In Taoism the Western Paradise was presided over by
Hsi Wang Mu, Queen of Heaven; in Buddhism the Amida
Buddha resided in the Pure Land: both had a Peach as the
Tree of Life growing in the centre and both were the
dwelling place of Immortals, Genii and fairies as well as
those souls who by virtue had won entrance to Paradise. Both these concepts were a popular degeneration from the
original non-theistic metaphysics of the impersonal Tao
and the equally impersonal Nirvana; both were based on
the notion of materialistic reward, the one for successful
adherence to the rules of physical and spiritual discipline,
the other for faith and calling on the Name. The Western
Paradise was paved with gold, silver and jade, pearls and
crystal. The seven lakes were fringed by golden sand and
there were beautiful pavilions of translucent jewels;
beautiful birds sang and ﬂowers were full of colour and
fragrance.Candelabrum with stylized Longevity and Happiness
characters. There are also traditions  and records going back to the
third centur y BC of Emperors sending expeditions to
search for the Palace of the Immortals, which was believed
to be situated in the mountains of northern Tibet. The
dwellers in this region lived in both worlds at once, the
natural and the spiritua l. Here we have an echo of the
theme of Shangri-la. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the great historian
(163-85 BC) wrote of these Mountains of the Immortals as
being the Land of the Blessed where the elixir is found and
where all things are white and the palaces are gold and
silver .While the hsien  could live either in the earthly or
celestial realm, the real goal of the alchemist was to reach
the Isles of the Immortal s, the Fairy Isles where the herb
of immortality grew . These ﬂoating isles—ﬁve originally—
were reputed to be situated a great way oﬀ in the Po Sea,
to the East of China. One of the gods arranged for ﬁfteen
huge turtles , in relays of ﬁve, to hold up the islands on
their heads. This arrangement was maintained until a
great giant, who wanted their shells for divination, ﬁshed
for and caught six of the turtles, whereupon two of the
islands ﬂoated away to the North Pole and sank into the
ocean. The Immortals living on those islands had to move
to the three that remaine d; there they cultivated the herb
of immortality . These were the Isles of P'eng-lai, Fang-chan
and Ying Chou, the most frequently mentioned being
P'eng-lai. All living things, birds, animals and plants are
perfectly white (symbolic of the white and vitality of
quicksilver), and the palaces and gates are made  of gold
and jewels, silver and pearls. If you see the Isles from a
distance they look like clouds, but when you get near them
they sink into the sea and a wind suddenly blows you away
from them. The food there is miraculous and fruits if eaten
will preserve the eater from old age and death. This,
again, is reminiscent of the Peach of Immortality growing
in the Western Paradise  and of the Tree of Life in all
paradisial mythology . One of the people greatly interested in ﬁnding these
Isles was Shih Huang Ti (259-210 BC), founder of the
Ch'in dynasty and the ﬁrst real Emperor of China, who
uniﬁed the country after the period of the Warring States,
making it an Empire instead of a collection of smaller
kingdoms and states. It was he who built the Great Wall to
keep out the northern barbarians; he introduced the hair-
brush, or pencil, for writing or drawing on silk instead of
the bamboo tablets used before; but he also achievednotoriety in his ‘burning of the books,’ ordering the
destruction of the Confucian Classics, which he
maintained were receiving an exaggerated reverence and
were stultifying scholarship. He was greatly inter ested in
alchemy and in his reign appeared the famous alchemists
An Ch'i Sheng and Hsü Fu or Hsü She. The former , a
vague legendary character , was believed to be a thousand
years old; he was highly learned, espec ially in
compounding medicines. He so impressed Shih Huang Ti
that the Emperor continu ed talking to him for three days
and nights, ﬁnally presenting the Sage with much gold and
jade, in which, as a true Taoist, he saw no value so threw it
away . He was said to live on a pill as large as a melon. Ssu-ma Ch'ien records in his History  that Hsü Fu was
sent on an expedition (some say he went at his own
request, others that it was the Emperor's wish) to ﬁnd the
Isles of the Immortals and bring back the elixir of
immortality . Shih Huang Ti equipped the expedit ion with
the ‘ﬁve grains’ and Hsu set out with three thousand
youths and maidens, and artisans and workmen of all
kinds. The expedition never returned. Some belie ved that
they had found the Isles; another tradition said that Hsü
Fu discovered the islands of peace and plenty and settled
there and became king of the new realm; others suggest
that this was the discove ry of the Japanese Islands. Shih
Huang Ti always hoped that the expedition would return
and used to go to the coast, wandering up and down it,
gazing out to sea, searching the horizon for the returning
ships. The Emperor Wu, of the Han dynasty , a great believer in
alchemy and astrology , also sent an expedition to the
island of P'eng-lai to bring back the elixir; but it too failed
to come back. During his reign various alchemists made
claims that they had discovered the secret of immortality
and transmuting metals, but, failing to produce  results,were executed. The Emperor ﬁnally came to the
conclusion that he had been led astray by the extravagant
claims of the magicians and decided that ‘if we are
temperate in our diet and use medicine, we make our
illnesses few . That is all we can attain to .’
While Shih Huang Ti and Wu Ti (the word Ti means
Emperor) and other alchemists took the existence of the
Isles literally , they were, from the esoteric aspect, an
allegory of the attainment of the state of enlightenment,
the inner world of spirit for which the adept worked; a
state of being rather than a ‘place;’ the mystical states in
which spiritual knowledge is achieved and it is realized
that there is no death. OceanofPDF .com– 5 –
THE ELIXIR
The Elixir, the Golden Pill or the Pill of Immortality was for
the East what the Philosophers' Stone was for western
alchemy; both are ill-deﬁned but were basically a
substance of which a small portion could transform a much
larger quant ity of base metals into gold, or could confer
immortality . Both had the property of transforming one
thing into another , both could cure diseases and restore
youth; the same phraseology is used to describe either . Many a Taoist account tells of the restoration of
youthfulness, or grey hair turning black, and of a man of a
hundred years old looking as if he were in the prim e of his
life. In the West, Solomon Trismosin said that by taking a
grain of the stone his wrinkled skin became smooth and
white, his cheeks rosy, his grey hair black and his bowed
back erect. He also said he restored youthfulness to
ninety-year-old ladies and that the stone was a universal
panacea. All sorts of extravagant claims were made for the
transmuting powers of the elixir and the stone. Ma Hsiang,
a hsien , always paid for his wine by turning all the iron
vessels in the wine shop into gold. Albertus Magnus was
reported to have brought to life a bronze statue made by
Thomas Aquinas, who made use of it as a servant;
unfortunately , it was somewhat talkative and noisy and
had to be kept in order with a hammer . There is, however , a sharp division between the aims of
the exoteric ‘bellows blower’ or ‘charcoal burner’ and the
esoteric searcher for wisdom and enlightenment,  and theelixir itself was named in various categories as exoteric or
esoteric: the ‘inner elixir ,’ the nei tan, of meditation and
spiritual practices developed the qualities of the soul and
was the esoteric aspect; the ‘outer elixir ,’ the wei tan, of
taking medic ines, herbs and the pill of immortality was the
exoteric side intende d to bring about physical
regeneration. There were also the hsien tan of the
Immortals and the divine elixir , shen tan . With the deliberately esoteric nature of alchemy it
followed that instructions and recipes were not made
available to the general public or the merely curious, so
most of the methods of concocting the elixir are not known
and even of those speciﬁcally mentioned many are not now
identiﬁable. Also, when the exact ingredients are given,
the proportions are withheld, so that, for example, when
the famous ‘eight preciou s things’ of the elixir are given as
cinnabar , realgar , sulphur , orpiment, saltpetre,  ore of
cobalt, salt and mica, no measures are included. In
addition to this diﬀiculty there were widely diﬀering local
and dynasti c weights and measures. Then, too, the
methods of concocting the elixir are couched in obscure
terms using names which are deliberately esoteric, if not
at times deliberately misleading, so that it is now
impossible to follow eithe r the ancient recipes or the exact
physical techniques. What Jung said about western
alchemy applies equally to the Chinese science: ‘It is quite
hopeless to try to establish any kind of order in the inﬁnite
chaos of substances and procedures. Seldom do we get
even an approximate idea of how the work was done, what
materials were used, and what results achiev ed. The
reader usua lly ﬁnds himself in the most impe netrable
darkness when it comes to names and substances; they
could mean almost anythi ng.’ In any case, as cannot be too
frequently stressed, they were not intended to mean
anything to the uninitiated and were only for transmissionfrom a master to a pupil with whom such dangerous
secrets could be trusted. ‘The vulgar and debased cannot
practise this art, neither such as have no understanding,’
as Ko Hung said in his Pao P'u Tzu . Recipes for the elixir (tan)  are endless, literally in
hundreds. As Professor Needham says of Chinese  science
and alchemy , it is a matter of ‘ﬁnding the way successfully
through an incohate mass of ideas, and the facts so hard to
establish, relating to alchemy and metallurgy in ancient,
medieval and traditional China.’ Also, ‘there is a veritable
ocean, only a small part of which has been explor ed.’ It is
also a questi on of separating the grains of wheat from the
mass of chaﬀ of the ‘bellows blowers.’ Even if recipes are
speciﬁc, it is not always known what is meant by
substances with such fanciful names as Scarlet Snow , the
Flowing Pearl Elixir , the Empyrean-Roaming Elixir , the
Pale Moon Elixir , and so on; but all of them guarantee
immortality . Ko Hung says that such elixirs are not
intended to be generally known, so does not give methods
of preparation and the uninitiated would do well to leave it
at that. Ingredients for the Empyrean-Roaming Elixir are:
cinnabar , realgar , malachite, laminar , amorphous sulphur
and quicksilver . It is known that the Flowing Pearl is an
esoteric name for quicksilver . On the other hand, some
recipes were  clearly given and even the exact places from
which the ingredients were to be collected were speciﬁed;
‘all others are best rejected.’
