The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life

Product Information

a b DeBernardi, Jean (2020-12-17). " "Ascend to Heaven and Stand on a Cloud." Daoist Teaching and Practice at Penang's Taishang Laojun Temple". In Clart, Philip; Crowe, Paul (eds.). The People and the Dao: New Studies in Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer. Routledge. ISBN 9781000156560. And here was Jung suggesting that this whole process could and possibly should be understood psychologically and symbolically! God damn-it that was irritating!

The more the being is sunk in these states, the more entangled in them it becomes, till finally it disappears from the plane of existence, of whatever nature that may have been, and then by entering a new womb begins a new existence formed out of its supply of images and memories. A positive result is the creation of new beings in which life continues, while the original being externalizes itself and “ultimately is made by things into a thing”. At the time I was studying martial arts, specifically aikido and Chinese boxing [5], with Dr John Williams. Dr Williams was the third of three masters I studied under over a period of fifteen years. Speaking frankly, I was a fanatic. My training regimen at the time (and understand I was not a professional athlete) was a minimum of two to three hours a day. Viewed objectively as a physical organism, which in all its parts is also a small universe (Hsiao T’ien Ti) man is one of the “ten thousand things.” There are any number of teachings in Chan, Zen, and Daoism that illustrate all or part of the Golden Flowerteachings. A well-known Zen adage advises: “If you can awaken the real one within, you will know that entering one state and leaving another, is like staying at an inn.”The whole body feels strong and firm so that it fears neither storm nor frost. Things by which other men are displeased, when I meet them, cannot cloud the brightness of the seed of the spirit. Yellow gold fills the house; the steps are white jade. Red blood becomes milk. The fragile body of the flesh is sheer gold and diamonds. That is the sign that the Golden Flower is crystallised. (SGF, p. 54-55) [10].

Pioneering modern translator Thomas Cleary also points out the problems with Wilhelm’s Golden Flower, both with the authenticity of the source document, as well as with basic Chinese grammar and the descriptions of processes. He concludes that Wilhelm’s watershed translation is unreliable, but he does it with understanding and respect. Above all, he credits Wilhelm with selecting the text in the first placefrom among the superabundance of Chinese spiritual texts unknown to the West. Who knows when this amazing spiritual masterpiece wouldotherwisehave emerged in the world? Cleary writes that he would not have translated it anew save for the fact that it already existed and was known. He appreciates the need to adapt a foreign spiritual teaching to another culture, but insists that process cannot include insufficient knowledge of Chinese and, more importantly, cannot misrepresent the processes described as something altogether different. Cleary took particular issue with Wilhelm’s term “circulating the light,” when it should read“turning the light around.” My physiology changed. My blood pressure dropped. I slept through the night. I was no longer hungry all the time. I started eating better. I was motivated to be more physically active. There is possibly some hyperbole in the statement. I trained in various styles of martial arts with a strong focus on the development and circulation of chi or “Qi” – traditional Chinese culture, is believed to be a vital force forming part of any living entity. Qi translates as “air” and figuratively as “material energy”, “life force”, or “energy flow”. Qi is the central underlying principle in Chinese traditional medicine and in Chinese martial arts – for a period of about fifteen years. So, training time in total was no doubt was well into the thousands of hours. However, the specific mediation, the circumambulation of the Golden Light through the microcosmic orbit, I learnt only from Dr Williams and focussed practice time was more modestly in the hundreds, rather than thousands, of hours. In this act of owning and pursuing (but not having) an inner tension arises in you, this is the light from which the Golden Flower can be crystallised. A Zen enso or circle summarizing enlightenment in a single brushstroke: insubstantiality and present awareness. Chan teachings melded with Daoist alchemy to produce The Secret of the Golden Flower

I am not too sure whether I have understood the secret (if it can be understood at all) but I feel like I have definitely taken away some of its appeal. This sounds all very poetic, so what is this book all about? If you allow it, tending the alchemical furnace with careful attention and love this tension will grow inside you (this is circulating the light through the microcosmic orbit) until it reaches a point where it (you) feel as though you can take it no more and are ready to burst. This eighth-century Chinese book, which Jung described as a Taoist-alchemical tract, had a major influence on his mature thinking. In 1928 he received a German translation from Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930), a distinguished German sinologist. Ten oxherding picture (Tomikichiro Tokuriki) The last image represent attending to the task at hand, but now with the presence of the original spirit

Despite the varieties of impressions, interpretations and opinions expressed by translators, the meditation technique described by The Secret of the Golden Flower is a straightforward, silent method; the book's description of meditation has been characterized as " Zen with details". The meditation technique, set forth in poetic language, reduces to a formula of sitting, breathing, and contemplating. [10]

However, the Master teaches us that when the light is held within and circulated through the microcosmic orbit and when this is done for one hundred days without interruption the light crystallises and the Golden Flower is born. In the terms of Jungian psychology, as I came to learn, this is referred to as the Transcendent Function. [9] Jung’s marvelous commentary is balm for the writer’s psyche. He warns us against being enthralled to “… the secret objective of gaining power through words …” He explains how this ancient text guides one through disentanglement. Here is the context in which Jung makes his statement: So, according to the Confucians, the inner nature of man comes from Heaven, or, as the Taoists express it, it is a phenomenal form of Tao. Both principles are, so to speak, super-individual. Man as a spiritual being is made human by essence (hsing).

Secret of the Golden Flower is an ancient Chinese book from an esoteric religious sect. In “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” Jung wrote this about it: “I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. That was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone.” The animus is bright and active, the anima is dark and earth-bound. The sign for hun (animus) is made up of the character for “daemon” and “cloud”, while that for p’o (anima) is composed of the characters for “daemon” and “white.”However, Cleary's translated version did not provide enough information about its source documentation. Jing Haifeng (1999) and J. J. Clarke (2000) excused Jung for not being a Sinologist, and for his humanitarian concerns in alleviating suffering by providing psychological insights. Clarke also did not follow Cleary in considering that the translation used by Wilhelm was problematic. [1] The original title of the book was something like Instructions on How to Cultivate the Golden Flower. To understand the purpose of this book, we must know first what the golden flower means. In the edition I have (Baynes), two Chinese alchemical texts are translated. First the T'ai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih, then the Hui Ming Ching. Afterwards there is a commentary by C. G. Jung, while the first text contains further explanations by Richard Wilhelm. The afterword and foreword are written by each of them respectively. In his memoirs, Carl Jung said that he was always interested in Eastern philosophy. In 1920, he began his thorough research on the I Ching, overlooking the ancient wisdom’s figurative language and Eastern traditions. It was exactly in those years when he met Richard Wilhelm, a well-known sinologist, theologian, and German missionary. Richard Wilhelm specialized mainly in translating Chinese texts to German. The version that Wilhelm used for his German translation had eight chapters. According to Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn, this edition was that of a "Supplement to the Taoist Canon" from 1834. Thomas Cleary (1991) used a different 13-chapter version, which he translated into English directly from Chinese. The five chapters missing from Wilhelm's translation are very short. According to Mori Yuria, it is possible that the prototype had 20 chapters, which would have been reduced to 13 by Shao Zhilin because they were considered redundant or less organized. [1]