East Asian Traditions | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Book · East Asian Traditions · 1371

The Kojiki

Old Book, Late Scripture

Japan's oldest chronicle, and scripture only since the 1790s — a status conferred, not inherited.

SignificanceIt reads the land itself as descended: the islands are born, the kami generate the imperial line, and there is no gap between geography, divinity and rule. That continuity is the doctrine, which is why the text could be turned into scripture when a state needed one.

The FindingThe oldest copy of the Kojiki in existence is a monk's transcription of 1371–72; the Nihon Shoki, not the Kojiki, was the chronicle the Heian court lectured on, and the Kojiki's standing as scripture dates from Motoori Norinaga's commentary of 1798, not from 712.

Read this entry

Book · around 300 BCE

The Daodejing

A Book Older Than Its Title

A discipline of restraint — water, the uncarved block, doing less — open enough to mirror its reader.

SignificanceIts images all argue one thing: water wears away rock by yielding, the uncarved block is worth more than anything carved from it, the usefulness of a pot is the emptiness inside it. Power in this book belongs to whatever has not yet been made definite.

The FindingThe Daodejing's title, its Dao-before-De order and its eighty-one chapters are Han-era and later conventions — the earliest near-complete copies, buried by 168 BCE at Mawangdui, put De first, and the earliest witness of all, Guodian around 300 BCE, holds only about two-fifths of the text.

Read this entry

Practice · 8th century

Neidan

The Furnace Is the Body

Chinese internal alchemy: the elixir compounded inside the body, in the borrowed language of the laboratory.

What it isIt takes the whole vocabulary of the outer laboratory — furnace, crucible, cinnabar, firing times — and relocates it in the body. The elixir is compounded from jing, qi and shen, refined upward and returned to emptiness. Nothing is ingested; the adept is the apparatus.

The FindingThe story that elixir deaths drove Chinese alchemy indoors is the account of waidan's own specialists, and Fabrizio Pregadio rejects it — it would have alchemists needing several centuries to notice their ingredients were fatal — tracing neidan instead to Daoist meditation on the inner gods.

Read this entry