146 Fist Fighting and Self-Cultivation
Wangting, alluded to it as a source of inspiration.) The Scripture of the Yellow
Court outlines techniques of breath circulation that are coupled with visualiza-
tion of the body’s interior divinities. By nourishing his corporal deities the
adept is able to produce within himself a divine embryo that ascends into im-
mortality. The scripture’s language is esoteric, describing the physiological cir-
culation of bodily fluids as a celestial journey through the heavenly palaces of
the body’s internal divinities. The following brief excerpts (in Paul Kroll’s
translation) describe the swallowing of saliva (“numinous liquor”) followed by
meditation on a spleen goddess (“the person within the yellow court”):
The mouth is the Jade Pool, the Officer of Greatest Accord.
Rinse with and gulp down the numinous liquor—calamities will not
encroach;
One’s body will engender a lighted florescence, breath redolent as orchid;
One turns back, extinguishes the hundred malignities—one’s features
refined in jade.
With practice and attention, cultivate this, climbing to the Palace of
Ample Cold [where the moon is bathed].
...
The person within the yellow court wears a polychrome-damask jacket.
A volant skirt of purple flowering, in gossamer of cloudy vapors.
Vermilion and azure, with green withes, numinous boughs of halcyon
blue.^24Even as they suffused daoyin gymnastics with a rich mystical language, Daoist
practitioners continued to stress the exercises’ therapeutic value. Clapping
the teeth (kouchi), for example, figures in Daoist meditation as a method for
summoning the body’s interior divinities. The practice can be traced back to
Western Han medical literature, which considered it useful for the preven-
tion of tooth decay. Daoist authors did not doubt the method’s hygienic effi-
cacy, they merely supplemented it with a spiritual one—religion joined
medicine rather than replacing it.^25
In addition to refining their individual qi, some Daoists sought to increase
their vitality by absorbing cosmic qi. Chinese cosmology recognized several
manifestations of the primordial qi: A female form (yin) and a male form
(yang), as well as five energetic configurations that were known as the “five ele-
ments” (wuxing): water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. In order to inhale the fe-
male and male energy one faced the moon and the sun respectively. Gazing at
the five directions, he or she was similarly blessed with the power of wood
(east), metal (west), fire (south), water (north), and earth (center). Irradiation
by the heavenly bodies combined physiological, meditative, and ritual proce-
dures. Controlling their breathing and swallowing their saliva, practitioners
exposed their bodies to the sun’s rays. They meditated on the colors produced
on their closed retinas, and they directed the absorbed energies into their in-