Thursday, July 26, 2018

Part 3: Needham and the Double Reversal

Needham quotes Discourse on the Dragon and the Tiger, or Lead and Mercury by Su Tung-pho (1100):

Dragon is mercury is semen and blood, issues from the kidney and stored in the liver and is Earth. (Kan). Tiger is lead is Qi and bodily strength. Lead issues from the Mind and via the lungs.

Fascinating - not the usual definitions! That's Waley's translation. Arthur Waley in the 1920s-30s.

And so the "gold juice" aka Metallous Fluid was thought to be prepared by the Lungs aka metal-water. fascinating.



And here we have the corroboration we are looking for:


Saliva - as Yuan Qi!

And in contrast the "yuan qi" degenerates into breathing while the Yuan Shen degenerates into thinking and yuan jing degenerates into....

Needham of course doesn't "believe" in these abilities and thinks the Taoists were ignorant. haha. But nevertheless he takes his job of trying to understand the Taoist on their OWN terms seriously! He translates Tan T'ien as Tan meaning Red as in Fire and therefore animal heat production.

Below the Heart (middle Tan t'ien) is translated as "metallous gateway" or "crimson palace."

Once again! The Yuan Qi is the "white" from the black - the white being the sweet dew saliva - the White Tiger.

 So that would be the external elixir, as it's called in Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality.

The lead=water=pliable=black while it belongs to Metal which is white as the silver (mercury).
The yang qi heats what is above - ....


O.K. NOW we have officially connected the same earlier blogpost I referred to - Needham makes the same connection!

In the generative (sheng ) cycle of the Five Phases Fire produces Earth and Water produces Wood. The poem speaks of reversing this cycle, so that Fire becomes Wood and Water becomes Metal. By this process the “Fire Dragon” and the “Water Tiger” become the “Green Dragon” and the “White Tiger” employed (among other places) in the Four Heraldic Creatures visualization (I. 24): they move from the position of Fire-Red to Wood-Green and Water-Black to Metal-White respectively.
 The White Tiger is the Yin within the belly of the Li - after the double reversal as yuan qi - white tiger as Fiery Lead.

In the place where the green dragon descends, the white tiger coils
In other words when green dragon descends, the water-black tiger turns into white tiger.
But then in Double Reversal down the front:
Tiger-metal produces water.

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