Taoism: The Landscape of a Body

Feb. 18, 2013

The industrialization of China in the past century has the seen the infusion of Western medicine into a predominantly traditional Chinese medical setting. However, the invasive practices of Western medicine generally tends to favor surgery and drug use to treat problematic symptoms, while traditional Chinese medicine prefers to focus on imbalances throughout the body in a more holistic fashion. This approach in traditional Chinese medicine tends to treat all of the bodily systems, as opposed to concentrating solely on individual ailments. Another approach to this is to view the body as Chinese Taoist do; as an intricate piece of landscape, encompassing natural wonders alongside complex social entities[1]. This distinction between traditional Chinese medicine and Taoist’s, as discussed by author Kristopher Schipper in his book “The Taoist Body”, means “the emphasis on country reflects the interdependence of the human being and his environment, as well as Taoism’s fundamental teaching that favors the interior over the exterior[2].” To illustrate this difference and focus on the body as a working landscape, Taoist illustrated numerous scrolls in which they depict the inner workings of alchemy and its uses to “achieve individual spiritual perfection[3].”

Alchemy plays an important role in Taoism in the fact that it is the means in which one can purify the spirit and body with the hopes that the ingestion of various concoctions, or alchemical elixirs, will achieve immortality[4]. Through this digestion of elixirs, Inner alchemy would combine mediation and breath control with the visualization of the elixir in the inner landscape of one’s own body. Through this, the inner energies of the body, commonly referred to as qi, would transform the practitioner into a “divine, embryonic immortal[5].” The goal of this inner alchemical process would then be to combine the different energies, such as ying and yang, to purify them in a symbolic furnace within the body[6]. As seen in the different artworks of Taoism, the central theme to this practice was that the goal of a Taoist transcendent was precisely immortality, but that of spiritual “perfection and union with the Tao[7].”

In the seventeenth century hand scroll Illustrations of the Sealed Verification of the Golden Elixir of the Reverted Cinnabar, the artists focus on the inner alchemy from beginning to end. The study of this scroll not only shows the Taoist interpretation of the outer alchemy workings, but also that of the inner[8]. The scroll depicts images that are natural and spiritual in nature, showing the connectedness between the human body and the natural world. Many of the figures must be interpreted to understand their meanings, such as an image of a dragon and tiger seen with a magical pearl over the ocean. To many this would seem a beautiful, somewhat odd, picture. However, in terms of Taoism it represents the refinement of reunification during the alchemy process[9]. These envisions of how alchemy would unfold within the body helped bring the practitioner and consumer closer to spiritual oneness, and possibly immortality[10].

Through the use and practice of alchemy, Taoist medical practitioners were able to use the fundamentals of traditional Chinese medicine, and incorporate them into a larger more spiritual context. To help envision this, traditional Taoist recorded their practices through the intricate creations of illustrated hand scrolls. While Alchemy is widely debated, and largely outdated, its uses in medicine helped patients understand their body in a more cosmological way, feeling connected to the world around them.

References

Little, Stephen. Taoism and the Arts of China. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000.

Schipper, Kristopher. The Taoist Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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[1] Kristopher Schipper, The Taoist Body, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 100-102.

[2] Schipper, 101.

[3] Stephen Little, Taoism and the Arts of China, (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), 337-338.

[4] Stephen Little, 337.

[5] Stephen Little, 337.

[6] Stephen Little, 337.

[7] Stephen Little, 337.

[8] Stephen Little, 345.

[9] Stephen Little, 345.

[10] Kristopher Schipper, 100-103