The reputati on of the crane for longevity made it a
symbol of immortality; it was also a messenger between
gods and men, hence its eggs were an appropriate food for
those seekin g immortalit y and contact with supernatural
beings. The cock, as a yang  bird, supplied vital force in its
comb, which was used in recipes, while the hen provided
the yin balancing force in its eggs. The tortoise, which is
one of the four ‘spiritually endowed creatur es’ andextremely long-lived, symbolized both longev ity and
strength, so that a preparation made from tortoise shells
can confer one thousand years of life. There are such recipes as taking a swan's egg, sealed
with lacquer , and steeped in a mica solution. After one
hundred days it will turn red: a gill of this will increase
your life by a hundred years, or a quart by a thousand. Another prescription says: ‘Prepare three pound s of the
skin and fat from the back of a hog and one quart of strong
vinegar . Place ﬁve ounces of yellow gold in a conta iner and
cook in an earthen stove. Dip the gold in and out of the fat
one hundred times; likew ise in the vinegar . Take a pound
of this and you will outlast all nature; half a pound and you
will live two thousand years.’
Other elixirs  will even raise the dead, others will confer
‘everlasting vision’ and so etherealize the body that ‘in full
sun you will cast no shadow .’ In many cases strange and
grotesque ingredients are required, such as black dung
from a black cow, black  insects' blood, seeds of red ﬁr,
dragons' grease, ox gall, earthworm excreta; many of
these, of course, would be a disguise. Equally strange
ingredients were used in western alchemy: the urine of a
dog, the hairs of a white dog; the blood of a mouse, asses'
dung; while pearls and stones found in a crab's head are
speciﬁcs against heart trouble; a contraceptive is to bind
the head with a red ribbon or hold a stone found in the
head of an ass, and baldness can be cured  by the
application of bees burned to ashes. Another recipe guarantees that ‘having eaten the
medicine for three years a man attains buoyancy of
movement and is able to travel great distances; stepping
over ﬁre, he is not scorc hed; dropped into water , he does
not get wet. He is able to appear and disappear at will. He
will be happy for ever .’Careful preparation is necessary before attempting the
work of making the elixir . In the ﬁrst place, both eastern
and western alchemy depended on astrology in calculating
the propitious times and seasons for experiments and for
compounding medicines and the elixir . Then the
alchemical work require d abstinence from certai n foods,
notably cereals and meat, for one hundred days, and a
ritual puriﬁcation which involved the use of perfumes in
washing the body and hair. The preparations should be
carried out in an uninhabited place, usually a sacred
mountain. This need for solitude in the work is insisted on
universally; it was a sine qua non for success. In China it
was the retre at to the mountain; in India to the forest ‘far
away from all unclean presence;’ in Babylon the alchemist
had to work alone, ‘a stranger shall not enter ,’ while in the
West the same applied to the alchemist in his laboratory . Ko Hung attributed the failure of the earlier alchemists,
employed by the Emperor Wu, in making gold and ﬁnding
the elixir to the fact that they attempted the work in the
palace and at court inste ad of the solitary retreat in the
mountains. It is necessary to pay reverence to, and invoke, the
proper divinities and powers; to have faith and to be blest
by being born under the right stars. These ritual
preparations, and the condition that only initiates or
disciples are present during the work, are evident in all
branches of alchemy . ‘Common people or anything that
soils’ must be avoided and no disbelievers may be told of
the plans, for, if they blaspheme the divine medicine, the
preparation will not be successful. It is also necessary to
avoid any possibility of the evil eye. ‘Even a doctor . . . will
avoid being seen by fowls, dogs, children or women . . . lest his reme dies lose their eﬀicacy .’ This last, however , is
at variance with the vital help given by wives who had the
necessary knowledge or ‘fate’ in cases where the man wasunsuccessful in his experiments. The Yellow Emperor , for
instance, was dependent on his Immortal maids and much
of the work needed the help of the yin female balance; in
the W est this was given by the ‘sister’ in the work. For the ‘inne r alchemy ,’ the esoteric side, to quote from
the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i, ‘Attention should be turned to the
well-being of the inner self so as to attain the state of
perfect calmness and freedom from matter . The primordial
substance, shining forth unseen, will illuminate the insides
of the body . . . Cessation of thought is desirable and
worries are preposterous.’ The concluding chapter of the
work makes it clear that immortality in its true sense, not
mere longevity , is to be achieved, for even a small quantity
of the elixir is enough to ‘confer tranquillity on the hun p'o
[soul], give it immortalit y and enable it to live with the
immortals.’
Chinese alchemy is full of accounts of the Pill of
Immortality , which is one of its chief distinctions from the
western branch with its emphasis on gold. The pill or elixir
has, though, close associations with the Persian haoma
and Indian soma  in that they, like the elixir , also cured
diseases as well as conferring immortality . According to
the Rig Veda, to drink soma  was to become immortal. There is also a connection with the sacred mushroom, the
peyotl  of the Mexicans. The cult of all these substances
was based on the belief that it was possible to achieve
immortality , either by the concoction of a drug, whether
from mineral, plant or animal sources, which could both
rejuvenate and preserve the physical body, which became
so reﬁned that it developed the qualities of the hsien;  or,
alternatively , to reach the same results by yogic
techniques in breathing exercises, diet, sex and
meditation. This gave two ways of attaining immortality
suitable for diﬀerent temperaments.In preparing the elixir there are instructions as to the
control of the heat, always an important point in eastern
and western alchemy:
The ﬂame at the start should be weak as to be
controllable and should be made strong at the end. Close attention and careful watch should be given so
as to regula te properly the heat or cold. There are
twelve divisions to the cycle. On completion of the
cycle a closer watch should be accorded. As the
breath expires, life is ended. Death expels the spirit. The colour changes to a purple. Behold! Returned
medicine [huan tan] is obtained. This is then made
into pills. These are extremely eﬀicacious, although
their individu al size is so small that they occupy only
the point of a knife or the edge of a spatula. If the compounding of the elixir is not properly carried
out ‘law and order will be upset’ and failure is inevitable,
‘for this is just as absurd as attempting to repair a
cauldron with glue, or to get rid of cold with ice, or as
reports of ﬂying tortoises or dancing snakes.’
On the esoteric level this control of the heat symbolizes
the need for a slow pace, within the capacities of the pupil,
at the beginning of the work; it warns the alchemi st not to
try and run before learning to walk. The ‘Returne d Medicine’  or ‘Reverted Elixir ,’ the most
prized and eﬀicacious of all, is the ‘nine-times cycled
elixir .’ This was placed in a reaction vessel and exposed to
the sun after the summer solstice. When the container
became hot a pound of cinnabar was put under the lid and
‘even while you are watching, with the full power of the
sun shining upon it, the whole content will suddenly glow
and sparkle with all the colours of divine light. It will
immediately turn into reverted elixir .’ After taking aspoonful of this you will unquestionably rise straig ht up to
heaven in broad daylight. In the reﬁning process the highly signiﬁcant number
nine is constantly employed. There was the Divine Nine
Turn Method: putting the cinnabar through nine diﬀerent
processes in order to reﬁne it to the highest quality . It was
‘nine times subjected to the ﬁre at nine regular intervals of
time.’ This nine-times cleansing also appears in western
alchemy . The essential method in Chinese alchemy
appears to have been repeated conversion from a solid
state to a vapour , by heat in a sealed vessel, then allowing
solidiﬁcation again, this process being cyclic or a ‘turn.’
In the process of obtainin g the elixir there are the stages
of ‘red and white,’ familiar to both East and West. ‘You
must wash it until it becomes white and beat it until it
becomes red, then you will have an elixir which will endow
you with ten thousand years of longevity .’ This symbolism
appears universally in alchemy and is bound up with the
idea of the alchemist as midwife assisting the birth of the
ore from the womb of the Earth Mother . This is the white
of water and the red of blood in the birth. Also the white
ﬂower is silver , the feminine; the red ﬂower gold, the
masculine; both are contained in the elixir and in the
philosophers' egg and grew out of it as a symbol of
creation. In the West the white rose, or lily, is the Queen,
the red rose is the King. The white, as water , and the red
as ﬁre are the two great powers of creation and
destruction in the world. In Arabic alchemy Senior said
that in purifying the mind  every black thing is made white
and every white thing red, ‘for water whitens and ﬁre
gives light.’
On the exoteric plane there was much in common
between the elixir and the magic potions or powers of fairy
tales, such as the magic table, already referred to, which
appeared when summoned to provide food and drink and,in alchemy, cups of jade and plates of gold; also the power
of seeing events hundreds of miles distant, being immune
from all natural forces and of being served by the fairy
world. There were alchemical recipes for potions or
ointments which made it possible to perform all these
wonders. These were also the siddhi  powers of the yogins
in all eastern  religions. On both the exoteric and esoteric
levels the elixir was recognized as a time-co ntrolling
substance. Ko Hung says on this: ‘once one's immortality
has been assured one is never again concerned about the
ﬂeeting of time.’
Sun Ssu-mo, who had made a study of alchemy , wrote:
‘The formulae I have studied are by no means few. On the
whole they are obscure and enigmatic. Those who dip into
them become increasingly bemused, and amateurs only
more addled . . . that is surely not because the ancients
have spoken deceiving words. It must be that students of
the Way themselves have been unable to reach the
essential meanings.’ For these ‘essential meanin gs’ one
might quote Titus Burckhardt in saying that the elixir
‘unites in itself all the powers of the soul and thus acts as
a trans muting “ferment” on the psychic world, and, in an
indirect fashion, on the outward world also .’
