The Secret of the Golden Flower: Taoist Yoga as Alchemy

As a young college student, in the early 1970s, I purchased The Secret of the Golden Flower (“A Harvest Book”, 1962 edition) and to this day can actually remember reading and considering the basic meditation practice described in that text.  This is the version that was translated and “explained” by Richard Wilhelm and which includes an extensive section of commentary by Carl G. Jung.  For more background material on this text, read the article preceding this one.

Key to this practice seem to be two areas of focus: the “third eye” region, as a “site” (“…the square inch field of the square foot house [i.e. face] [where] life can be regulated”) representing the core of our being and awareness, and the movement of subtle life or spirit energy.

This meditation practice involves (a) steady focusing on the third eye region, calming agitated awareness and freeing oneself from countless distractions, while (b) feeling and visualizing the circular flow of energy in one’s body.  The circulation of energy, when cultivated to reverse it’s normal outward direction, is meant to “crystallize” an awakened spiritual “body”.  So, this practice of reversing the normal flow of energy and light entails the energy descending down the frontal line of the body (with each exhalation) and ascending up the spinal line (with each inhalation).

John Mann and Lar Short in their 1990 book The Body of Light describe the “Taoist model of the subtle body” (page 96):

The basic elements in the Taoist spiritual anatomy, as in the Hindu and Buddhist, are the energy centers and the channels that connect them.  The most important of these are located in the core, up the back and down the front of the midline of the body.  The central core channels correspond to those in the tantric Buddhist model used for transforming subtle energies into spiritual energies.  The channel in the spine corresponds to the Hindu model.  The channel along the front of the body, in combination with the one in the back, constitutes the Microcosmic Orbit, which forms an inner system for digesting and circulating energies of various types.

So, they explain, the Taoist Yoga system entails three “bodies”: physical, energy, and spirit bodies.  And, while “Hinduism tends to assume the [already in] existence of these bodies” Mann and Short report (page 100) that with Taoist (and also Buddhist) yoga practices an alchemical-like process is at work, where the energy and spirit bodies are developed only by “arduous inner work”.