Historical and Comparative Studies
edited by Livia Kohn
The Huangting jing (Yellow Court Scripture) consists of a set of two texts that outline the body vision and key techniques of Daoist meditation. At the center of an extensive literature of both commentaries and exegeses compiled over several millennia, it has been mainly studied from a historical and textual perspective. Supplementing this, this volume explores not only important rhyme structures but also the nature of the body vision presented, the type and quality of the practices involved, and how they compare to modern scientific models as well as to later Chinese interpretations and adaptations, such as medical texts of the Tang and internal alchemy of the Song. It assembles nine presentations of accomplished scholars in the field, bringing the Huangting jing into the limelight and enhancing its in-depth understanding in the greater context of Daoist history and modern science.
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AVAILABLE 15 APRIL, 2025PRAISE
This collection of eye-opening essays follows the publication of Livia Kohn’s much-anticipated translation of The Yellow Court Scripture—a core Daoist source for meditations on the inner-gods—and its invaluable companion volume on textual precursors and successors. The contributors, a stellar collection of scholars and practitioners, elucidate key concepts pertaining to the source and its methods from a variety of vantage points and disciplinary perspectives, including those of modern science.
—Dominic Steavu, University of California, Santa Barbara
This volume contains some highly illuminating and engaging essays. Among early medieval Daoist scriptures, the inner and outer Yellow Court Scriptures are exceptional for how they have retained popularity and relevance right up to modern times. Readers are offered new insights on the textual history of these scriptures as well as detailed discussions on their teachings and how they have been (or can be) variously interpreted or applied. A very worthwhile publication!
—Stephen Eskildsen, International Christian University, Tokyo
THE AUTHOR
Livia Kohn, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University. The author or editor of close to sixty books (including the annual Journal of Daoist Studies), she spent ten years in Kyoto doing research. She now serves as the executive editor of Three Pines Press, runs international conferences and workshops, and guides study tours to Japan.
CONTENTS
1. Radosav Pušić, Body as a Path toward the Dao
2. Thomas E. Smith, Rhyme, Structure, and Meaning in the Huangting waijing jing
3. Stephan-Peter Bumbacher, Body Spirits in Early Daoism and the Huangting jing
4. Shih-shan Susan Huang & Livia Kohn, Internal Gods in Chinese Visual Culture
5. Johan Hausen, As Above, So Below: Astro-Deity Techniques and the Jade Maiden
6. Sheng Jiang, Visualization and Neurophysiology
7. Livia Kohn, The Lights Within: Body Gods and Biophotons
8. Daniel Spigelman, Religion, Medicine, and the Bifurcated Body in the Writingsof Hu Yin
9. Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein, The Book of the Yellow Court: A Lost Song Commentary of the 12th Century
INTRODUCTION
The Huangting jing 黃庭經 (Yellow Court Scripture) is a text in multiple formats, most importantly an outer and an inner version, the Waijing 外經and the Neijing 內經, both written in seven-character verses and revealed by cosmic deities. As outlined in the first book of this series (Kohn 2023), recent research tends to favor the understanding that the Waijing is older, linked with the Celestial Masters and dated to the late Eastern Han dynasty. The Neijing, on the other hand, goes back to the late 3rd century and is linked with Wei Huacun 魏華存 (251-334), the libationer of the Celestial Masters who turned revealing deity of the Highest Clarity (Shangqing 上清) school. Through her, the text made its way into its extensive corpus of texts although, as Isabelle Robinet points out, it never attained full canonical status on par with the high celestial scriptures (1993, 58).
Both texts, moreover, have the character jing 景 (lights) in the title, emphasizing the core nature of the works illuminating the radiant spirit powers and entities that reside in the human body and keep it not only alive but healthy, vibrant, and spiritually connected to the greater universe. Studies accordingly should explore the works in several different dimensions, from a historical and textual perspective as well as in terms of contents and the relevance of presented practices. To a certain degree, this has been accomplished, beginning with their date and place in Daoist history (e.g., Schipper 1975; Robinet 1993; Qing 1994), moving on to their literary structure, language, and philology (e.g., Yu 2001), and extending to their place among other, related works, both before and after their compilation (e.g., Kohn 2024). Still, there is much work left to be done, especially with regard to the nature of the body vision presented, the type and quality of the practices involved, and how they might compare or relate to later Chinese interpretations and adaptions, such as in medical texts of the Tang and the system of internal alchemy in the Song, and to modern scientific models.