The elixir is, at any level, the passing from death to life. OceanofPDF .com– 6 –
M E D I C I N E S
The border line between the elixir and medicines is vague
and ill-deﬁned. The elixir  is frequently referred to as ‘the
medicine’ and was also known as hsien  drugs; both were
made on the assumption  that there was a possibility of
ﬁnding a method of controlling ageing and decay , even
death itself , and though the elixir might kill the physical
body, the subtle body would survive if suﬀiciently rareﬁed. Ko Hung wrote: ‘By takin g these two things [the elixir and
gold] man can reﬁne his body so that he never grows old
and never dies. Seeking for these external substances to
fortify and strengthen oneself is like feeding a ﬂame with
oil, so that it does not die out.’
That the elixir and medicines were interchangeable is
shown by the list of diseases that could be cured by an
elixir , such as the Cyclically Transformed Elixir , which
cures nerve palpitations, poisoning, possession by demons,
heart attack s, seasonal epidemics and fevers; it also
appears to act as a tranquillizer since it ‘paciﬁes the
mind;’ it is good for the complexion and improves sight
and hearing. Having as its ingredients quicksilver , sulphur ,
cinnabar , powdered rhinoceros horn and musk, it is
sublimated, ground, and mixed with a paste to form pills of
which varyin g quantitie s were prescribed for diﬀerent
ailments. There are other recipes which cure epilepsy ,
melancholia and aid the circulation; some can ‘quiet the
soul and put it in touch with the Immortals.’ Anoth er elixir
could revive  the dead provided they had not been dead
more than three days; it could also cure blindness and
deafness and even ensure that things do not get lost since,once rubbed  with the elixir , they will ﬁnd their own way
back home. Another nine-fold elixir was received supernat urally . This was the Ninefold Perfected Jade Elixir , which was
simpler to concoct than the Nine-Cycled Elixir . It was
based on the nine-stalked purple mushroom and a jade
infusion of vermilion and had extraordinary powers; it
could halt the ﬂow of a stream, seal a door so that one
thousand men could not tug it open, open mountains and
transﬁx brigands. Taken as a medicine it would provide
immediate death if one wished to join the Immortals
forthwith, or in moderate doses it would confer physical
longevity and ultimate immortality . As drugs of immortali ty, the elixir and medicines
mentioned are mostly unidentiﬁable, but those that can be
recognized often contain ed highly toxic and dangerous
ingredients, minerals and plants—such as arsenic,
mercury , lead, gold, digitalis, aconite and hemp , which,
taken in small doses migh t prove stimulating at ﬁrst, have
curative properties, give psychedelic experiences. As Ko
Hung says: ‘You can even make everyone see mountains
moving and trees transporting themselves, although no
actual movement takes place.’ If taken in large doses these
ingredients would confer immortality by translation to the
next world, either as intended, or quicker than was
bargained for if the properties were not understood. Symptoms of poisoning were often hailed as signs  that the
elixir was working and ‘dispelling latent disorders.’ There
was also a widespread belief , not conﬁned to the East or to
alchemists, that the more unpleasant the medi cine the
better the eﬀect. ‘After taking the elixir , if your face and
body itch as though insects were crawling over them, if
your hands and feet swell with dropsy , if you cannot stand
the smell of food and bring it up when you eat it, if you feel
sick, if your limbs are weak, if you are prone to diarrhea orvomiting, or if you have stomach aches, do not be
disturbed, these are merely proofs that the elixir is
succeeding in driving out the illness.’
Nor was the use of these medicines abandoned after the
death of some of the experimenters trying out their own
recipes or giving them to others. There was the famous
instance of this happening to the T'ang Emperor Hsuan
Tsung, who, after taking a dose of the magic drug,
prematurely joined his ancestors and the Immortals in the
next world instead of prolonging his life in this as
intended. Sun Ssu-mo said: ‘Although mineral pot-pourri can be
taken orally , this is really not a practice to be continued
over long periods.’ He regarded taking minerals as
medicines as being responsible for his suﬀering from
carbuncles and said he had seen others suﬀering in the
same way. He conclude d that he would rather eat the
poisonous gelsemium root than minerals; ‘under standing
their toxicity one must needs be cautious.’
Some of the medicines seem to have had unforseen and
disastrous eﬀects. One adept, Ssu-ma Chi-Chu, took Cloud
Powder to mount to heaven, but his head and his feet
landed in diﬀerent places. Another , Mo Ti, after taking the
Rainbow Elixir, jumped into the river and yet another , the
Master Ning, swallowed the Eaglestone Elixir and threw
himself into the ﬁre. The Lang-kan Elixir had the eﬀect of
causing intense pain in the heart, followed by a great
thirst which, when assuaged, cut oﬀ the breath. There seems little doubt, however , that some of these
lethal preparations were taken with the full knowledge of
their eﬀects and that the subsequent death was a
deliberate journey to the next world, in full faith of
attaining immortality . Death by taking the elixir was
sometimes represented as a response to a summons from
the Immortals to join them in the heavens, as in the case ofthe young visionary Chan Tzu-liang, a youth of exceptional
powers and promise who intentionally took the fatal dose. On the other hand, some masters seemed to have
complete control over the elixir and its eﬀects. The famous
alchemist Wei Po-yang, author of the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i,
whose biography appears in the Chinese Encyclop aedia of
Bibliography ,
entered the mountain to make eﬀicacious medicin es. With him were three disciples, two of whom he
thought lacki ng in complete faith. When the medic ine
was made he tested them. He said: ‘The good
medicine is made but it ought ﬁrst to be tested on the
dog. If no harm comes to the dog, we may then take
it ourselves, but if the dog dies of it we ought not to
take it.’ (Now Po-yang had brought his white dog
with him to the mount ain. If the number of the
treatments of the medicine had not been suﬀicie nt,
or if harmonious compou nding had not reached the
required standard, it would contain a little poison
and would cause temporary death.) Po-yang gave the
medicine to the dog and the dog died an
instantaneous death. Whereupon he said: 'The
medicine is not yet done. The dog has died of it. Doesn't this show that the divine light has not been
attained? If we take it ourselves I am afraid we shall
go the same way as the dog—what is to be done? The
disciples asked: ‘Would you take it yourself: Sir?’ To
which Po yang replied: ‘I have abandoned the worldly
route and forsaken my home and come here. I should
be ashamed to return if I could not attain the hsien . So to live without taking  the medicine would be just
the same as to die of the medicine. I must take it.’
With these ﬁnal words he put the medicine in his
mouth and died instantly . On seeing this, one of the
disciples said: ‘Our Teacher was no common person.He took the medicine and died of it. He must have
done that with special intention.’ The disciple also
took the medicine and died. Then the other two said
to each other: ‘The purpo se of making medicine is to
attempt to attain longevity . Now the taking of the
medicine has caused deaths. It would be better not to
take the medicine and so be able to live a few
decades longer.’ They then left the mountain toget her
without taking the medicine, intending to get burial
supplies for their Master and fellow disciple. After
the departure of the disciples Po-yang revived. He
placed some well-concocted medicine in the mouth  of
the disciple and the mouth of the dog. In a few
moments they both revived. He took the disciple,
whose name  was Yü, and the dog and all three went
the way of the Immortals. By a wood-cutter whom
they met he sent a letter of thanks for the funeral
arrangements to the two disciples. The two were
ﬁlled with regret when they read the letter .1Wei Po-yang, his disciple Y ü-sheng and the dog. Another more mundane use of the elixir was that it could
be used as a substitute for food, in which case it did not
matter whether a person ‘eats a hundred times a day, or
only once in a hundred days.’ But when the medicines are
taken a distinction should be made betwee n those
intended to cure a mala dy and those taken ‘to nourish
one's nature,’ to reﬁne the body and achieve longevity andimmortality . The ﬁrst should be taken on an empty
stomach, the second after food. As an oﬀsho ot from medicines, aphrodisiac drugs were
developed which were important to the male, demands on
whose vitality were considerable in a society which was
not only polygamistic, but in which concubines were kept
in addition to a plurality of wives. Nor is the belief in such
drugs a thing of the past: witness the pressure, in our
times, on the rhinoceros by poachers who still make a
fortune by selling the horn as a powerful aphrodisiac. Many writers have maintained that the task of alchemy
was not to make gold but medicines and this is particularly
true of Chinese alchemy , though it appeared also in the
West. A passage attributed to Roger Bacon says that
‘alchemy is a science which teaches how to make and
generate a certain medicine, called elixir , which when
projected on to metals or imperfect bodies, perfects them
completely at the moment of projection.’2 In another
treatise, drawing an association between the rusting and
corrosion of metals and the decay of the human body, he
states that ‘that medicine which will remove all impurities
and corruptibilities from the lesser metals will also, in the
opinion of the wise, take oﬀ the corruptibility of the body
that human life may be prolonged for many centuries.’3
The Chinese alchemist, concentrating on medicines and
experimenting with minerals and plants, had more scope
for his work than his western counterpart and was
encouraged to follow his own intuitions and judgement,
while the western alchem ist was tied to the dictates of the
authorities and to ﬁxed procedures and had to keep a wary
eye on the strictures of the Church. In the search for the elixir it was inevitable that the
experiments undertaken by the Taoist alchemist would
lead to important discoveries concerning the properties
and eﬀects of the minerals and plants they used. As aconsequence, they amassed a considerable body of
medical lore, as well as laying the foundations of the
sciences of chemistry , metallurgy , astronomy , botany ,
herbalism, zoology and, incidentally , the making of
perfumes. Other by-produ cts were the acquisition of great
skills in the working of metals for both decora tive and
practical use; the spectac ular use of colour in dyeing; and
superb ceramic glazing techniques. The value of drinking
certain medicinal waters was known as a cure for
