China

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China, for the purposes of this site, is less the modern state than the long civilization of the East Asian mainland — the body of language, ritual, and cosmological assumption out of which Taoism, Confucianism, and the Chinese arts of alchemy and divination grew. Its formative age runs from the Shang and Zhou dynasties through the philosophical ferment of the Warring States and the imperial syntheses that followed, when the chief schools of Chinese thought took the shape they would keep for two thousand years.

Underneath the schools lay a cosmology most of them shared. The world was held to be a single field of relation rather than a thing made: it arose not from a creator standing outside it but from the interplay of yin and yang, the receptive and the active, and unfolded through the Five Phases — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — that succeed and constrain one another in cycles. The animating term was qi, the breath or vital energy thought to circulate through cosmos and body alike. Heaven, earth, and the human being were taken to answer to one another, so that order in the state, in the body, and in the seasons was a single problem in different registers. The Yijing, the Book of Changes, supplied the diagrams by which that order was read.

Within this frame the schools diverged sharply. Confucius and his heirs held that the way was kept by li — ritual propriety, the cultivation of character, and the bonds of family and rule — a discipline aimed at the human order. The Taoist texts gathered under Laozi and Zhuangzi turned the other direction: the Dao, the Way, was the nameless source that could not be grasped by striving, and the sage’s art was wuwei, action so attuned to it as to look like doing nothing. The library holds these in their first full English dress, in James Legge’s and Herbert Giles’s late-nineteenth-century translations. Later, Buddhism entering from India was absorbed and reworked, most distinctively as Chan, the school the West knows as Zen.

The alchemy is twofold, and the distinction matters. Waidan, outer alchemy, was the laboratory pursuit of an elixir of immortality, compounded often from cinnabar and other toxic minerals; neidan, inner alchemy, took the same vocabulary of furnace and elixir and turned it inward, treating the body as the vessel in which an immortal embryo could be refined from qi. Whether these were one art or two, and how far the inner reading reworked the outer, remains debated among scholars. What the practitioners sought was plain enough: not metaphor but transformation — a body made to last.

The resemblances to currents further west are easy to feel and worth handling with care. The Dao that cannot be named recalls the apophatic God of the mystics; inner alchemy’s refinement of a hidden body has been set beside the Hermetic and European alchemical traditions. The parallels are genuine, and they have drawn comparison for over a century. Each tradition, pressed, means something exact and its own. China named the unnameable in its own grammar, and built from it a way of seeing in which the cosmos was less a creation to be explained than an order to be kept in tune with.

→ In the library: Legge — The Tao Teh King (1891) · Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (1891) · Giles — Chuang Tzŭ (1889)

→ Related: Karma · Reincarnation · Monism · Reason