The complete path of internal alchemy in one overview, from foundation to emptiness
Just sharing a summary chapter from my book as I think it could be very helpful for beginners to have the full path laid out without modern lineage influence or personal claims getting in the way. It's what the classics say.
The chapters before this one walked the path stage by stage, with their sources, their cautions and their detail. This chapter does something simpler and, for a beginner, more useful. It sets the whole process down in one place, plainly, so that the shape of it can be held in the mind at once. The literature is heavy with names, and a newcomer can read for a long time without ever seeing the simple spine that all the names hang on. Here is that spine.
Stripped to its bones, the path is one movement repeated four times: something is gathered, refined, and handed up to a higher centre of the body, growing purer and more yang at every step, until nothing coarse is left and what remains is returned to its source. The centre of the work rises through the body as it goes, from the lower belly and remaining here for a while, to the chest, to the head, and finally beyond the body altogether. What is being refined changes its name at each stage, and that is the source of most of the confusion, but the thing itself is a single current being carried home. Read the four stages below with that one picture in mind and the names will fall into place.
A word first on the spans of time the texts attach to each stage, the hundred days, the ten months, the three years, the nine years. None of these is a literal count. Each is an old indicative figure for how long that labour tends to take and what its character is, and the texts themselves say as much. Treat them as descriptions of weight, not of calendar.
Stage One: building the foundation
The first stage is called building the foundation, zhuji 築基, and often the hundred days of building the foundation, bai ri zhu ji 百日築基. No medicine is gathered yet in the strict alchemical sense, and no formal alchemical conversion has begun. This stage repairs the vessel so that the real work can begin, because an ordinary adult body has leaked and scattered too much of its vitality to refine anything at all. The aim is to restore the body to fullness: essence full, qi abundant, spirit bright, what the tradition names jing zu qi man shen wang 精足氣滿神旺.
Where it happens is the whole body, with the lower dantian, the field below the navel, gradually built up and filled as the reservoir everything later will draw on. How it is done is the broadest of any stage: many different methods, standing and sitting, moving and still, all aimed at restoring vitality and conserving what is normally lost. This is where conditioning the body, the regulation of posture, breath and mind, and the first turning of the small orbit belong. The yin and yang work here is recovery rather than transformation: the constant downward and outward leakage of the ordinary body is reversed, and what was being lost is kept and gathered. The stage is complete when the body is full again and the foundation is firm enough to bear what follows, the yang stirring of its own accord as the sign that it is ready.
Stage Two: refining essence into qi
The second stage, refining essence into qi, lianjing huaqi 煉精化氣, is where the alchemy proper begins and where the first medicine is made. The restored essence of the foundation is refined into qi and gathered into a tangible point. The first product is the lesser medicine, xiao yao 小藥, also called the small medicine, caught at the moment the tradition calls the living midnight, huo zi shi 活子時. As the work continues this is matured into the greater medicine, da yao 大藥. Both the lesser and the greater medicine form and are gathered in the lower dantian, which now serves as the furnace of the work.
Where it happens, then, is the lower dantian and the pathways of the orbits. How it is done shifts in character from the first stage: as the classics describe it, there are far fewer moving forms, and the emphasis falls on filling and refining the dantian and on circulating qi through the orbits, driven mostly by the pressure built in the dantian itself rather than by outward movement. This is the home of fire timing, of the extraction the texts call taking from water to fill fire, qu kan tian li 取坎填離, and of the gathering of the medicine. The yin falling away begins here in earnest: the true yang hidden inside water, inside the kidneys and the essence, is drawn out and used to restore the yang that the ordinary fire of the heart has lost, the broken halves moving back toward wholeness. The stage closes with recognised signs, the three appearances of the yang light, yang guang san xian 陽光三現, and the trembling of the six senses, after which the fire is stopped and the great medicine is complete.
