were gentle,
following Nature without wrangling or strife; their hearts
were soft and their bodies delicate; arrogance and envy
were far from them.’Styles of the Longevity character
The Yellow Emperor also visited this realm in a dream. It
was ‘tens of thousands of miles distant . . . it was beyond
the reach of ships or vehicles or any mortal foot. Only the
soul could travel so far.’ As in Yü the Great's Paradise, so
here too the people were gentle ‘without desire or
cravings; they simply followed their natural instincts . . . They bestrode the air as though treading on solid earth;
they were cradled in space as though resting on a bed. They moved about like gods. Water had no power to drown
them nor ﬁre to hurt them.’China also had a tradition of a grey, shadowy
underworld, beyond the Yellow Springs, similar  to the
place known to the Babylonians, Greeks and Israelites, but
it was not a popular belief . The most usual otherworld was
the Western Paradise, a concept shared by Taoists and
Buddhists alike. This was diﬀerent from the Earthly
Paradise in which the hsien  could live in his etherea lized
body among the beauties  of the earth, or wande r among
the stars without contact with the ordinary world of
humanity . But the Immortal could also dwell entirely in the
heavens and the stars, if he so desired. Taoist otherworld
ideas, however , diﬀered from Buddhism in that there were
no hells, though later Taoism adopted many of the
Buddhist demons which threatened human ity and
frightened it into good behaviour .
_OceanofPDF.com_Chinese_Alchemy_-_Jean_Cooper.txt
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Wheel/W eiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 1984 by Aquarian Press, a part of
the Thorsons Publishing Group, ISBN : 1-85030-327-3. ISBN : 978-1-57863-577-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooper, J.
Ko Hung
Who wrote the book "Pao P'u Tzu"?
To achieve immortality and prolong life
What was the purpose of the elixir in Chinese alchemy?
To become one with the Tao and transcend the physical body
What was the main goal of the hsien in Chinese alchemy?
Spiritual growth and self-purification
What was the focus of the inner alchemy in Chinese alchemy?
Not mentioned in the passage, but Chung-li Ch'üan is mentioned as one of the Immortals
Who was the founder of the Eight Immortals?