Zhouyi cantong qi (The Seal of the Unity of the Three)周易参同契

Also known as

Cantong qi, King of Elixir Scriptures

Author / transmission

Wei Boyang

Period

Eastern Han · Traditionally attributed to Wei Boyang of the Eastern Han, composed around the reign of Emperor Huan (mid-2nd century); some accounts hold it was supplemented by Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong, and some scholars hold that the text of the received version took its final form around the Tang dynasty.

Canon division

Taixuan Section

Collected in

Zhengtong Daozang, Taixuan Section (various commentarial editions)

Category

Alchemical Texts

Fascicles

Three scrolls (or divided into upper, middle, and lower chapters, with an appended 'Song of the Tripod' and 'Eulogy and Preface')

Synopsis

The Zhouyi Cantong Qi (Token for the Agreement of the Three According to the Book of Changes) was later honored as the king of alchemical scriptures for all ages, and is the earliest surviving work to systematically expound the theory of alchemy. Its author, Wei Boyang, was a native of Shangyu, Kuaiji; his life is recorded in the Shenxian Zhuan. The title means that the imagery of the hexagrams of the Yijing, the Way of Huang–Lao, and the furnace-and-fire arts of alchemy agree as three and unite into one. The whole work takes Qian and Kun as the cauldron, Kan and Li as the medicinal ingredients, and the sixty-four hexagrams as the stages of firing, using the najia system, the twelve sovereign hexagrams, and the lunar najia scheme of images and numbers to explain the medicine, the firing process, and the transformations of yin and yang; its language is deliberately obscure, borrowing the imagery of the hexagram lines to discuss the making of the elixir. The original text may have referred equally to external alchemy's furnace and fire, but from the Tang and Song onward it was venerated by practitioners of internal alchemy as the fundamental scripture, and commentaries by Peng Xiao, Zhu Xi (under the pseudonym Zou Xin), Chen Xianwei, Yu Yan, Chen Zhixu, and others proliferated, making it the shared theoretical source of both the Southern and Northern Lineages of internal alchemy. Its terminology — lead and mercury, dragon and tiger, yellow sprout, the river chariot — was inherited almost wholesale by later alchemical scriptures.

Key Ideas

• Qian and Kun as the cauldron, Kan and Li as the medicine, the sixty-four hexagrams as the stages of firing
• The unity of the Way of the Great Changes, of Huang–Lao, and of the furnace and fire
• The lunar najia scheme and the waxing and waning of the firing process
• The innate primordial qi, true lead and true mercury
• Reverse cultivation to return the elixir, returning from the acquired to the innate

Structure

Three sections — upper, middle, and lower — alternating four- and five-character rhymed verse with prose, with the appended 'Dingqi Ge' and 'Zanxu.' Chapter divisions vary by commentator; Peng Xiao's edition has ninety chapters.

Editions

• Various commentarial editions in the Zhengtong Daozang
• The Siku Quanshu edition (Zhu Xi's Zhouyi Cantong Qi Kaoyi)
• Meng Naichang, Zhouyi Cantong Qi Kaobian [A Critical Study of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi]
• Zhang Weiwen (collated and annotated), Zhouyi Cantong Qi Jishi [Collected Interpretations of the Zhouyi Cantong Qi]

Commentaries

• Peng Xiao, Zhouyi Cantong Qi Fenzhang Tongzhenyi
• Zhu Xi (as Zou Xin), Zhouyi Cantong Qi Kaoyi
• Chen Xianwei, Zhouyi Cantong Qi Jie
• Yu Yan, Zhouyi Cantong Qi Fahui
• Chen Zhixu, Zhouyi Cantong Qi Fenzhang Zhu
• Qiu Zhao'ao, Guben Zhouyi Cantong Qi Jizhu
• Liu Yiming, Cantong Zhizhi

Translations

• Fabrizio Pregadio, The Seal of the Unity of the Three (2011)
• Richard Bertschinger, English translation (1994)

Full Text & Online Resources

• CTEXT: Zhouyi Cantong Qi
• Wikisource: Zhouyi Cantong Qi
• Wikipedia: Zhouyi Cantong Qi

Related scriptures

Related figures