Stage Three: refining qi into spirit
The third stage, refining qi into spirit, lianqi huashen 煉氣化神, takes the greater medicine and raises it to a higher seat, where it is joined with the original spirit to form an embryo. This is the stage of the holy embryo, sheng tai 聖胎, also called the spirit embryo: the union of the great medicine and the original spirit, conceived and then nurtured to fullness over the indicative span called the ten months, shi yue 十月.
Where it happens is the middle dantian, the chamber in the chest the texts name the yellow court, huang ting 黃庭, or the crimson palace, jiang gong 絳宮. The great medicine is carried up from the lower field to this middle one, where the embryo forms and is nurtured; the lower dantian remains below as the furnace, and qi suffuses the space between the two fields during the nurturing. How it is done is mostly sitting meditation, with the attention resting on the middle and lower dantian, through quiet practices of warm nurturing and embryonic breathing rather than any vigorous method; deliberate effort gives way here to a more passive tending. The yin continues to fall away: the embryo is refined toward pure yang, and the yin part of the soul, the yin po 陰魄, is steadily transformed. The stage completes when the ten months are full, the embryo round and whole, and the yin exhausted enough that a yang spirit can appear.
Stage Four: refining spirit into emptiness
The fourth and final stage, refining spirit into emptiness, lianshen huanxu 煉神還虛, brings the matured spirit to the summit of the body, lets it emerge, rears it, and then returns it to the emptiness from which everything came. The product here is the yang spirit, yang shen 陽神: the completed spirit, which is raised to the head, brought forth from the crown as what the texts call a body outside the body, and reared over the indicative three years until it is stable. After this the spirit is returned to emptiness across the long stillness named the nine years of facing the wall, and the path culminates in the merging with the Dao described in the previous chapter.
Where it happens is the upper dantian, the niwan 泥丸, deep in the head, and at the last beyond the body altogether. This is where the three flowers gather at the crown and the five qi return to the origin. How it is done is sitting, with the attention raised to the upper dantian, in the purest non-doing of the whole path, the deep stillness the old texts call sitting in forgetfulness. Here the last of the yin falls away. With the yin of the heart and spirit finally stripped, the practitioner becomes pure yang, chun yang 純陽, yin wholly flaked away and yang wholly whole, which is exactly what the gathering of the three flowers at the crown signifies: the pure yang drawn out of essence, qi and spirit, assembled at the summit with nothing impure left below.
The thread that runs through all of it
Three things run unbroken through the four stages, and holding them is worth more than memorising any list of names.
The first is that the centre of the work rises through the body. It is built in the lower dantian, the medicine is made in the lower dantian, the embryo is formed in the middle dantian, the spirit is matured in the upper dantian, and at the end it passes beyond the body. The seat of the work climbs from belly to chest to head to emptiness, and each stage hands its finished product up to the next height.
The second is that something is produced and renamed at each step, and the renaming is not the tradition being obscure for its own sake but the same current taking a new form as it is refined. In order: the foundation is restored, then the lesser medicine and the greater medicine are gathered in the lower belly, then the holy embryo is formed in the chest, then the yang spirit is brought forth from the head. Foundation, medicine, embryo, spirit: four names for four states of one refining thing.
The third is that yin falls away at every stage until only yang remains. This is the engine beneath the whole process. The ordinary person is a mixture of yang and the acquired yin that has crept in since birth, and the entire path is the patient separating out and discarding of that yin and the recovery of the original yang. Essence is refined and its yin let go, then qi, then spirit, each conversion shedding a yin part and raising a pure yang part, until at the end the practitioner is wholly yang. The classical image for this is precise: each of the three treasures has a yin and a yang aspect, and the three conversions strip away the yin of water, then of metal, then of fire, raising the three pure yang that gather as the three flowers at the crown. The path begins with a body that has been leaking its yang and ends with one that has become nothing but yang, returned to the source.
Everything else in the literature, every furnace and firing time and trigram and alias, is detail hung on these three simple facts. A beginner who keeps them in view can read the densest of the old texts without losing the thread.