The Three Treasures

One Name, Two Triads

First attested

8th centuryThe dateline dates the alchemical triad, because that is what the claim is about: jing, qi and shen as the three treasures is an internal-alchemy usage, and Pregadio dates the earliest surviving neidan texts to about the eighth century. The mature lineages then divide — the Southern to Zhang Boduan, who died in 1082, under the Song, and the Northern to Wang Chongyang (1113–1170), whose Quanzhen order arose under the Jin. Which text first attached the word sanbao to jing, qi and shen I could not establish; the dateline therefore rests on the tradition, not on a first use of the label. The Daodejing's side is older and separate. The phrase sanbao in chapter 67 has its earliest surviving witness in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, copied by the early second century BCE, where the De section stands first and the chapter falls as number 32; they read “I constantly have three treasures”. Henricks translated the silk manuscripts in 1989. Nothing from chapters 67–81 appears in the Guodian bamboo slips of about 300 BCE, which is the ground of Franklin Perkins's argument in T'oung Pao in 2014 that the final fifteen chapters are a separate stratum, resting on an anthropomorphic heaven and showing no concern with internal cultivation.

Claimed

6th century BCEasserted by Modern qigong, Chinese-medicine and wellness writing, which presents jing, qi and shen as “the Three Treasures of Taoism” and traces them to Laozi and the Daodejing, conventionally placed in the sixth century BCE. The Daodejing supplies the phrase and none of the content; the alchemical content belongs to internal alchemy from roughly the eighth century CE onward, and to the Song lineages from the eleventh.

The claim runs about 1.4 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The three essential virtues of Daoism: compassion, simplicity, and humility, as taught in the Daodejing.

Chapter 67 of the Daodejing names them — 我有三寶，持而保之 — I have three treasures, which I hold and keep: the first compassion, the second frugality, the third not daring to be first in the world. No body, no breath, no alchemy. Franklin Perkins argued in 2014 that chapters 67–81, absent from the Guodian slips of about 300 BCE, are the stratum of the Laozi least interested in self-cultivation. The triad modern qigong calls the three treasures is another thing: jing, qi and shen, the working material of internal alchemy, refined by stages into emptiness, whose Southern Lineage charter is Zhang Boduan's Wuzhen pian of 1075. Fabrizio Pregadio's neidan dictionary shows the label floating further — within alchemy alone it also names the three cinnabar fields and, in the Cantong qi, the ears, eyes and mouth.