early buddhism in china: daoist reactions 221
(Scripture of the Yellow Court, Outer View). The relevant sentence
reads:^101 “breathe in and out and through the thatched cottage; thus
[the breath] enters the cinnabar eld” (hu xi lu jian ru dan tian
). Or it refers to the meditating Daoists themselves who ought to
visualise their own passing through the cinnabar eld in order to meet
there those body gods that occupy it as their residence. According to the
Laozi zhong jing, this would be no other than the (divinised) Confucius:
“its spiritual being is called Kong, its rst name is Qiu, and its style is
Zhongni. According to tradition, this spiritual being is a teacher” (shen
xing Kong ming Qiu, zi Zhongni, zhuan zhi wei shi ye , ,
).^102 As will be shown shortly, one could meet the gods
residing in one’s own body by visualising them and then asking them,
for example, for help. In any case, the sentence in question alludes to
visualisation as a meditation technique.
Similarly, cognate to the Wangzi Qiao stele the already mentioned Laozi
ming of 165 AD contains the sentence “[Laozi] visualised the cinnabar
eld” ([Laozi] cunxiang dan tian [ ] ).^103 This is said about
the sage when he still was a mortal being and practiced meditation in
order to become an immortal: he visualised the cinnabar eld as well
as the “purple chamber of grand unity” in his head and, when this
dao was accomplished and his body was transformed, he—like a cicada
that leaves behind its exuvias—left the world.^104
The recently discovered stele Fei Zhi bei , dated 169 AD and
erected to commemorate a local cult dedicated to Master Fei Bei in
the area of Anle, east of the Liang county of Henan (the village where
this stele was found in July 1991 in a Han dynasty tomb is now called
Caizhuangcun and located east of Luoyang), refers to the
same form of meditation.^105 Witness its sentence “[Xu] You’s son Jian,
styled Xiaochang, [while his] heart was kind and [his] natural disposi-
tion was lial, constantly visualised [his body-] gods” ([Xu] You zinan
Jian, zi Xiaochang, xin ci xing xiao, chang sixiang shenling [ ] ,
, , ).^106 Whether shenling indeed means the
gods residing within You’s body or in a more neutral way may hint at
(^101) Schipper 1975, p. 1*.
(^102) Laozi zhong jing 1.13a.
(^103) Li shi 3.1a–4a, present sentence on p. 2a; Seidel 1969, pp. 45–50, 121–128.
(^104) Loc. cit.
(^105) Schipper 1997.
(^106) Schipper 1997, p. 241.