Page 119 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

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by the Great One (*Taiyi). In both texts, the deities of the viscera perform
administrative functions within the body, establishing a link with the views
of the medical texts referred to above.
In other instances, the viscera are the seats of impersonal forces. Accord-
ing to the Heshang gong commentary and to medical texts, the *hun "soul"
(representing the Yang components of the human being), the *po "soul"
(representing the Yin components), the essence (*jing), the spirit (*shen), and
the Intention (*yi) respectively reside in the liver, lungs, kidneys, heart, and
spleen. Elsewhere, hun and po are represented in a divinized form; in this case,
the hun deities are said to number three and the po seven (see fig. 42). They
are often mentioned with the "three corpses" and "nine worms" (*sanshi and
jiuchong), malevolent spirits who report the faults and sins of the individual in
which they dwell to the Director of Destinies (*Siming). Accumulating merit
through good actions, abstaining from cereals (*bigu), and performing rites
on the *gengshen day (the fifty-seventh of the sexagesimal cycle) were among
the methods used to neutralize them.
The body as mountain and landscape. The *Wushang biyao (Supreme Secret
Principles, 4I.3b; Lagerwey 1981b, 136) associates the Authentic Talismans of
the Five Emperors (wudi zhenJU 3i * ~ r-f) with the five planets in heaven,
the five sacred mountains on earth, and the five viscera in the human body.
The body itself is often represented as a mountain (Despeux 1990, 194- 98;
Lagerwey 1991,127- 42). Liang Kai ?ifH~ (thirteenth century) painted a famous
scroll that depicts an immortal- possibly meant to be Laozi himself- as a
mountain, using the technique normally applied for painting landscapes (fig.
n ). Images of the body as a mountain are also found in Taoist texts (for an
example, see fig. 13). They illustrate loci in the body that are important for the
practices of Nourishing Life (*yangsheng) and inner alchemy (*neidan). Some
of these sites are represented as palaces that function as headquarters for the
administration of the inner body: here too the metaphor of the government
of the country as the government of the body is apparent. In turn, the visual
depictions of the body as a mountain are related to the best-known Taoist
image of the inner body, the Neijing tu (Chart of the Inner Warp; see *Neijing
tu and Xiuzhen tu, and figs. 60 and 61), which maps the body as a landscape
whose features (e.g., the watercourse, the mill, the furnace) have symbolic
meanings in neidan. (For another example, see fig. 19.)
The body in inner alchemy. The neidan view of the body is complex, and remark-
able differences occur among various subtraditions and authors. In general, the
main components of the inner elixir (essence, pneuma, and spirit, or *jing, qi,
and shen), as well as the tripod and the furnace (*dinglu), are said to be found
within the human being. Beyond this basic premise, neidan shares some of