rheumatism and other ailments, pills were used to activate
the kidneys, and there were powders which beneﬁtted the
circulation. The nutritional properties of the soya bean, as
protein, now a popular item of diet in the West, were
known from ancient times in China. Acupuncture,  laughed
out of court some years ago, is now seriously studied and
practiced. One might add that gunpowder was also
discovered, though it was not used for aggression or
destruction but for entertainment and ﬁreworks. With the herbal lore of the Taoist-alchemist naturally
went the practice of healing and it followed that many of
the hsien  were practising doctors. Such a one was Hua
T'o, of the Later Han dynasty , who was known to have
discovered and used anae sthetics. He had a ‘hemp-bubble-
powder ,’ mixed with wine, which ﬁrst made the patient
intoxicated then unconscious. He also had a ‘marvellous
ointment’ which caused surgical wounds to heal in four to
ﬁve days. He was apparently a skilled surgeon, removing
‘morbid grow ths and contaminating matter which caused
infection.’ He was reputed to have met two ancie nt Sages
in a cave in the mountains and humbly besought them to
impart their lore to him. This they did on condition that he
‘took no account of the vicissitudes of fortune and was
indiﬀerent to poverty and wealth alike, high rank, or
humble station, if money-making were not his aim and if
his urgent desire were to bring comfort to old age andsympathy to the young.’ They left him a huge volume of
lore and disappeared, the cave became envel oped in
swirling mists and the mountain collapsed. It was said of
Huo T'o that when he was a hundred years old he had the
complexion of a man in the prime of life. There is evidence
that heart transplants were carried out: Ko Hung states
that he had seen doctors graft on a severed ﬁnger and that
trepanning took place, the cranium being opened ‘to re-
arrange the brain;’ he said he had seen this done. The most astounding of all, however , was the discovery
in 1972 of the preservation of a corpse, for some two
thousand years, by methods not known to modern science. To quote Professor Needham's account:
An unprecedented ﬁnding showed that the ancient
Taoists knew how to achieve an almost perpetual
conservation. A large tomb excavated by Ma-wa ng
Tai, near Ch'angsha, proved to be that of a Lady of
Tai, apparently the wife of the First Lord of that ilk . . . enfeoﬀed in −193. She would have died about −186
and the painted outer coﬀins were ﬁlled with a great
variety of rich and beautiful objects, then sealed
tightly with layers of charcoal and a kind of sticky
white clay. So far nothing  unique, but when the body
was ﬁnally uncovered it was found to be like that of a
person who had died only a week or two before. The
elasticity of the subcutaneous tissues was conser ved
in an extraordinary way, for when the skin was
pressed it at once returned to the normal when the
pressure was released. Similarly , preservative
solutions when injected raised swellings which after
a short time subsided. The body was partly immersed
in a brown aqueous liquid, which contained mercuric
sulphide, the atmospher e in the coﬀin was largely
methane under some pressure, the temperature hadbeen constant at about 13°C and the coﬀin complex
had been airtight and watertight. Other expert s suggest that the Lady might have been a
consort of the Emperor Wu, who took an intense interest
in alchemy. Chinese scientists, X-raying the body later,
came to the conclusion that she had died of a heart attack,
but also had tuberculosis , gallstones and rheumati sm. Also
in the tomb were some herbal medicines such as are used
in cases of heart disease today . OceanofPDF .com– 7 –
MINERALS AND PLANTS
The elixir and medicines were made from either vegetable,
mineral or animal elements, but mostly from the ﬁrst two;
there were also recipes that combined these ingredients. Herbal medicines and drugs play a more importan t part in
Chinese alchemy than in the western branches . Plant-
produced drugs were supposed to give quick but more
transient results, while those from minerals were slower
but surer. ‘Reﬁned pine, cypress and thistles can be taken
but they are inferior to the great medicines [gold and
cinnabar] and last only ten years or less,’ Ko Hung
maintained. It was argued that gold and jade were better
ingredients than herbs since herbs decayed when  buried,
softened when cooked and turned to ashes when burned; if
they could not maintain themselves, it was argued, how
could they give lasting life to others? But although
authorities like Ko Hung assert that metals produce better
results in this world, it must be remembered that the
Immortals on the Isle of P'eng lai used herbs, since the
herbs of immortality grew  there and it was to obtain these
that the various expeditions were mounted. Amongst plants, the pine and peach are the most
frequently mentioned. Pine needles, roots and resin were
considered highly eﬀicacious. One lady hsien  lived entirely
on a diet of pine needles and dew. The peach, like the Tree
of Life in the Western Paradise, is a fairy fruit, one bite of
which automatically confers immortality . There was also
the unidentiﬁed plant called chih, the most desirable of all;
it is referred to as ‘the divine herb,’ the ‘plant of
immortality .’ It grew in the Isles of the Immortals butcould also be found by mortals ‘in steep and dangerous
places, and on high mountains and in deep valleys.’
One of the most famous pills of longevity was the Fo-ti
Ting, which was said to contain kolo nuts, meadowsweet
and hydrocotya asiatica minor . This was the medicine
which the herbalist Li-chung claimed as the source of his
longevity—and he should know , having lived 256 years and
outlived twenty-three wives. He is an historical person and
his authenticated dates were 1677-1933. He was said to
look like a man in the prime of life and could outstrip
young men in walking. He practised Taoist yoga and
advocated ‘inner quiet’ as the chief means of attaining a
long life. The mushroom, the ‘mag ic fungus,’ the ling-chih , is the
most important of plants and pre-eminent for its
rejuvenating qualities. It is frequently referred to, which is
not surprising in view of the known psychedelic and
hallucinogenic properties  of some fungi. These fungi were
widely used in Chinese art, together with the crane and
butterﬂy , as symbols of longevity and immortality . Asparagus appears to impart considerable powers; it will
‘strengthen people and cause them to walk twice as fast as
would thistle  or knot-grass if taken for one hundred days.’
These powers became positively miraculous in the case of
one man, Tzu-wei, who took asparagus ‘with the result
that he had eighty concubines, sired a hundred and thirty
sons, and walked three hundred miles a day.’ Knot-grass,
also called hare-bamboo, is a restorative, but it is diﬀicult
to obtain suﬀicient quant ities of the ﬂowers, and ‘to derive
great beneﬁt from takin g it requires at least ten years.’
Thistle ‘make s men sleek and good carriers,’ but it is not
as easy to take as knotgr ass, though in time of famine ‘it
can be given to young and old in place of grain; those not
knowing the diﬀerence think it is dried meat made of rice.’
There were also cassia or cinnamon and a sort of root likeginger , while sesame ‘prevents senility and repairs the
ravages of old age.’ Pine has already been mentioned for
its needles, roots and resin; but the resin is of particular
importance in a diet in order to ‘render the body light and
prevent the onset of old age.’ The durability of the pine as
well as its believed preservative properties made it a
symbol of immortality; all evergreens have the same
symbolism, giving them value as the wood for making
coﬀins and accounting for their presence in cemeteries. In
addition to this there are ‘more than three hundred uses’
for the pine. There were also strange and obscure plants and animals
and birds mentioned, some of which appeared to be able
to change places, for example, one unidentiﬁed plant
which grew on a sacred mountain by the sea, or on an
island, could assume the shape of a luminous animal with
head, four limbs and a tail; this, used in the right manner ,
would enable the consumer to live one thousand years,
occasionally for ten thousand. Nor is it merely longevity that could be conferr ed by
these plants or creatures; they could also impart the hsien
qualities. The sap of juniper , if spread on the soles of the
feet, enables one to walk on water , or if smeared on the
nose gives the ability to stay under water without
drowning; it also makes the body invisible if painted on the
skin, while wiping it oﬀ restores visibility . It is a universal
panacea against disease, either internal or external. Naturally , in accordance with Taoist principles of
harmlessness, animals were not supposed to be used in
compounding medicines, only their by-products such as
dung or urine. One of the famous early physicians and
researchers was T'ao Hung Ching, who had a pupil who
became a hsien  before his master . T'ao Hung Ching then
enquired the reason and was told that he had been
advocating and writing on experiments which usedanimals and so caused harm to them. He revised his work
and only used herbs thereafter and became an immortal. While herbs were used extensively , most alchemists, as
has been seen, regarded metal-based drugs as more
potent, on the grounds that plants were perishable while
metals endured. This was particularly true of incorruptible
gold, but there is some dispute as to whether any value
was set on actual gold in Chinese alchemy . While gold and
cinnabar are called the ‘Great Medicines,’ it is more likely
that by ‘gold’ is meant the golden cinnabar , or artiﬁcially
made gold. The query arises from the fact that the word
chin, used for gold, can equally be translated as simply
‘metal.’ Gold was a latecomer to Chinese alchemy as it was
scarce in China and only found in any quantity in early
times in the one district  of Kiangsi. Most of it had to be
imported from remote places such as Siberia, where it was
exchanged for silk. The Chinese native precious
substances were originally cinnabar and jade. It is
probable that much of the symbolism, ritual and magic
associated with gold was imported with it from its native
sources. While all other metals had speciﬁc names, the
term chih usually referred to copper or bronze, so it may
be assumed that gold was of less importance; the fact that
it is not mentioned in early Chinese classics or writings
before the end of the fourth century BC would appear to
conﬁrm this. It was not until Han times that gold became
distinguished as the ‘yellow metal.’ The word is used in the
I Ching  in hexagram 21, but here it is the colour yellow
that is important, rather than the metal, since yellow was
symbolic of the Centre, the Earth, power and dignity ,
implying that man should be like gold in this respect. Nor was gold used as a general currency , although it did
appear in one of the proto-feudal states. It was its value as
an imperishable substance, not its intrinsic worth, which