This volume aims to provide a first step in this direction and explore the Huangting jing in a variety of different contexts. Thus, the first chapter by Radosav Pušić, “Body as a Path towards the Dao,” looks at the message of the texts in terms of energy and its pathways, meridians, channels, and vortexes. People in Huangting jing mode think of themselves as bodies, developing a broad picture of a more cosmic dimensions and understanding that the physical form is just a one modality in which numerous inner and outer energy pathways meet and fork. People as energetic beings exist solely through a constant flow of energy and as such connect to all things in the universe, both visible and invisible. They give and take the energy of other people, animals, plants, stones, earth, water, sun, moon, stars, deities, and more.
The physical body is only the visible side of various energies which shape living beings. Each inner organ receives and transforms a particular type of energy and, in this commingling, rejects all that is incompatible with the nature of its energy. Thus, various types of energy interweave and collide, repel and balance each other, both within and beyond the body. It is through their constant action that bodies emanate their own energetic power which spreads around them as an energy sheath.
Ancient teachings identify three levels, on which human beings function: physical, energetic, and spiritual. As the Huangting jing emphasizes, a free flow between these levels can be learned and achieved through practice, leading to a high level of conscious awareness and engaging vitality on all levels. The texts, and their later successor works of internal alchemy, show ways of getting closer to Dao, achieving longevity, and reaching for immortality.
Next, Thomas E. Smith examines “Rhyme, Structure, and Meaning in the Huangting waijing jing,” focusing on the importance of rhyme for understanding the structure and broader meaning of the text, as well as the necessity of working with, and combining elements of, its four main versions in order to arrive at a more accurate interpretation. He identifies twenty-eight rhyme blocks, analyzes several of these, and draws the following conclusions:
1) Each section, which may include more than one rhyme block, often ends with a positive, encouraging statement, as in the Neijing.
2) The often-consulted Tang-era commentators Wuchengzi and Liang-qiuzi, working from a perspective based on the Neijing, tended to freight the Waijing with meanings that it probably did not have before the Neijing’s composition.
3) The commentators rarely drew from exoteric sources, even in passages where an awareness of those sources is crucial for interpretation.
4) The Waijing itself, in its preserved form(s), has been so thoroughly compromised by commentators and copyists working from the later Neijing-informed perspective that several of its sections cannot be understood apart from the latter; this also explains some of the differences among the four main versions.
5) A meaningful interpretation of the text will seek to grasp its overall continuity and “flow,” beyond the meaning of individual words and lines.
Moving on from here, the next several contributions examine the meditation practices outlined in both versions of the Huangting jing. To begin, Stephan-Peter Bumbacher looks at “Body Spirits in Early Daoism and the Huangting jing,” placing the idea of body spirits presented in the text in a larger context. He first examines the various forms of meditation documented from the late Zhou dynasty to the Three Kingdoms period, then traces particularly the development from breath observation to visualization, speculating about possible Indian influence.
Next, he outlines the appearance of body spirits in Eastern Han apocrypha and various early Daoist scriptures, possibly influenced by the former. Although these spirits are a common subject, their treatment within the variant versions of the Huangting jing differs so that the Neijing presents the three deathbringers as well as the cloud and white spirit agents (hun and po), which do occur in the older Waijing. Another entirely new aspect in the Neijing is the physiological function of the body gods.
The following chapter, by Shih-shan Susan Huang and Livia Kohn, studies “Internal Gods in Chinese Visual Culture,” distinguishing five kinds of relevant spirits: the body gods proper who represent the organs and functions of the body; starry entities such as the sun, the moon, and the Dipper; bureaucratic figures that include guardians, heavenly clerics, and controllers of time (notably the Six Ding); personal emanations of pure spirit manifest mainly in the two spirit agents hun and po;and—last but not least— destructive or demonic aspects, notably the three deathbringers but also physical parasites often described as the nine worms.
After examining the nature and practice of visualization in the Chinese context, the authors look at each of the five kinds of spirits in turn, describing their looks and nature on the basis of medieval sources and illustrating them with the help of Song and later documents, all the while comparing their presentation with materials from Chinese medicine and Buddhism. They show how visual images have been standardized over the ages and to what degree they match descriptions found in early works. The appearance of similar visual materials in both Buddhist and medical sources, moreover, demonstrate the close interaction among the traditions, the links between health concerns, advanced spiritual techniques, and the quest for enlightenment or immortality that is typical for Huangting jing literature.
A third presentation that focuses on the nature of meditation practice in the Huangting jing is Johan Hausen’s “As Above, So Below: Astro-Deity Techniques and the Jade Maiden.” It elucidates methods of visualization of the five spirit animals in the inner organs as found in literature developed from the Highest Clarity tradition. Such tradition revolves around a meditative system on organ spirits laid out in the Huangting jing. The organization of the animals is familiar in traditional Chinese medicine as the directional five-phase correlations. However, there are striking differences between the well-known classification of the animals in Chinese medicine and that of the Huangting jing and its succeeding texts, with major consequences for the practical workings of Daoist meditative visualization techniques. This chapter focuses on the organ of the center, the spleen, and delves deep into the hypothesis on its pertaining deity.
