The intellectual work of Internal Alchemy

Why is it important? How does it work?

The Intellectual Work of Internal Alchemy:

“Why are there so many Internal Alchemy documents?”

This is a question I sometimes get asked and today I'd like to give a quick answer to clarify things a little.

If you've been around the international Daoist scene for more than five minutes you have probably seen several camps of practitioners each proposing conflicting views.

I believe they are:

1: Qigong and Martial Arts practitioners who like the ideas of the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi,

2: Academics who study Daoist texts and may or may not be involved in religious Daoist lineages,

3: People who are interested in Daoism philosophically,

4: Ordained Daoists,

5: People who don't fit into any of these categories such as myself.

Members of each of these groups often make claims to knowledge of Internal Alchemy and indeed some of them actually practice at varying levels of proficiency.

If we look at the categories in terms of knowledge though there are really only four:

1: No knowledge and no teacher,

2: book knowledge but no teacher,

3: teacher but lack of knowledge,

4: knowledge and teacher,

When I say teacher I mean a teacher who has completed at least some of the Internal Alchemy curriculum.

People who have no knowledge and no teacher although sometimes making claims to Internal Alchemy practice are quickly identified by the total level of discord with the rest of the Daoist community.

This is where groups like the Christian Psychedelic Daoists who learned from secret masters with lineages tracing back to monkeys in the mountains of Sichuan fit. These people know nothing and the only people who follow them are silly and lack discernment.

People with book knowledge and no teacher also have a nearly impossible feat in front of them since Internal Alchemy is very hard to learn from books, not just because there are so many coded words and phrases, but also because a book can't tell you whether or not you are making progress when you experience certain energetic phenomena, and it certainly can't correct your practice.

People with teachers who lack academic knowledge in Neidan can still succeed and certainly this is a common way of studying throughout much of the history of this art.

This way of practice exclusively relies on receipt of Kou Jue/Oral Formula which are imparted by teacher to student and show how to practice.

The drawback of this approach is that there is no way to verify whether or not what a teacher taught is correct.

People who have both academic knowledge and a qualified teacher have the easiest path to study because regardless of whether they receive the oral formulas they can learn directly with an experienced practitioner who can explain the standard texts of Neidan to them, enabling them to continue their studies on their own time and check back in with the teacher when they need help.

There is still one weakness with this model which is the degree to which the teacher transmitted knowledge and the degree to which the student understands the transmission and texts.

This problem is especially serious for Western practitioners because even after we learn to read classical Chinese there is still a lot of work to do just to decipher the deeper layers of meaning.

Chinese is a difficult language and Neidan texts are some of the most difficult to read among all genres of Chinese literature, so the ability of a Western student to read and understand Neidan texts requires considerable time spent with a qualified teacher to explain some of the more difficult points.

I still go to my teacher frequently for help with texts I'm reading and new things that come up in practice.

I think I basically understand the direction of practice now, but even after more than a decade of working on it, I frequently get surprised by new experiences.

With that out of the way, let's talk about why the intellectual tradition of Neidan is so important to developing as a practitioner.

Neidan is a system of meditation which exists in an ecology of meditation systems which each have their own unique methodology, methods, and teleology (study of goals).

Neidan has rules which make it work and even if we agree that the end game of Neidan is the same as the end game of Chan Buddhism, Vipassana, Vajryana or Confucian Meditation, we can't assume that the practices of these systems are interchangeable, at least not during the early learning stage.

Neidan is also a rare system of meditation with probably only a couple thousand practitioners in the west and only a tiny hand full of people claiming to teach, and even a smaller number of people who can verify their practice.

The rarity of Neidan makes it more difficult to study since the overwhelming majority of research on this subject is in Chinese and in China Neidan is also a relatively small tradition compared to its Buddhist counterparts and other popular practices such as Qigong.

Thus we come back to the issue of verification and how we can know if our understanding is correct or not.

Verification of Neidan knowledge requires three things:

1: knowledge of Neidan theory,

2: a teacher to explain the theory,

3: years of practice to integrate the theory into experience,

Neidan theory is not just about putting the mind in the dantian with the breath and waiting for Qi to move, that is only just a tiny part of the overall nature of the art.

This is where things become very sticky because even in this situation there are claimants to Neidan practice who have all three parts but from the perspective of people with formal Daoist education are immediately identifiable as having no idea about how Neidan really works.

Thus we should add a fourth element to our list of requirements:

4: An understanding of the standards of Neidan as a genre of practice.

That is to say, we somehow have to come to an intellectual understanding of what Neidan is, independent of the formal teachings we receive from our teachers.

This process may seem nebulous at first, but actually it is possible in both English and Chinese, you just have to dig in and read a lot.

In today's Neidan environment it is commonly agreed that there are seven famous schools which include:

• the Northern School

• Southern School,

• Middle School,

• Eastern School,

• Western School,

• Wu Liu School,

• San Feng School,

We can learn about these schools and what they think in two ways:

1: read their documents,

2: read research about them.

Reading the documents may be difficult if we don't understand Neidan terminology, so probably the best place to start is by reading research documents written by scholars.

There are many scholars on Neidan and many of them make mistakes since they are not practitioners and do not have a great deal of formal teaching with a master, but there are a few standard names in the study who consistently make good research documents that can point you in the right direction and often also have some practice background.