gave it its place in alchemy , the argument being  that itwould impart its imperishability if taken internally as a
medicine or elixir , or if fashioned into plates or drinking
vessels, from which it would transmit its qualities. The
same applied  to cinnabar and jade. Gold and jade items
were buried in imperial and aristocratic tombs and the
corpse was sometimes completely encased in jade mosaics
held together with gold thread. Jade was placed in every
oriﬁce of the body . Gold was esteemed principally for its colour , an attitude
not conﬁned to China since for the Egyptian alchemist the
real quest was for the golden colour which embodied the
‘spirit,’ so that to achieve the colour was suﬀicient in itself . Any goldcolo ured metal contained that ‘spirit,’ which was
also perfection; hence the Egyptian gods had bodies of
that colour . In fact all metals were conceived of as having
spiritual power , thus the solar yellowness of sulphur
sublimates the earthly and puriﬁes it, ‘washing away its
sins’: a religious viewpoint echoed later by the Gnostics
and Christians in the conﬂict between the powers of good
and evil in the world. Egyptian wealth depended largely on
gold-mining and the making of gold was the Royal Art, the
secret being  imparted to only the priests and royalty; it
was, as in China, a sacred matter and not a question of
producing wealth. Hermoupolis, the town of Hermes, was
the ‘town of the holy technique,’ i.e., alchemy . Gold was
also used ritually in India: ‘By means of gold they cleanse
themselves, for gold is life immortal.’ Gold was called
‘mineral light.’ ‘For gold is light and ﬁre is light, gold is
immortality and ﬁre is immortality .’ Gold, with silver , also
had a cosmological signi ﬁcance as the colours of the Sun
and Moon. Chinese culture did not set store on wealth as money,
while the Taoist scholar in particular regarded it as an
encumbrance, ‘fetters and hand-cuﬀs’ in the words of
Chuang Tzu; at best it is a necessary evil. The real wealthwas scholarship and the scholar was always valued above
the merchant money-maker who was, in fact, looked down
on and occupied an inferior social status. The scholar
adopted a sublime indiﬀerence to money , so for the
scholar-alchemist the use of gold was purely for an elixir
or medicine. ‘As to the True Man, he makes gold because
he wishes by its medicina l use to become an Immortal . . . one becomes  an Immortal, the object is not to get rich,’ as
Ko Hung wrote. The alchemist's riches are ‘contentment
and learning . . . the properly balanced man is beyond
proﬁt and loss.’ The Confucian school also showed
contempt for material riches and adopted a highly anti-
commercial attitude, regarding merchants as social
parasites and calling them' reprobated persons,'
subjecting them to restrictions and excluding them from
oﬀicial posit ions which were reserved for schol ars. The
only honourable vocations were the scholar and the
farmer . The pursuit of gain was considered low and vulgar ,
and although oﬀicials obviously enriched themselves, such
activities were not recognized and were swept under the
carpet, just as the alche mical making of gold for riches
took place but was not mentioned in alchemical works. The true science/art, however , was followed by intelligent
men unlikely to be devoted to material wealth; to attain to
the True Man was only possible for those of rare quality . So, for the scholar-alchem ist the use of gold was purely as
an elixir or medicine. ‘When men make gold they wish to
take it in order to bring divinity or hsien -hood upon
themselves, not riches.’1Metallurgical Sage superintending the work. Gold and cinnabar , as the Great Medicines, were the
most powerful and sough t after of the elixirs and could be
taken without the precautions necessary for the lesser
medicines. However , it was better to use artiﬁcial gold. When asked why it was better to go to the trouble of
making it instead of using real gold, Ko Hung replied:
‘Gold created by transformation, being the very essence ofa variety of ingredients is superior to natural gold.’ ‘The
gold which is made by transmutation embodies the
essences of many diﬀerent chemical ingredients so that it
is superior to natural gold.’ Artiﬁcial gold was considered
to have the added value of being obtained only in diﬀicult
conditions, needing ‘seclusion in some famous mountain
range, isolation from profane unbelievers and critics,
religious ceremonies, purifying rites, abstentio n from
pungent ﬂavours and ﬁsh, to say nothing of fasting, long
heating unde r exact conditions of temperature, needing
taxing watc h, and ﬁnally the indispensability of oral
instructions from a genui ne adept teacher .’2 Artiﬁcial gold
could be made so hard that nails could be made  from it
and there are various recipes and instructions as to the
means of softening or hardening the metal, such as ‘if too
hard, heat it with lard, if too soft, with a mash of white
plums.’
Silver was also sought and made artiﬁcially , but it was
considered inferior to gold and jade as a medicine. ‘To
make silver put mercury in an iron vessel and insert three
inch-square spoonsful of litharge. Fire to fusion. Pour into
water and it will become  silver at once,’ according to Ko
Hung, but he also adds that taking silver can only make
you an earth hsien ; it can be made edible in barley water
or in vermilio n grass wine, or in raspberry juice. Silver can
also be taken when it is dissolved with large pearls from
oysters; this, too, is inferior to potable gold, but the
preparation of gold is not always possible since it requires
the usual necessity of retirement to a mountain, fasting,
avoiding certain conditio ns and so on: all this limits the
number of those able to set about making gold. Another ,
and even more limiting,  factor was the need for ample
funds. Both eastern and western alchemists warned
against attempting the work without suﬀicient reserves. Ko Hung emphasized this when he wrote:You may wish to mount to heaven by preparing gold
or elixir , but you discover that the important
ingredients all require so much money that you
cannot aﬀord them all. It is then necessary to go back
to seek resources through farming, herding, busin ess
or trading for years and years, expending much
eﬀort. Only after that can the concocting be
undertaken . . . Even then it is necessary to fast again
and purify oneself: foregoing all human activities. To
all these things must be added concentrated thought
of the gods, preservation of unity , dispelling of evils
and protecting one's own person. Both gold and silver can be considerably debased and
still look like the real metal, and various types are called
‘false’ and ‘true.’ The Greek alchemists called ‘gold’ all
that glittered, even if it were only some veneer of gold-
seeming metal, but their Chinese counterparts called this
‘artful deception’ (cha) and made their artiﬁcia l gold and
silver of the same substa nce all through. One of the side
results of this exoteric alchemy in transmuting metals was
the discovery of, and concern with, the making of alloys
which were later used in making bronze for the superb
objects in Chinese art, for both secular and religious use. Alloys were capable of having the appearance of gold
and silver without actually containing either of those
metals; such alloys were bronze and brass, nickel, zinc and
tin; there were also complex combinations of metals. There is evidence that zinc was used as far back as the
second century BC and there are also accounts of ‘yellow
and white metals’ which the Chinese introduced into other
lands; these metals were not necessarily gold or silver but,
from the records of their usage, may have been
complicated alloys. Professor Needham writes of ‘the
remarkable fact that 2 per cent of arsenic can confer upon
copper a beautiful golden colour , while 4.6 per cent makesit shine and glow like silver.’ The Chinese had a ‘white
copper’ which they exported to the West in the
seventeenth century; it was used for ﬁre grates,
candlesticks and ornaments, did not tarnish and looked
like silver. It was known as pak tong and is, in fact, now
almost universally employed in modern coinage and
electroplating. Professor  Needham points out that the
modern world owes this debt ‘to the alchemical adepts and
technicians of ancient and medieval China who ﬁrst
studied and made use of nickel.’ It is also believed that the
Chinese used aluminium. Various methods and mixtures can produce endless
variations in colour , from olive-green brass to brass
looking like gold; copper can be anything from red-brown
to silvery-white. ‘Tanyang copper’ looked like gold and a
Chinese expression for being duped is ‘to buy brass for the
price of gold.’ Artiﬁcial gold-making was a considerable
industry and lumps of gold from alchemists' furnaces were
regarded as highly valuable by foreign merchants who
paid a good price for them. There were fourteen diﬀerent
types of gold listed in alchemy in the T'ang dynasty . The
most prized was the ‘purple-sheen gold.’ Gold leaf was
used extensively in gilding images of gods in the Taoist-
Buddhist pantheon. Although the term ‘yellow  and white’ was used for alloys
and the counterfeiting of gold and silver , it was also the
esoteric name for the actual science and art of alchemy
itself . Here a distinction is made between the exoteric and
the esoteric, the former being a purely scientiﬁc work of
transmuting base metal into ﬁner metals, a work having no
other signiﬁcance than attaining health, longevity or
immortality; one which Ko Hung maintained was
invariably successful. The esoteric ‘yellow and white’ of
the real alchemy was a work so secret that ‘the ancients
refrained from speaking openly about it and resorted tolanguage known only to the initiates . . . much of what
they say is so secret that only a small portion can be given
a clear explanation.’ Nor can such a work be undertaken
by ‘the impure and unintelligent or those with little
experience of the occult arts. Certain matters can only be
transmitted orally and must be learned from a teacher .’
‘Also you must go to a pure spot in the mountains, so that
the illiterate crowd will not know what you are
undertaking.’
The most prized and potent of all minerals, though, was
cinnabar , the ‘red stone’ or ‘red sand’ (tan sha ), a light red
mineral mercuric sulphide, found in Szechuan and Hunan
provinces; it was esteemed above gold both as a mineral
and medicine. The same plant-versus-mineral argument
was used for it: ‘The fact is that the least of the minor
cinnabar elixir is far better than the best of thing s of the
plant world. When submitted to the ﬁre all plant
substances are burnt to ashes, but cinnaba r when
calcinated produces liquid silver [quicksilver] and this,
after a whole series of transformations, can revert to
cinnabar again. That far exceeds what plants can do;
hence such chemicals  can confer longev ity and
immortality .’3 The state of immortality  conferred is much
superior to the earth hsien  power  of silver since ‘cinnabar
may be transmuted into pure gold and the latter when
swallowed will make one rise as a heavenly hsien .’
