Liu Huayang柳华阳

Style & Daoist names

Chan Master Liu Huayang

Period

Qing

Dates

1736 — ?

School

Wu–Liu School of Internal Alchemy

Role

Internal Alchemy MastersmonkTransmitter of the Wu-Liu School

Birthplace

Hongdu (present-day Nanchang, Jiangxi)

Life

Liu Huayang, a native of Nanchang in Jiangxi, was a Qing-dynasty Buddhist monk and internal-alchemy master, a representative figure of the Wu–Liu School. Born in the first year of the Qianlong reign (1736), he became a Buddhist monk in his youth, and claimed to have met Wu Shouyang at Shuanglian Temple on the Wan River, who transmitted alchemical methods to him; he thus cultivated Daoist internal alchemy while remaining a Buddhist monk, writing the Scripture of Wisdom and Life (Huiming jing, 1794) and the Verified Discourse on the Golden Immortal (1790). These works use diagrams and Buddhist terminology to explain such methods as refining essence into qi and the Celestial Circuit and Fire Phasing, proclaiming the “Union of Immortals and Buddhas,” and, being clear and accessible, became one of the most widely circulated introductory texts on internal alchemy from the Qing dynasty onward. In the late Qing and early Republican era, The Wu-Liu School of Immortality combined his writings with those of Wu Shouyang in a single edition, establishing the name “Wu–Liu School”; his methods have had wide influence in Republican-era qigong circles and among practitioners both in China and abroad today. His year of death is unknown.

Contributions & Influence

• Wrote the Scripture of Wisdom and Life and the Verified Discourse on the Golden Immortal, popularizing internal-alchemical cultivation through diagrams
• Established the “Union of Immortals and Buddhas” transmission of the Wu–Liu School
• One of the principal sources of modern and contemporary internal-alchemical practice

Works

• Scripture of Wisdom and Life (Huiming jing)
• Verified Discourse on the Golden Immortal

Legends

His claim to have received the transmission directly from Wu Shouyang, who had died more than a century earlier, is regarded by scholars as a legendary construction.