224 stephan peter bumbacher
of black and yellow ve-colour jewels. She is nine-tenths of an inch high.
Visualise her also as being three inches high. She dwells in the palace of
Grand Simplicity, she feeds the son of the True Person with Cinnabar.
He grows little by little, so as to becoming as big as your own body. If
you can preserve him in meditation (cun ), then speak with him. Then he
will call you to go up to visit the Lord of the dao. The Lord of the dao
is the One. He rides a chariot of cloudy mist [covered with] pearls and
jade, and [a team of ] horses of [the heaven of] the Nine Extremes. At
times he rides [a team of ] six dragons in order to drive to the earth.
[When] you long visualise (si ) him on the eight nodal days and on the
rst and fteenth day of each month, when the sun sets and at midnight,
utter the invocation, saying:
“Heavenly Spirit of Regulating Glory, [ I ], the True Person Wang Jia^116
wish to obtain a long life. [ You], the One of Utmost Mystery, guard my
body. Noble lord of the Five Viscera, I wish lasting peace.”^117From these pieces of epigraphical and textual evidence we can conclude
that from the year 165 AD onwards at the latest, in various Daoist
circles from Sichuan to Meng (commandery of Liang, Henan) up to
Luoyang, visualisation was practiced as a new form of meditation.
Visualisation meant mentally contemplating a divinity (or its dwelling
place) within one’s own body and thus keeping it there in order to pro t
from its protective power. Those who observed this practice were thus
no longer concentrating on total unity with the cosmos as in the early
form of meditation.
This new type of meditation appeared in China all of a sudden, not
being the result of the evolution of any indigenous tradition. Although
it goes without saying that independent innovations in religious beliefs
do often occur—as far as visualisation is concerned, the earliest Daoist
testimonies just discussed date from a time when Buddhist texts describ-
ing precisely this form of meditation became available in Chinese
translations. To these Buddhist examples we now have to turn.
In India, mental vision or visualisation predates Mahyna Bud-
dhism. Stephan Beyer has presented quotations from the Bhagavadg t,
a text whose composition is dated from the fourth to the third century
BC,^118 that give evidence of such a contemplative activity, the icono-
(^116) At several places, the adept calls himself by this name when invoking the gods.
Professor Jao Tsung-i, of Hong Kong Chinese University, sees in this usage a possible
allusion to the interregnum of Wang Mang (private communication). 117
Laozi zhong jing 1.3a–4a, also cf. Schipper 1995, pp. 120f.
(^118) Mylius 1988, p. 115.