‘Returned cinnabar’ and the returned or ‘reverted’ gold
were ‘things of the highest importance. These two, it
seems, mark the peak of the divine process leading to
hsien -hood.’ Cinnabar was puriﬁed by roasting, in the ﬁrst
stages to expel the mercury; after that, heating the
mercury with sulphur produced a puriﬁed cinnabar or
‘vermilion.’ Quicksilver can be obtained from solid
cinnabar by a process of roasting in a luted container; it
then produces quicksilver , the ‘living metal.’ Ko Hungsays: ‘Quicksilver is originally cinnabar , which is roasted to
make it quicksilver . In this case quicksilver is roasted and
becomes returned cinna bar, the cinnabar returns to its
original substance. That is why it is called “returned
cinnabar .”’ In the Pao P'u Tzu he also deals with two kinds
of elixir , the Golden Cinnabar , (chin tan—the Philosophers'
Stone of the West) and the Gold Juice, the latter being
simpler but more expensive to make. These are
distinguished from the yellow and white art of transmuting
base metals into gold and silver: again a purely scientiﬁc
exoteric work. His recipe for making cinnabar solution is
to
prepare and insert one pound of cinnabar into a
green bamboo tube; add two ounces each of copper
sulphate and saltpeter above and below the cinnabar;
close the tube openings and seal them with hard
lacquer , which must be allowed a time to dry. Place
the whole in strong vinegar and bury it three feet
deep in the earth. After thirty days it will have
liquiﬁed and become red in colour and bitter in taste. The red colou r of the natural cinnabar and the vermilion
of returned cinnabar made it of value in itself . In China, as
elsewhere, red is the zenith of the colour representing the
sun, ﬁre, royalty , energy . It has always been a highly
auspicious colour in China, being the brightest of all and
therefore associated with, and attractive to, good spirits;
evil spirits fear all light and brightness. It is also the bridal
and good-luck colour , so that any red-coloured stone, and
cinnabar in particular , shared this virtue. It had a
particular alchemical signiﬁcance in the white-to-red
transformation, the powers of water and ﬁre, opposing but
complementary , in the Work. Cinnabar was yang  to the yin
of quicksilver; in alchemy the two were spoken of as ‘the
ﬁre of the heart is red as cinnabar , the water of thekidneys is dark as lead,’ and ‘as medicines we value the
kinds which  are as red as a cock's comb and have a
brilliant lustre.’
Red pigment was painted on images and sacred objects,
such as buried bones, and the lettering on the bamboo
tablets of the hsien  was red in colour . This sacred-magic
quality of red is not conﬁned to China but is found in many
other cultures, both primitive and advanced. It is also the
sacred colour of the life-blood and this attribute was easily
carried over into the notion of giving ‘life’ to the baser
metals and to the idea of life being contained in the red
cinnabar . OceanofPDF .com– 8 –
THE ALCHEMIST AS MIDWIFE
Common to both western and eastern alchemy is the
concept of the alchemist as midwife. The alchemist
believed that minerals, like all else in creation, were
endowed with life and grew in the womb of the Earth
Mother , the matrix. Metals were in embryo in the womb
and grew there gradua lly, developing from the lower
stages to the perfection of gold. The alchemist was the
midwife assisting at the birth but ﬁrst hastening the
development in the womb and decreasing the period of
gestation; an acceleration and extension of the work of
Nature in generation. The idea of the ores in embryo is also met in the term
‘foetus,’ used in both Chinese and Babylonian alchemy . The symbol of the Earth Mother runs right through as the
prima materia . Mirce a Eliade suggests  that the sacriﬁces
performed on alchemical  occasions, occurring in diﬀerent
parts of the world, would be comparable to obstetric
sacriﬁces. A further association with the embryo is the fact
that the human embryo is forty weeks in the womb  and the
furnace under the alchemical stove must burn for the
same period. African sorcerers, even today , use an aborted
foetus to secure the success of the fusion of metals, ‘to
bring the metal to birth.’
All metals were regarded  as the same in essence but in
diﬀerent stages of devel opment; they could be matured
and brought to perfection as gold, this being the highest
aim in Nature; there was thus a total analogy with the
spiritual growth of the human being. This analog y was sopersistent and consistent that man and meta ls were
spoken of in the same terms, such as the ‘base’ metal lead
and the ‘imperfect’ metals as the base and unregenerate
nature of humanity , both striving towards the perfection of
gold, of regeneration and transmutation. Man and metals
were both possessed of body, soul and spirit, the soul
being individ ual while the spirit was universal, a kind of
‘over-soul’ common to all. Belief in the possibility of
transmutation of base metals into gold implied that all
metals are potentially gold, as the human being is
potentially divine. The whole cosmos, as one living being,
in its properties and potentialities, is capable of evolution
and development from the state of imperfection to that of
perfection; everything has innate and wonderful
possibilities. At the back of this symb olism of the Earth Mother and
the reverence for Nature is the ancient and universal
worship of the Great Mother , she whose body was the
earth, the stones her bones and the rivers her blood: the
whole a living being. It is in this original worship , not as
an early science or chemistry , that many authorities see
the beginnings of alchemy . The reverence for the life of the
earth, the prima materia , and cooperation with the laws
and rhythms  of Nature were fundamental; experiments
came later. Sciences were born from alchemy after the
initial stage of the magico-religious element had declined
and died, just as the great festivals, based on religious
beliefs, ritual, dramas and magic, lost their ‘mystery’ in
the mystery religions and became merely occasions for
relaxation and holiday amusement. The Great Mother
carries her symbolism through alchemy , in which she is
dynamic as ﬁre and heat, transforming and purifying; but
in her other aspect she is destructive, consuming and
devouring: both life and death.Eliade writes of the magico-religious relationship
existing between man and matter and the importance of
this association in all initiatory rites, as illustrate d by the
‘creators,’ the potter , carpenter , mason, metal-worker ,
smith and alchemist. As he says, all held matter ‘to be at
once alive and sacred, and in their labours they pursue the
transformation of matter , its perfection and its
transmutation.’ This close association with Nature and the
magico-religious element s shown in Chinese alchemy are
closely bound up with Taoism in both its philosophical and
popular aspects. There was always an initiatory tradition in alchemy , both
eastern and western. The transmission of vital knowledge
could only take place from a master to a pupil, following
certain lines of working which were within a spiritual
environment—that is, the sacred and the intuitive, rather
than the profane and reasoning intelligence. Craftsmen
formed secret and initiatory societies and guilds and,
travelling from one place to another in search of materials,
carried their myths and lore with them. This initiatory
succession had existed from the beginning in Chinese
alchemy and was implicit in the Hermetic tradition in the
West. Initiation is the archetypal pattern of transition from one
state to another , from life to death to rebirth, the return to
the darkness  of the womb before rebirth into the light. In
alchemy the ‘death’ of the metals, the black, nigredo
stage, is not only the death-experience of the initiation
rites; it is also psychologically the descent into the chaotic,
undiﬀerentiated realm of the unconscious, again, to return
to the womb, the embry onic state from which the new
person is born. To go through the initiation rites, both
physical and mental, often so severe as to amount to
torture, is spoken of in alchemy as the ‘torture’ of the
metals, or of the vermilion bird, the phoenix of Chinesealchemy . For the ordeal, rigorous dedication and strength
of character were required. Indian alchemy held the adept
must be ‘intelligent, devo ted to his work, without sin and
master of his passions.’ Initiation is essentially a ritual
confrontation with death that vouchsafes the know ledge of
immortality and kills fear of death. Two of the artiﬁcers most concerned with alchemy and
necessary for its work were the miner and the smith. The
miner operat es in the early stages, bringing forth the ores,
helping and hastening the process of birth. That he was
involved in the sacred aspect of the work is shown by the
fact that the opening of a new mine required a religious
ceremony and elabora te ritual; fasting, prayer or
meditation, incantation, ritual cleanliness and sexual
abstinence were necessary as in any other branch of
alchemy . To interfere with the Earth Mother is to tread on
dangerous ground, indeed, in some cultures, such as the
Tibetan and Amerindian,  it was altogether prohibited by
sacred scruples. Even on the lower folk-level, mountains,
mounds and the underworld are treated with extreme
caution as the homes of spirits, fairies, dwarfs, trolls and
gnomes. These underground workers were always
mysterious and feared for being in touch with underworld
and dark powers. ‘There is a vast background of myth which incorporates
all transform ers; among these the smith occupies an
important but extraordin arily ambivalent position; he can
be venerated as a god or royalty , or despised as an outcast. In some cases he is the First Ancestor who came down
from heaven to found civilization.
