Qínxuán fù 禽玄賦
Rhapsody on Grasping the Mystery
anonymous
About the work
A short and elegantly written fù 賦 (rhapsody) on inner alchemy in nine parts, in one juan (10 folios), preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0260 / CT 260 = TC 259), 洞真部 方法類. The author and date are unknown; the title — “Grasping” or “Catching the Mystery” — alludes to the alchemical art of “stealing” the cosmic transformations into the body. The work is divided into nine sections, each headed by a two-character topic: (i) Huándān 還丹 (“the Returned Elixir”; “周五行用成妙丹矣”); (ii) Dào shēng yī 道生一 (“Tao Begets One”; “天地含化斯為母矣”); (iii) Dào yuán 道源 (“Source of the Tao”; “明本根芽 修錬成藥”); (iv) Lónghǔ 龍虎 (“Dragon-and-Tiger”; “龍虎相配 投入金鼎”); (v) Qiūshí 秋石 (“Autumn Stone”; “言曰金髓 名喻秋名”); (vi) Héchē 河車 (“River-Cart”; “北方正氣 名曰河車”); (vii) Wǔxíng 五行 (“Five Phases”; “陰陽精氣 列布五方”); (viii) Tāixí 胎息 (“Embryonic Breathing”; “服氣分明 是內丹成”); (ix) Dàojī 盜機 (“Stealing the Trigger”; “如有行止 機自來應”). Each section is a self-contained ornate parallel-prose passage in fù metre, weaving alchemical metaphors around its topic — Qiūshí on the autumn-mineral as the lunar essence, Héchē on the yuánqì 元氣 as the chariot that conveys the inner refinement, Tāixí on the foetal respiration that recapitulates cosmic genesis. The work’s allusive style and tight verbal construction mark it as a literary, rather than a strictly didactic, alchemical text.
Prefaces
No preface in the source. The text opens directly with the title-line and the first section.
Abstract
Kristofer Schipper, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:841 (§3.A.4, Nèidān and Yǎngshēng), characterises the work as “a short and elegantly written treatise on Inner Alchemy in nine parts, of unknown authorship and date.” Although the text quotes no sources, it makes extensive use of the metaphorical language of the ZhōngLǚ 鍾呂 (Zhōnglí QuánLǚ Dòngbīn) school as exemplified in [[KR5a0263|DZ 263 ZhōngLǚ chuándàojì (Xiūzhēn shíshū 14–16)]]. It should therefore date from the Northern Sòng period (960–1127). The frontmatter brackets composition accordingly. The work was not widely cited and stands somewhat outside the major nèidān anthological streams of the late Sòng and Yuán; its closest stylistic kin in the Daoist canon are the alchemical fù of the same volume, viz. [[KR5a0260|DZ 259 Táo zhēnrén nèidān fù]] and [[KR5a0262|DZ 261 Jīndān fù]].
Translations and research
No full translation. Standard scholarly entry: Kristofer Schipper, “Qinxuan fu,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.4, 841. On the Zhōng-Lǚ tradition and Northern Sòng nèidān: Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein, Procédés secrets du Joyau magique: Traité d’alchimie taoïste du XIe siècle (Paris: Les Deux Océans, 1984); Isabelle Robinet, Introduction à l’alchimie intérieure taoïste (Paris: Cerf, 1995); Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Taoism (London: Routledge, 2008), s.v. “neidan.”
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0261
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.4, 841.