The Golden Elixir and Qigong are Different Skills

the secret is the true seed.

One of my goals with this newsletter is to clearly show how and why internal alchemy is a unique practice. I must say that as a 20+ year practitioner of Qigong I am not denigrating it at all, but many people who want to practice Daoist meditation are drawn down the path of Qigong when what they are actually looking for is Neidan and I feel this is an injustice since those two practices have little in common.

If we want to understand the difference between Neidan and Qigong we should focus our discussion a little more tightly and move away from Qigong as a bulk topic toward Daoist Qigong as a more precise topic.

Daoist Qigong is a modern term used to describe historical practices which mainly include the following categories:

• Dao Yin: stretching and leading, arts which can be similar to asana performed in modern Hatha Yoga, or energy leading exercises which can include intention guiding, visualization, and breath work among other things.

• Tu Na: specific breath practices which emphasize either inhalation or exhalation along with things like saliva swallowing and vocal sounding in order to either collect or disperse Qi.

• Cun Xiang: visualization practices used to generate Qi or produce spiritual experiences including hallucinations of deities.

There are other practices such as mudras, but broadly we can categorize them within Dao Yin so I do not mention them in detail.

Daoist Qigong has a similar theory to Neidan which includes the idea of emptiness and form, Jing, Qi and Shen, the Three Dantian etc.. and its practice has changed many times over the last 2500 years.

I personally separate Daoist Qigong between Pre Tang Dynasty practices and those practices which came around or after the Tang. This is because the early practices of Daoism were often quite intense including strong visualization, stressful breath holding, and other similar practices. These methods often resulted in injury (probably the reason for the erroneous belief in the West that Neidan practice results in Qi pathology).

After the Tang Dynasty Neidan began to have an impact on the Daoist understanding of Qigong practice and many methods gradually became more gentle, although of course the old style of practice has never disappeared completely, especially since many popular figures in the Daoist Qigong world misinterpret old texts in order to give students a sense of doing hard work which will reward them with energetic results.

Either way, the thing that essentially defines Daoist Qigong is that it is energetic practice of the body and mind, only having tangential spiritual results according to the theory of Daoism (which in this case can be defined by Zhuangzi's “an empty room generates purity”).

This body and mind practice can take any of the above mentioned approaches and certainly has significant benefit, but progress stops at the point where the Post Heaven Qi of the body is full and can easily circulate in the meridians.

In the Tang Dynasty Shi Jianwu called practitioners of this approach “Human Immortals,” because they attained a level of practice which made them different from regular people, but they stay in the realm of the human world as a result of unwavering identification with the so called “rotten flesh sack.”

In other words, a human is bound to a body and a mind and thus has to die when their physical self dies, but a person who is not bound to the body seems to be able to live without a body. I don't know if this is true, but that is what Daoists have believed since the time of Laozi (“If I did not have a body, what danger could befall me?” - Dao De Jing).

It seems there are only two ways to go beyond the “flesh sack” and achieve the “spiritual immortal,” the first is Sitting in Forgetting, an early approach to meditation in which the Qi of the body was allowed to mix with the primordial Qi outside the body to allow practitioners to merge with nature.

The second is the Golden Elixir, a sophisticated method of changing emptiness for energy and returning energy back to and empty place within the confines of the body until it becomes so full that it can live outside the body.

Sitting in forgetting is wonderful, but it has no solution to the problem of energy leaking after it has been cultivated. In this instance practitioners will obtain less benefit since they lose much of the Qi they obtain during practice.

Only the Golden Elixir is the best method for creating energy, returning it, storing it and transforming it into something greater.

The Golden Elixir follows the same principle of self forgetting, but it adds the awareness of the loci of energetic development of the body discovered by past practitioners of Daoist Qigong.

In a sense it borrows from Qigong while staying true to the nature of apophatic meditation, making it a subtle hybrid of the two.

At the same time, it definitely does not take on the self reifying understanding of Daoist Qigong since identification with the body is only used for the purposes of returning to emptiness, thus making it a temporary measure which is increasingly discarded at a higher levels of practice.

Do you understand what this means and why Neidan is different from Daoist Qigong?

Here is what Zhang Boduan (author of Understanding Reality, the first Neidan text to completely explain the practice) had to say:

“Gulping saliva and swallowing breath are human activities, the medicine location can generate creation and transformation, the cauldron interior if without the true seed will only result in empty boiling of water and fire.”

He is saying two things:

1: body practices are good for the human body, but they lack the ability to form the genuine medicine of the Golden Elixir,

2: the golden elixir requires a “true seed” in order to function or else all will be for naught.

It is this true seed that is the essence of the Golden Elixir and the main point of the practice.

Everyone has Jing, Qi and Shen, Martial Artists have it, Pang Ming of Zhineng Qigong fame has it (as do all Qigong masters and many students), even my tea teacher Hei Caitong could practice this work while she performed Taiwanese Cha Dao Tea Ceremony.

These things are great and highly respectable, but none of them have the true seed.

So what is this true seed that is only found in Neidan practice?

(behind the paywall as a detailed discussion of the true seed, the “baby,” five elements, three families, and how all these things come together in practice. All these ideas are from the book Understanding Reality by Zhang Boduan. It is the first major Neidan text to explain the entire practice and is the most important Neidan text. Over time it is my plan to explain it here at IS, but since it is so layered and rich, it is a big job which may take many years. I welcome you to join me on this adventure and I hope it helps you learn Neidan and succeed! If you would like to read the extended posts behind the paywall, please sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription and feel free to take advantage of the seven day free trial).