From the Introduction

Taoism is a source of some of the world's oldest mind-body health and healing lore. Taoists often call their study the "science of essence and life" to represent their cultivation of those arts. The science of essence deals with mind; the science of life deals with the body. Their object is to groom and enhance what Taoists call the three bases or three treasures of human existence: vitality, energy, and spirit.

Vitality, energy, and spirit are envisioned as three centers of the individual and collective organism. Each center is twofold: there is a primal or abstract noumenon, and a temporal or concrete phenomenon. There are many differences in Taoist practices according to which aspect of what center they are primarily designed to affect.

Vitality is primally associated with creativity, temporally associated with sexuality. Energy is primally associated with movement, heat, and power, temporally associated with breath, magnetism, and strength. Spirit is primally associated with the essence of mind and consciousness, temporally associated with thought and reflection. As the three centers interact, the quality and proportion of their mutual influence relate directly to the total state of mental and physical wellbeing.

In terms of the individual body, vitality is associated with the loins, energy with the thorax, and spirit with the brain. These associations are invoked in some forms of Taoist yoga, where the respective areas of the body are called the lower, middle, and upper fields of elixir. These fields are used to focus attention in healing, energizing, and meditative exercises.

Vitality, energy, and spirit can also be defined in terms of three bodies: vitality is the flesh-and-blood body, energy is the electrical body within the flesh-and-blood body, and spirit is the ethereal body of consciousness within the electrical body. In yet another sense, vitality is the natural world, energy is the social world, and spirit is the psychological world.

There are many Taoist arts concerned with enhancing vitality, energy, and spirit. Included among them are sexual techniques for vitality, movements and exercises for energy, and meditations for the spirit. For historical and theoretical perspective on Taoism, therefore, it is useful to review each of the "fields of elixir" in terms of the modes of practice devised for their cultivation.

Vitality
Taoist sexology is generally called the "bedroom art" in exoteric literature and "bedroom alchemy" in more specialized writings. Like other Taoist sciences, it is believed to have originally been articulated in antiquity. In both popular and esoteric Chinese lore, sexology is commonly associated with Huang Ti (Huang Di), the legendary Yellow Emperor, who is believed to have assembled the ancient sciences of Taoism in the middle of the third millennium BCE. The Yellow Emperor Huang Ti is said to have learned this particular art from someone named Su Nu, whose name means Basic Woman.

Bedroom alchemy has always been among the most controversial Taoist practices, for several reasons. From a sociopolitical point of view, there was an aspect of the art that had powerful implications apart from simple enhancement of sexual intercourse for men and women. Biologically speaking, one of the effects of the bedroom art was to maintain fertility in dominant males, who were habitually polygamous and commonly suffered from low sperm counts unless they deliberately conserved their semen. Rulers and other wealthy and powerful men with exceptionally great concerns for propagating their lineages, and exceptionally great opportunities for doing so, often became personal devotees of this aspect of Taoism, even as they discouraged it among the people at large.

An unusual and dramatic form of sexual yoga was instituted by the revolutionary neo-Taoist school of the Celestial Guides in the second century CE. The practice, known as "joining energies," consisted of a ritual form of communal sexual intercourse. It was carried out within a religious community under the direction of Taoist healers and teachers, in the context of a comprehensive path of development.

Like some of the other activities of the controversial Celestial Guides, sacred sexual rituals were designed to offset certain imbalances that had developed in the mind and body of China. These imbalances can be defined in biological, social, and psychological terms, reflecting deterioration in the circulation of vitality, energy, and spirit of Chinese civilization.

At the time of the movement of the Taoist leaders who came to be known as the Celestial Masters, China had been subject to one political regime, the Han dynasty, for nearly four hundred years. Although Chinese society was not entirely static, as it has often been portrayed, nevertheless it was obviously stagnant and sclerotic. A small number of clans had acquired a vast majority of the wealth and power in the empire, while the social structure they supported revolved around perpetuating their privilege and authority.

This state of affairs had genetic as well as political consequences. Rich and powerful men commonly bought or stole as many teenage girls as they could, in addition to their socially appointed wives. Poor peasant men, on the other hand, were more likely to die prematurely from hunger, overwork, or violence. The sexual ritual of "joining energies" cut across long-established class lines and remixed segments of the gene pool that had been largely segregated for centuries except through the liaisons of rich men with slave girls. Socially and psychologically, it also cut through long-fixated feelings about paternity and possessiveness.