_OceanofPDF.com_Chinese_Alchemy_-_Jean_Cooper.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        In Taoism the Western Paradise was presided over by
Hsi Wang Mu, Queen of Heaven; in Buddhism the Amida
Buddha resided in the Pure Land: both had a Peach as the
Tree of Life growing in the centre and both were the
dwelling place of Immortals, Genii and fairies as well as
those souls who by virtue had won entrance to Paradise. Both these concepts were a popular degeneration from the
original non-theistic metaphysics of the impersonal Tao
and the equally impersonal Nirvana; both were based on
the notion of materialistic reward, the one for successful
adherence to the rules of physical and spiritual discipline,
the other for faith and calling on the Name. The Western
Paradise was paved with gold, silver and jade, pearls and
crystal. The seven lakes were fringed by golden sand and
there were beautiful pavilions of translucent jewels;
beautiful birds sang and ﬂowers were full of colour and
fragrance. Candelabrum with stylized Longevity and Happiness
characters. There are also traditions  and records going back to the
third centur y BC of Emperors sending expeditions to
search for the Palace of the Immortals, which was believed
to be situated in the mountains of northern Tibet. The
dwellers in this region lived in both worlds at once, the
natural and the spiritua l. Here we have an echo of the
theme of Shangri-la. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the great historian
(163-85 BC) wrote of these Mountains of the Immortals as
being the Land of the Blessed where the elixir is found and
where all things are white and the palaces are gold and
silver. While the hsien  could live either in the earthly or
celestial realm, the real goal of the alchemist was to reach
the Isles of the Immortal s, the Fairy Isles where the herb
of immortality grew. These ﬂoating isles—ﬁve originally—
were reputed to be situated a great way oﬀ in the Po Sea,
to the East of China. One of the gods arranged for ﬁfteen
huge turtles, in relays of ﬁve, to hold up the islands on
their heads. This arrangement was maintained until a
great giant, who wanted their shells for divination, ﬁshed
for and caught six of the turtles, whereupon two of the
islands ﬂoated away to the North Pole and sank into the
ocean. The Immortals living on those islands had to move
to the three that remaine d; there they cultivated the herb
of immortality. These were the Isles of P'eng-lai, Fang-chan
and Ying Chou, the most frequently mentioned being
P'eng-lai. All living things, birds, animals and plants are
perfectly white (symbolic of the white and vitality of
quicksilver), and the palaces and gates are made  of gold
and jewels, silver and pearls. If you see the Isles from a
distance they look like clouds, but when you get near them
they sink into the sea and a wind suddenly blows you away
from them. The food there is miraculous and fruits if eaten
will preserve the eater from old age and death. This,
again, is reminiscent of the Peach of Immortality growing
in the Western Paradise  and of the Tree of Life in all
paradisial mythology. One of the people greatly interested in ﬁnding these
Isles was Shih Huang Ti (259-210 BC), founder of the
Ch'in dynasty and the ﬁrst real Emperor of China, who
uniﬁed the country after the period of the Warring States,
making it an Empire instead of a collection of smaller
kingdoms and states. It was he who built the Great Wall to
keep out the northern barbarians; he introduced the hair-
brush, or pencil, for writing or drawing on silk instead of
the bamboo tablets used before; but he also achievednotoriety in his ‘burning of the books,’ ordering the
destruction of the Confucian Classics, which he
maintained were receiving an exaggerated reverence and
were stultifying scholarship. He was greatly inter ested in
alchemy and in his reign appeared the famous alchemists
An Ch'i Sheng and Hsü Fu or Hsü She. The former, a
vague legendary character, was believed to be a thousand
years old; he was highly learned, espec ially in
compounding medicines. He so impressed Shih Huang Ti
that the Emperor continu ed talking to him for three days
and nights, ﬁnally presenting the Sage with much gold and
jade, in which, as a true Taoist, he saw no value so threw it
away. He was said to live on a pill as large as a melon. Ssu-ma Ch'ien records in his History  that Hsü Fu was
sent on an expedition (some say he went at his own
request, others that it was the Emperor's wish) to ﬁnd the
Isles of the Immortals and bring back the elixir of
immortality. Shih Huang Ti equipped the expedit ion with
the ‘ﬁve grains’ and Hsu set out with three thousand
youths and maidens, and artisans and workmen of all
kinds. The expedition never returned. Some belie ved that
they had found the Isles; another tradition said that Hsü
Fu discovered the islands of peace and plenty and settled
there and became king of the new realm; others suggest
that this was the discove ry of the Japanese Islands. Shih
Huang Ti always hoped that the expedition would return
and used to go to the coast, wandering up and down it,
gazing out to sea, searching the horizon for the returning
ships. The Emperor Wu, of the Han dynasty, a great believer in
alchemy and astrology, also sent an expedition to the
island of P'eng-lai to bring back the elixir; but it too failed
to come back. During his reign various alchemists made
claims that they had discovered the secret of immortality
and transmuting metals, but, failing to produce  results,were executed. The Emperor ﬁnally came to the
conclusion that he had been led astray by the extravagant
claims of the magicians and decided that ‘if we are
temperate in our diet and use medicine, we make our
illnesses few. That is all we can attain to. ’
While Shih Huang Ti and Wu Ti (the word Ti means
Emperor) and other alchemists took the existence of the
Isles literally, they were, from the esoteric aspect, an
allegory of the attainment of the state of enlightenment,
the inner world of spirit for which the adept worked; a
state of being rather than a ‘place;’ the mystical states in
which spiritual knowledge is achieved and it is realized
that there is no death. OceanofPDF. com– 5 –
THE ELIXIR
The Elixir, the Golden Pill or the Pill of Immortality was for
the East what the Philosophers' Stone was for western
alchemy; both are ill-deﬁned but were basically a
substance of which a small portion could transform a much
larger quant ity of base metals into gold, or could confer
immortality. Both had the property of transforming one
thing into another, both could cure diseases and restore
youth; the same phraseology is used to describe either. Many a Taoist account tells of the restoration of
youthfulness, or grey hair turning black, and of a man of a
hundred years old looking as if he were in the prim e of his
life. In the West, Solomon Trismosin said that by taking a
grain of the stone his wrinkled skin became smooth and
white, his cheeks rosy, his grey hair black and his bowed
back erect. He also said he restored youthfulness to
ninety-year-old ladies and that the stone was a universal
panacea. All sorts of extravagant claims were made for the
transmuting powers of the elixir and the stone. Ma Hsiang,
a hsien, always paid for his wine by turning all the iron
vessels in the wine shop into gold. Albertus Magnus was
reported to have brought to life a bronze statue made by
Thomas Aquinas, who made use of it as a servant;
unfortunately, it was somewhat talkative and noisy and
had to be kept in order with a hammer. There is, however, a sharp division between the aims of
the exoteric ‘bellows blower’ or ‘charcoal burner’ and the
esoteric searcher for wisdom and enlightenment,  and theelixir itself was named in various categories as exoteric or
esoteric: the ‘inner elixir,’ the nei tan, of meditation and
spiritual practices developed the qualities of the soul and
was the esoteric aspect; the ‘outer elixir,’ the wei tan, of
taking medic ines, herbs and the pill of immortality was the
exoteric side intende d to bring about physical
regeneration. There were also the hsien tan of the
Immortals and the divine elixir, shen tan. With the deliberately esoteric nature of alchemy it
followed that instructions and recipes were not made
available to the general public or the merely curious, so
most of the methods of concocting the elixir are not known
and even of those speciﬁcally mentioned many are not now
identiﬁable. Also, when the exact ingredients are given,
the proportions are withheld, so that, for example, when
the famous ‘eight preciou s things’ of the elixir are given as
cinnabar, realgar, sulphur, orpiment, saltpetre,  ore of
cobalt, salt and mica, no measures are included. In
addition to this diﬀiculty there were widely diﬀering local
and dynasti c weights and measures. Then, too, the
methods of concocting the elixir are couched in obscure
terms using names which are deliberately esoteric, if not
at times deliberately misleading, so that it is now
impossible to follow eithe r the ancient recipes or the exact
physical techniques. What Jung said about western
alchemy applies equally to the Chinese science: ‘It is quite
hopeless to try to establish any kind of order in the inﬁnite
chaos of substances and procedures. Seldom do we get
even an approximate idea of how the work was done, what
materials were used, and what results achiev ed. The
reader usua lly ﬁnds himself in the most impe netrable
darkness when it comes to names and substances; they
could mean almost anythi ng. ’ In any case, as cannot be too
frequently stressed, they were not intended to mean
anything to the uninitiated and were only for transmissionfrom a master to a pupil with whom such dangerous
secrets could be trusted. ‘The vulgar and debased cannot
practise this art, neither such as have no understanding,’
as Ko Hung said in his Pao P'u Tzu. Recipes for the elixir (tan)  are endless, literally in
hundreds. As Professor Needham says of Chinese  science
and alchemy, it is a matter of ‘ﬁnding the way successfully
through an incohate mass of ideas, and the facts so hard to
establish, relating to alchemy and metallurgy in ancient,
medieval and traditional China. ’ Also, ‘there is a veritable
ocean, only a small part of which has been explor ed. ’ It is
also a questi on of separating the grains of wheat from the
mass of chaﬀ of the ‘bellows blowers. ’ Even if recipes are
speciﬁc, it is not always known what is meant by
substances with such fanciful names as Scarlet Snow, the
Flowing Pearl Elixir, the Empyrean-Roaming Elixir, the
Pale Moon Elixir, and so on; but all of them guarantee
immortality. Ko Hung says that such elixirs are not
intended to be generally known, so does not give methods
of preparation and the uninitiated would do well to leave it
at that. Ingredients for the Empyrean-Roaming Elixir are:
cinnabar, realgar, malachite, laminar, amorphous sulphur
and quicksilver. It is known that the Flowing Pearl is an
esoteric name for quicksilver. On the other hand, some
recipes were  clearly given and even the exact places from
which the ingredients were to be collected were speciﬁed;
‘all others are best rejected. ’
The reputati on of the crane for longevity made it a
symbol of immortality; it was also a messenger between
gods and men, hence its eggs were an appropriate food for
those seekin g immortalit y and contact with supernatural
beings. The cock, as a yang  bird, supplied vital force in its
comb, which was used in recipes, while the hen provided