In my opinion the very best English language scholar on Neidan is Fabrizio Pregadio and the best English language scholar on Daoism in a general sense is Livia Kohn.

Their books are well organized, well researched and the best place to start for those wishing to understand something about the essence of the arts.

Once you have thoroughly read this authors you should move on to specific scholars dealing with individual historical practitioners of Neidan.

For instance today there are scholars researching figures such as Li Daochun of the Middle School, Min Yide, Huang Yuanji and just about every other famous historical practitioner you can think of.

I don't follow their research since I do all my reading in Chinese because of there being relatively less interpretive mistakes in the Chinese academic community, but I'm sure by digging around you will find them.

The only major drawback to this approach is that most of the authors are not writing about practice, they are writing histories and have to make thesis statements which sometimes lead readers away from the true meaning of the central theory of study and toward other strange superstitious ideas like Min Yide's mysterious relationship with Vajryana practitioners and other marginalia.

The best current Chinese scholar on Neidan is Hu Fuchen and if you read Chinese you should read his book Neidan Shi San Jiang (Thirteen discourses on Neidan) which is the most famous modern academic text on the Neidan genre full stop.

After you have done this and have a basic idea of the main Neidan schools, their central figures, and what they taught it is time to move on to reading theory.

The best author on the subject of Neidan theory was Chen Yingning since he did a cross analysis of the entire Neidan genre, was a master of the art and also read the entirety of the Daoist canon and thus was able to differentiate the major types of practice.

It is because of Chen's work that there is a modern consensus about Neidan and it wasn't just his opinion. He went through each of the major schools and texts and meticulously recorded and explained their contents, so starting with his documents is a great idea.

If Chen's work in Chinese is a little hard to read you can start with his disciple Hu Haiya who wrote in a more modern vernacular.

The next step is to then compare what you have learned against the claims of Neidan teachers so you can find out whether or not what they are saying is true insofar as the Neidan genre is concerned.

For instance, you can compare a teacher's claim that practicing certain movements such as stretching and rotating the joints is a prerequisite for study against passages like this from Understanding Reality:

“making the body tired by bending and stretching is all false Dao, swallowing the breath and eating clouds is completely insane.”

Then you can understand that in the context of traditional Neidan, at least in the Southern School there is no Dao Yin.

You can compare this against similar things that Wang Chongyang, Li Daochun and most other famous Neidan masters said about the art and find out that indeed Dao Yin is not a traditional practice of Neidan.

Then you can compare it against the curriculum of the teacher and the language they use to describe the process.

For instance, a teacher might teach a self cultivation system which includes Dao Yin in the curriculum. This is not uncommon at all and in fact Min Yide included the Thirteen Rules Dao Yin in his magnum opus, but he never claimed it produced the result of the Golden Elixir.

However, if the teacher claims that Dao Yin is a prerequisite to Neidan or that Dao Yin is a kind of Neidan you will immediately know they are talking falsely.

Again, it is the discernment gained through learning that will allow you to understand this subtle difference in ontology.

There are so many areas of practice where this same principle of comparison applies (all of them really) but this does not mean that you should go out and grill a prospective teacher and annoy them with all kinds of intrusive questions.

A more Daoist way to do it would be just to have a look at what is on offer, dig around a bit on your own and try to understand the real situation without making a fuss.

We shouldn't want to tear down teachers of false Neidan, just avoid them if our goal is to make genuine achievements in the art.

Also, it is important to recognize that every teacher has limitations and flaws so if you study with someone and you find out later that they have made some mistakes, it doesn't mean you should abandon them, it just means they made some mistakes. Making mistakes is perfectly human and of course it is always nicer when people amend their mistakes (I try my best to do so when I discover I was wrong about theory), but some people are so deeply entrenched in their own systems that there is no way to change what they do without massively losing face, so even if they find out they are wrong they can't change. you'd be surprised how many people this probably applies to, teachers aren't stupid and sometimes they find out too late that what they've been promoting for years has nothing to do with mainstream practice.

This is why it is important to study with more than one teacher and have lots of Daoist friends, this way you don't have to suffer with receiving one incorrect transmission forever and you can always compare with and learn from your friends to improve your practice and study.

There are so many points in Neidan study where it is easy to screw up and completely ruin your practice. I think I can summarize the main problems into about twenty words which I'll leave at the end of the essay, but it is very important to have at least a qualified teacher and textual knowledge to help you verify that your practice is going in the right direction.

I wrote this article because I won't be around forever and one day when I've written enough I'll quit. Although I don't foresee that happening any time soon, I want to not only leave information about what Neidan is, but how you can research it by yourself and how we can preserve the tradition and get rid of all this crazy confusion that has been percolating for so long in our community.

Here are a few words about practice:

Focus on stillness, calm and softness: even if you feel strong sensations, always make sure to return as quickly as possible to stillness, calm and softness, this is the real way to encourage the fast production of True Yang from within the shell of true Yin.

The above is the number one mandate of Neidan, it is in every text, every tradition and it is the most important rule. Teachers who break this rule do not practice Neidan and there is no room for this type of practice in the Neidan tradition. This is not a subjective statement it is verifiable fact which you can decipher by reading any of the major classics of the genre and talking to people who have completed any part of the authenticpractice.

I can only speak generally since I don't know where your practice is right now so I can't give more specific advice, but following that point above will protect you from most of the mistakes you can make studying Internal Alchemy.