It has been said that traditional opposition of Confucian authorities to Taoist sexual arts is based on prudish or puritanical Confucian attitudes toward sex. It would appear most likely, however, that the real fears of Confucian authorities were socially and politically founded. Social and political questions were indeed the very foundation of Confucian moral thinking, and their position on Taoist bedroom arts was evidently rooted in these concerns.

Apart from the controversial collective "joining energy" rites, the bedroom arts also included a variety of techniques for individual couples, and for rites involving a man and two or more women. Taoists expressed their own reservations about sexual alchemy, but these reservations were founded on a different basis from those of Confucian orthodoxy. The concerns of the Taoists were the dangers arising from ignorant misuse, excess, and lack of appropriate preparation, context, and self-mastery before taking up the practice of sexual alchemy.

Evidence of this cautionary attitude appears fairly early in Taoist literature. Near the end of the second century CE the alchemical text Ts'an-t'ung-ch'i, or Triplex Unity, included a certain form of mechanically ritualized sexual intercourse in a list of mechanically ritualized practices that it rejected. Later the Complete Reality school of Taoism would regard this text as a classic of spiritual alchemy, and its caveats on practice would be widely repeated in the literature of that school. Warnings about misuse of sexual yoga were common to other forms of yoga, being based on the attitude, approach, and application; all formal practices were considered limited in any case, and mechanical performance was known to exhaust the spirit and energy of yogic practices.

The bedroom art is mentioned several times in the great fourth-century Taoist work Pao-p'u-tzu (Baopuzi), a collection of essays by Ko Hung (Go Hong, 284–363), a famous researcher and writer on secular and occult subjects. In the chapter "Subtle Doctrines," the author recommends the method of P'eng Tsu (Peng zu), the Chinese Methuselah, who is supposed to have lived for seven hundred years, due in part to his practice of bedroom arts. Ko Hung writes, "The method of P'eng Tsu is quintessential. The other texts are often complicated, tedious, and hard to practice, while the actual benefits are not necessarily as written in the books. Few people can do them. The verbally transmitted secrets, furthermore, consist of only a few thousand words."

In the chapter "Unclogging," Ko Hung elaborates further on the bedroom arts and their customary practice: "There are more than ten schools of bedroom arts. Some use them to repair damage; some use them to cure sicknesses; some use them to draw on yin to enhance yang; some use them to add years and extend life. What is most important and essential, however, is one thing alone: returning vitality to boost the brain. This practice is transmitted by real people by word of mouth, and is not written in books." Ko also mentions a few popular texts, including P'eng Tsu's manual, of which he approves, and says, "They note the crude things, but never put the most essential points down on paper."

Like the Taoist Celestial Guides of the late Han dynasty, Ko Hung also attributed the practice of bedroom arts to Lao-tzu, the legendary Taoist ancient, based on esoteric interpretations of certain passages in the classic Tao-te Ching.Sexual yoga was also known to have been practiced among male and female shamans, with whom certain of the Celestial Guides were undoubtedly associated. In his Pao-p'u-tzu, Ko Hung speaks highly of the great advantages of bedroom arts for health and longevity but is careful to avoid the inflated claims of sex gurus who even then commercialized the arts for personal profit.

In the "Subtle Doctrines" chapter, Ko writes of the arts' importance in terms of the general economy of vitality-sustaining life: "Those who do not know bedroom arts may take a hundred potions but still cannot prolong life." In the "Ultimate Principle" chapter, he writes of their function in bolstering the energy that underlies work and exercise: "For working with energy, it is also beneficial to know bedroom arts. The reason this is so is that if you don't know the yin-yang arts, you will repeatedly become fatigued and depleted, with the result that you will have a hard time gaining strength in working with energy."

Ko responds to exaggerations of bedroom arts in the "Subtle Doctrines" chapter of Pao-p'u-tzu:

Some say that those who completely master the bedroom art can by its sole practice reach spiritual immortality, avert disasters and resolve misdeeds, turn calamity into fortune, and find promotion in official life or increased profit in the business world. Is this true? These are all deceptive exaggerations of shamanistic writings, which are so colored by fetishism as to lose reality. Some even deliberately make up lies to fool people of the world, concealing clues to get others to wait on them, attracting and gathering disciples, thus to encompass worldly profit. The fact is that the yin-yang arts at their highest can cure minor illnesses; at the next level, they can be used to avoid depletion. But that is all. There is a natural limit to the science; how can it produce spiritual immortality, repel calamity, and bring good fortune?

