East Asia · Death & the Afterlife
Symbol · The Sixty-Four Hexagrams
Enthusiasm
Thunder Out of Earth
Stored energy breaks free and carries people of their own accord — until the mood outlasts its moment.
What it meansThunder bursting out of the earth, sound that was stored and is now released. The ancient kings answered it with music and with honours to the dead. Enthusiasm is treated as a natural force that needs a form, or it discharges anywhere.
Symbol · The Sixty-Four Hexagrams
Small Preponderance
The Bird Flying Low
Not well to strive upward, well to remain below: exactness in small things, ruin in great ones.
What it meansThunder on the mountain, loud and local, carrying no distance. The counsel is a list of small excesses that are safe: more reverence in conduct, more grief in mourning, more thrift in spending. Where only small things can be done, the tradition says do them slightly too much.
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.