Sun Ruzhong孙汝忠

Style & Daoist names

Courtesy name Ruzhong, Sobriquet Xuanjizi

Period

Ming

Dates

? — ?

School

Southern Lineage of the Golden Elixir (Nanzong), Ge Family Golden Elixir Tradition (Danding School)

Role

Internal Alchemy MastersAuthor of Alchemical Texts

Birthplace

Henan (some say Hebei)

Life

Sun Ruzhong, a Ming-dynasty internal-alchemy master and author of True Transmission of the Golden Elixir (Jindan Zhenzhuan), has dates of birth and death unknown, and was active around the Wanli era. According to the book's own preface and colophons, his father Sun Jiaoluan (styled Xuanxuanzi) sought the Dao in his youth and obtained methods from the lineage of Li Xu'an, later transmitting them to Ruzhong; Ruzhong, inheriting his father's teachings, completed the book around the forty-third year of the Wanli era (1615), comprising sixteen chapters with appended verse formulas. True Transmission of the Golden Elixir sets out its teaching under the rubric of the ‘threefold elixir method,’ emphasizing life-cultivation before nature-cultivation in a clearly ordered sequence, and lays out in list form the fire-phasing formulas for each stage — laying the foundation, gathering the medicine, forming the elixir, warming and nourishing, and returning to emptiness; its language is more direct than that of other alchemical texts, and it therefore circulated very widely among Ming and Qing alchemists. The book belongs to the tradition of paired-cultivation (yin-yang) alchemy, and its formulation of ‘like seeking like’ has long been controversial: the school of solitary cultivation (such as the Wu-Liu tradition and Min Yide) generally took issue with it, holding that it could easily lead to deviant interpretation, while the Eastern Lineage of Lu Xixing and the Western Lineage of Li Xiyue regarded it as orthodox. It was included in both the Qing-dynasty Daozang Jiyao (Essentials of the Daoist Canon) and Twelve Daoist Books, and was annotated by Fu Jinquan, Liu Yiming and others. Sun Ruzhong's own life is known only from his preface to the book and later colophons, and beyond the transmission from father to son there is no further verifiable record.

Contributions & Influence

• Wrote True Transmission of the Golden Elixir, setting out the stages and fire-phasing of internal alchemy in list form; it became one of the most widely circulated alchemical texts of the Ming and Qing
• Inherited the alchemical methods transmitted by his father Sun Jiaoluan, producing a representative text of Ming-dynasty paired-cultivation alchemy
• His teachings sparked prolonged debate between the solitary-cultivation and paired-cultivation schools, spurring the divergence of alchemical theory in the Ming and Qing

Works

• True Transmission of the Golden Elixir