Scripture of Wisdom and Life (Huiming jing)慧命经

Also known as

Huayang's Scripture of Wisdom and Life (Huiming jing)

Author / transmission

Liu Huayang

Period

Qing · Written by Liu Huayang, published in the fifty-ninth year of the Qianlong reign (1794).

Canon division

Outside the Canon

Collected in

Outside the Canon (included in the Wuliu xianzong and the Daozang Jiyao)

Category

Alchemical Texts

Fascicles

One Fascicle (Juan)

Synopsis

The Scripture of Wisdom and Life (Huiming jing) is a work of Liu Huayang's later years, which takes the Buddhist term 'wisdom-life' (huiming) to denote the pre-celestial qi of the human body, explaining that cultivating wisdom-life is precisely cultivating one's life-work, and holding that 'the Buddhist tradition, too, has a work of life,' merging the Chan Buddhist illumination of the mind and seeing of one's nature with the alchemical refining of essence into qi and qi into spirit. At the front of the book are eight diagrams with explanations — the Chart of the Exhaustion of Outflows, the Chart of the Six Stages of the Dharma Wheel, the Chart of the Ren and Du Meridians, the Chart of the Dao-Embryo, the Chart of Emerging from Samadhi, the Chart of Transformation-Body, the Chart of Wall-Facing Meditation, and the Chart of the Pulverizing of the Void — followed by a series of 'collected discourses' explaining, passage by passage, the stages of the fire phasing of the Celestial Circuit, the Dao-embryo, the emergence of the spirit, and the return to emptiness, drawing extensively on passages from Buddhist scriptures to corroborate the alchemical teaching. Together with the Verified Discourse on the Golden Immortal, this work forms the complete system of the Wu-Liu School, and became known in the West in the early twentieth century when Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung translated and introduced it as an appendix, 'Hui Ming Ching,' to The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi jinhua zongzhi).

Key Ideas

• Wisdom-life is the pre-celestial qi; the Buddhist tradition also cultivates life
• Eight diagrams illustrate the complete process from the Celestial Circuit to the return to emptiness
• The unity of Chan and the Dao
• The Dao-embryo, the emergence of the spirit, wall-facing meditation, and the pulverizing of the void

Structure

Eight diagrams with explanations, and a number of collected discourses.

Editions

• The Wuliu xianzong edition
• The Daozang Jiyao edition

Translations

• German translation by Richard Wilhelm, English translation by Cary Baynes (appended to The Secret of the Golden Flower, 1931)
• English translation by Eva Wong

Full Text & Online Resources

• Wikipedia: Huiming jing
• CTEXT (Chinese Text Project) search

Related scriptures

Related figures