the yin balancing force in its eggs. The tortoise, which is
one of the four ‘spiritually endowed creatur es’ andextremely long-lived, symbolized both longev ity and
strength, so that a preparation made from tortoise shells
can confer one thousand years of life. There are such recipes as taking a swan's egg, sealed
with lacquer, and steeped in a mica solution. After one
hundred days it will turn red: a gill of this will increase
your life by a hundred years, or a quart by a thousand. Another prescription says: ‘Prepare three pound s of the
skin and fat from the back of a hog and one quart of strong
vinegar. Place ﬁve ounces of yellow gold in a conta iner and
cook in an earthen stove. Dip the gold in and out of the fat
one hundred times; likew ise in the vinegar. Take a pound
of this and you will outlast all nature; half a pound and you
will live two thousand years. ’
Other elixirs  will even raise the dead, others will confer
‘everlasting vision’ and so etherealize the body that ‘in full
sun you will cast no shadow. ’ In many cases strange and
grotesque ingredients are required, such as black dung
from a black cow, black  insects' blood, seeds of red ﬁr,
dragons' grease, ox gall, earthworm excreta; many of
these, of course, would be a disguise. Equally strange
ingredients were used in western alchemy: the urine of a
dog, the hairs of a white dog; the blood of a mouse, asses'
dung; while pearls and stones found in a crab's head are
speciﬁcs against heart trouble; a contraceptive is to bind
the head with a red ribbon or hold a stone found in the
head of an ass, and baldness can be cured  by the
application of bees burned to ashes. Another recipe guarantees that ‘having eaten the
medicine for three years a man attains buoyancy of
movement and is able to travel great distances; stepping
over ﬁre, he is not scorc hed; dropped into water, he does
not get wet. He is able to appear and disappear at will. He
will be happy for ever. ’Careful preparation is necessary before attempting the
work of making the elixir. In the ﬁrst place, both eastern
and western alchemy depended on astrology in calculating
the propitious times and seasons for experiments and for
compounding medicines and the elixir. Then the
alchemical work require d abstinence from certai n foods,
notably cereals and meat, for one hundred days, and a
ritual puriﬁcation which involved the use of perfumes in
washing the body and hair. The preparations should be
carried out in an uninhabited place, usually a sacred
mountain. This need for solitude in the work is insisted on
universally; it was a sine qua non for success. In China it
was the retre at to the mountain; in India to the forest ‘far
away from all unclean presence;’ in Babylon the alchemist
had to work alone, ‘a stranger shall not enter,’ while in the
West the same applied to the alchemist in his laboratory. Ko Hung attributed the failure of the earlier alchemists,
employed by the Emperor Wu, in making gold and ﬁnding
the elixir to the fact that they attempted the work in the
palace and at court inste ad of the solitary retreat in the
mountains. It is necessary to pay reverence to, and invoke, the
proper divinities and powers; to have faith and to be blest
by being born under the right stars. These ritual
preparations, and the condition that only initiates or
disciples are present during the work, are evident in all
branches of alchemy. ‘Common people or anything that
soils’ must be avoided and no disbelievers may be told of
the plans, for, if they blaspheme the divine medicine, the
preparation will not be successful. It is also necessary to
avoid any possibility of the evil eye. ‘Even a doctor. will
avoid being seen by fowls, dogs, children or women. lest his reme dies lose their eﬀicacy. ’ This last, however, is
at variance with the vital help given by wives who had the
necessary knowledge or ‘fate’ in cases where the man wasunsuccessful in his experiments. The Yellow Emperor, for
instance, was dependent on his Immortal maids and much
of the work needed the help of the yin female balance; in
the W est this was given by the ‘sister’ in the work. For the ‘inne r alchemy,’ the esoteric side, to quote from
the Ts'an T'ung Ch'i, ‘Attention should be turned to the
well-being of the inner self so as to attain the state of
perfect calmness and freedom from matter. The primordial
substance, shining forth unseen, will illuminate the insides
of the body. Cessation of thought is desirable and
worries are preposterous. ’ The concluding chapter of the
work makes it clear that immortality in its true sense, not
mere longevity, is to be achieved, for even a small quantity
of the elixir is enough to ‘confer tranquillity on the hun p'o
[soul], give it immortalit y and enable it to live with the
immortals. ’
Chinese alchemy is full of accounts of the Pill of
Immortality, which is one of its chief distinctions from the
western branch with its emphasis on gold. The pill or elixir
has, though, close associations with the Persian haoma
and Indian soma  in that they, like the elixir, also cured
diseases as well as conferring immortality. According to
the Rig Veda, to drink soma  was to become immortal. There is also a connection with the sacred mushroom, the
peyotl  of the Mexicans. The cult of all these substances
was based on the belief that it was possible to achieve
immortality, either by the concoction of a drug, whether
from mineral, plant or animal sources, which could both
rejuvenate and preserve the physical body, which became
so reﬁned that it developed the qualities of the hsien;  or,
alternatively, to reach the same results by yogic
techniques in breathing exercises, diet, sex and
meditation. This gave two ways of attaining immortality
suitable for diﬀerent temperaments. In preparing the elixir there are instructions as to the
control of the heat, always an important point in eastern
and western alchemy:
The ﬂame at the start should be weak as to be
controllable and should be made strong at the end. Close attention and careful watch should be given so
as to regula te properly the heat or cold. There are
twelve divisions to the cycle. On completion of the
cycle a closer watch should be accorded. As the
breath expires, life is ended. Death expels the spirit. The colour changes to a purple. Behold. Returned
medicine [huan tan] is obtained. This is then made
into pills. These are extremely eﬀicacious, although
their individu al size is so small that they occupy only
the point of a knife or the edge of a spatula. If the compounding of the elixir is not properly carried
out ‘law and order will be upset’ and failure is inevitable,
‘for this is just as absurd as attempting to repair a
cauldron with glue, or to get rid of cold with ice, or as
reports of ﬂying tortoises or dancing snakes. ’
On the esoteric level this control of the heat symbolizes
the need for a slow pace, within the capacities of the pupil,
at the beginning of the work; it warns the alchemi st not to
try and run before learning to walk. The ‘Returne d Medicine’  or ‘Reverted Elixir,’ the most
prized and eﬀicacious of all, is the ‘nine-times cycled
elixir. ’ This was placed in a reaction vessel and exposed to
the sun after the summer solstice. When the container
became hot a pound of cinnabar was put under the lid and
‘even while you are watching, with the full power of the
sun shining upon it, the whole content will suddenly glow
and sparkle with all the colours of divine light. It will
immediately turn into reverted elixir. ’ After taking aspoonful of this you will unquestionably rise straig ht up to
heaven in broad daylight. In the reﬁning process the highly signiﬁcant number
nine is constantly employed. There was the Divine Nine
Turn Method: putting the cinnabar through nine diﬀerent
processes in order to reﬁne it to the highest quality. It was
‘nine times subjected to the ﬁre at nine regular intervals of
time. ’ This nine-times cleansing also appears in western
alchemy. The essential method in Chinese alchemy
appears to have been repeated conversion from a solid
state to a vapour, by heat in a sealed vessel, then allowing
solidiﬁcation again, this process being cyclic or a ‘turn. ’
In the process of obtainin g the elixir there are the stages
of ‘red and white,’ familiar to both East and West. ‘You
must wash it until it becomes white and beat it until it
becomes red, then you will have an elixir which will endow
you with ten thousand years of longevity. ’ This symbolism
appears universally in alchemy and is bound up with the
idea of the alchemist as midwife assisting the birth of the
ore from the womb of the Earth Mother. This is the white
of water and the red of blood in the birth. Also the white
ﬂower is silver, the feminine; the red ﬂower gold, the
masculine; both are contained in the elixir and in the
philosophers' egg and grew out of it as a symbol of
creation. In the West the white rose, or lily, is the Queen,
the red rose is the King. The white, as water, and the red
as ﬁre are the two great powers of creation and
destruction in the world. In Arabic alchemy Senior said
that in purifying the mind  every black thing is made white
and every white thing red, ‘for water whitens and ﬁre
gives light. ’
On the exoteric plane there was much in common
between the elixir and the magic potions or powers of fairy
tales, such as the magic table, already referred to, which
appeared when summoned to provide food and drink and,in alchemy, cups of jade and plates of gold; also the power
of seeing events hundreds of miles distant, being immune
from all natural forces and of being served by the fairy
world. There were alchemical recipes for potions or
ointments which made it possible to perform all these
wonders. These were also the siddhi  powers of the yogins
in all eastern  religions. On both the exoteric and esoteric
levels the elixir was recognized as a time-co ntrolling
substance. Ko Hung says on this: ‘once one's immortality
has been assured one is never again concerned about the
ﬂeeting of time. ’
Sun Ssu-mo, who had made a study of alchemy, wrote:
‘The formulae I have studied are by no means few. On the
whole they are obscure and enigmatic. Those who dip into
them become increasingly bemused, and amateurs only
more addled. that is surely not because the ancients
have spoken deceiving words. It must be that students of
the Way themselves have been unable to reach the
essential meanings. ’ For these ‘essential meanin gs’ one
might quote Titus Burckhardt in saying that the elixir
‘unites in itself all the powers of the soul and thus acts as
a trans muting “ferment” on the psychic world, and, in an
indirect fashion, on the outward world also. ’
The elixir is, at any level, the passing from death to life.
Hsi Wang Mu, Queen of Heaven, and the Amida Buddha, respectively.
Who is said to reside in the Western Paradise in Taoism and Buddhism?
To confer immortality and rejuvenation, rather than to create wealth.
What is the purpose of the elixir in Chinese alchemy?
To transmute base metals into gold and confer immortality.
What is the purpose of the elixir in Western alchemy?
It is a symbol of completion and perfection, as well as a reference to the nine-staged process of refinement.
What is the significance of the number 9 in Chinese alchemy?
The alchemist is not only a scientist, but also a spiritual guide and teacher, who assists in the transformation of the individual and the attainment of enlightenment.
What is the role of the alchemist in Chinese alchemy?