Gymnastics 145
were two groups of souls, three upper ones (hun) and seven lower ones
(po), and if there were differences of opinion about what became of
them in the other world, it was agreed that they separated at death. In
life as in death, these multiple souls were rather ill-defined and vague;
after death, when the dim little troop of spirits had dispersed, how
could they possibly be re-assembled into a unity? The body, on the
contrary, was a unity, and served as a home for these as well as other
spirits. Thus, it was only by the perpetuation of the body, in some form
or other, that one could conceive of a continuation of the living person-
ality as a whole.^20This is not to say that the body that was to enjoy eternal bliss was the one with
which we were endowed at birth. Instead, practitioners endeavored to create
a new body within the body. They fashioned an internal luminous embryo
that was to be liberated from the confinements of the external body like a ci-
cada breaking out of its cocoon. The immortal inner body was much more
refined than the external one. It was, as it were, a purified version of the lat-
ter. Still, as “spiritual” as it might have been, the immortal embryo was largely
constructed from the physiological building blocks of the external body. Bi-
ological rejuvenation was therefore a precondition for Daoist self-cultivation:
“For most medieval Daoists aspiring to immortality,” writes Anna Seidel,
“there was no mystical way around some kind of physical preservation or res-
toration of the body.”^21
Diverse methods existed for the preservation of the body. The Daoists
pioneered alchemical laboratory research on substances that might increase
vitality. Ge Hong (283–343) considered calisthenics an inferior method, be-
lieving that cinnabar (dan) could be manipulated into an elixir. Daoyin could
prolong one’s years, he noted, but unlike the elixir it could not prevent death.
Most Daoist mystics, however, did recommend calisthenic training at the
very least as a preparatory stage for more elaborate alchemical and medita-
tive methods.^22 In many Daoist schools the typical practice consisted of “dual
cultivation,” combining physiological exercises with techniques of mental
concentration. In Daoist “inner alchemy” (neidan) the adept joins elaborate
meditations with methods of controlling the internal flow of bodily sub-
stances: breath, saliva, and semen, concocting within his own body an inner
elixir. As Joseph Needham has noted, the process was not purely mental, for
it had a concrete physiological aspect. “It was born upon us,” he writes, “that
we were face to face with a physiological (indeed at bottom a biochemical)
elixir, to be prepared by physiological, not chemical, methods, out of physio-
logical constituents already in the body.”^23
One of the earliest texts to combine physiological training with medita-
tion was the Scripture of the Yellow Court (Huangting jing) (ca. third century CE),
which, thirteen hundred years after its compilation, influenced the late impe-
rial martial arts. (Recall that the probable founder of Taiji Quan, Chen