In another work, Ko Hung relates a story underscoring several points: that bedroom arts are only one part of Taoist developmental science; that only the cruder aspects of the bedroom arts are written in books; and that the essence of the bedroom arts, like other practices of the Taoist science of life, can be taught only by expert personal instruction. Typically, the point of the story is technical rather than moral in the ordinary sense of the word in such a context.

The story concerns a certain woman who made and sold wine. One day a wizard came into her shop, drank some wine, and left a book in lieu of payment. When the woman looked at the book, she found that it contained instructions for "Nurturing nature" by means of sexual intercourse. She copied the essential points and began to practice the art with young men who came to her shop. Regaining and preserving her youth thereby, thirty years later she still looked like a woman in her twenties. Eventually the wizard returned and saw what had transpired. Laughing, he said to the woman, "On a purloined path with no teacher, even if you have wings you cannot fly." Then the woman closed up her shop and followed the wizard into the mountains.

From the third and fourth centuries onward, Taoism was increasingly influenced by Buddhism, which began to filter into China near the end of the Han dynasty. Following Buddhist models, Taoists composed scriptures, organized churches, and ordained clergy. Unlike the celibate Buddhist clergy, however, the Taoist clergy could marry and carry on the traditional art of bedroom alchemy as part of its religious observances.

Although Buddhism had married clergy practicing sexual yoga in other cultures, in China Buddhism was regarded by the Confucian authorities as foreign and politically suspect, so their policy was that Buddhist institutions could not be allowed to reproduce themselves biologically. During the T'ang dynasty (618–905), when greater regimentation was introduced into church Taoism, there was a trend toward celibacy among the clergy, more in conformity with the Buddhist custom. Later Taoist revival movements of the Sung dynasty (960–1276), independent of the old Taoist churches and strongly influenced by Ch'an Buddhism, took an even more ascetic turn to secure their political and economic independence.

The most influential of the Sung dynasty neo-Taoist movements, the Ch'uan-chen (Quanzhen) or Complete Reality school, took a reserved approach to bedroom alchemy for the cultivation of vitality. Generally speaking, the Northern branch of the school, known as the sect of clear serenity, recommends moderation in sexual activity and does not speak of deliberately practicing sexual yoga for energizing the body or healing sickness. In contrast to this, the Southern branch of the school, known as the sect of dual cultivation or grafting, is said to use sexual yoga for revitalization of the physical body. In most texts of this school the subject is not openly discussed in detail, but Chang Po-tuan (Zhang Boduan), the founder of the Southern branch, warns against overestimation of both celibacy and ritual sex exercises in his classic Wu-chen p'ien (Wuzhen-pian), Understanding Reality. The underlying principles invoked here, naturalness and freedom from obsession, are characteristic of ancient Taoism and its revival in the Complete Reality school.

One of the distinguishing marks of Complete Reality Taoism was its emphasis on integration of Buddhism and Confucianism with Taoism. This probably influenced the attitude of the school toward bedroom arts. Buddhist thought is particularly prominent in a story told of the famous Ancestor Lu in this connection. Ancestor Lu was one of the primary founders of Complete Reality Taoism, and the story illustrates something of the ethical tone of the school.

It seems there was a rich man skilled in sexual arts who always kept a seraglio of ten young women. Whenever one would get pregnant, he would throw her out and get someone else to replace her. He had sexual intercourse with these young women one after another day and night, with the result that he could go for days without eating and at the age of ninety-seven still looked like he was thirty years old. He was also a braggart.

Now Ancestor Lu, the master spiritual alchemist, went to see this man, posing as a beggar asking for alms. At first the rich man did not recognize him and sent him away, but Ancestor Lu displayed his occult power and won the man's confidence. When the man now asked Lu for some words of wisdom, the Taoist master told the story of someone who had once liked to hunt and fish, but gave up hunting in middle age. When asked why he gave up hunting and not fishing, seeing as how both involve taking life, he replied, "Hunting depends on me; fishing depends on the creatures. I couldn't give them both up at once, so I first stopped the worse of the two." And after that he gave up fishing as well.

When Ancestor Lu had recited this story to the rich man with ten concubines, he said, "I like the way he cared for beings and protected life. What are you doing with your antics?" After that Lu disappeared. The rich man felt ill at ease from that point on. Before long he vomited up gallons of silver liquid and died. This represents the accumulation of untransformed vitality, which supposedly did prolong the man's life, but did not improve him spiritually. The moral of the story reflects the Buddhist attitude of cherishing living beings, combined with traditional Taoist teachings on the need for a balanced integration of the sciences of essence and life.