From here, the focus of the book shifts toward more comparative perspectives. To begin, Sheng Jiang examines the relation of Huangting jing “Visualization and Neurophysiology,” noting how scientific experiments have shown that images of infants and other cute entities can stimulate the prefrontal cortex to produce positive emotional effects through the visual system. This closely relates to Highest Clarity methods of cultivating immortality, which focus on the development of certain forms of memory in the brain. Daoists pay attention to the world of the frontal lobe, centering their attention “between the two eyebrows,” and dream of achieving immortality through this.
Related neuroscience research shows that even simple meditation processes positively activate the early visual cortex and can prevent cortical degeneration. These data provide structural evidence for cortical plasticity related to meditation practice and suggest a link to structural changes in brain regions connected to sensory, cognitive, and emotional processing. This can also affect age-related degeneration and increase the gray matter in long-term practitioners. Looking at the relationship between human thinking and internal movements in the body, Jiang proposes a new scientific methodology, a micro-drive theory of life, in order to match explanations of the macro-drive commonly seen as the subjective will to drive immediately visible human actions.
Along similar lines Livia Kohn presents “The Lights Within: Body Gods and Biophotons.” She first notes that the two versions of the Huangting jing present ways of visualizing body gods and circulating energy to activate and maintain internal lights in the five organs, six viscera, and other bodily functions. The methods serve to create a strong presence of light energy in the body, preventing it from leaking or exiting, yet maintaining it in a constant flow and continuous interchange. The texts claim that this enhances health, increases longevity, and opens the road to immortality.
Similar goals today are closely associated with the correct activation of so-called biophotons, units of light in the ultraviolet and low visible light range that are produced by biological systems. Kohn argues that Daoist cultivation of radiant internal energies and body gods as described in the Huangting jing is an early form of biophoton activation.
Moving on to readings of the Huangting jing in later periods of Chinese history, Daniel Spigelman, in his “Religion, Medicine, and the Bifurcated Body in the Writings of Hu Yin,” introduces the idea of the bifurcated body, that is, how the left and right hemispheres of the body were seen in ancient China. He does so through an analysis of the perspective of the Huangting neijing wuzang liufu buxietu 黃庭內景 五臟六腑補瀉圖 (Diagrams for the Tonification and Drainage of the Five Organs and Six Viscera from the Inner Landscape of the Yellow Court) by the Tang dynasty priestess Hu Yin 胡愔 (fl. 848). He outlines similarities between the basic anatomy of Daoism and the practice of medicine, thereby highlighting the common philosophical basis both these supposedly disparate modes of practice operate from, drawing into question the idea of a fused tradition.
Concluding the collection is a reprint of “The Book of the Yellow Court: A Lost Song Commentary of the 12th Century” by Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein, originally published in 2004. Here she translates and annotates the anonymous Huangting pian 黃庭篇 (Section on the Yellow Court), contained in the collection Daoshu 道樞 (Pivot of the Way, dat. 1151) by the scholar-official Zeng Zao 曾慥 (d. 1155). She points out that the ancient Huangting jing served mainly to keep the pantheon of internal gods active to protect the body from demons and disease. In contrast, this work, written under the auspices of internal alchemy during the reign of Emperor Huizong (1100-1125), leaves out virtually all allusion to the inner gods and sees mainly connections to medical phenomena, often drawing on relevant works of this period and utilizing the acupuncture text Nanjing 難經 (Classic of Difficult Issues).
The text is primarily an explanation of the circulation of breath and blood through the body, demonstrating the use of breathing techniques to unblock extraordinary channels and facilitate their unimpeded passage. The procedures are explained using hermetic language borrowed from internal alchemy texts of the Zhong-Lü system, a popular movement at the time. However, the writer does not go beyond the second stage described in these texts: any mention of the final procedures of transfiguration, amply outlined in the Zhong-Lü texts, remains strangely absent from this.
References
Huang, Shih-shan Susan. 2012. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Chinese Studies.
Qing Xitai 卿希泰. 1994. Zhongguo daojiao 中國道教, vol. 2. Shanghai: Tongfang chuban chongxin.
Robinet, Isabelle, 1993. Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity. Translated by Norman Girardot and Julian Pas. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Schipper, Kristofer M. 1975. Concordance du Houang-t’ing king. Paris: Publications de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient.
- Yu Wanli 虞萬里. 2001. “Huangting jing yongyun shidai xinkao” 黃庭經用韻時代新考. Shengyun luncong 聲韻論叢10:209-41.