Page 578 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

JI 537

and "opening" of the world) in the instant that precedes the movement of
breath. Some authors emphasize that this breath is not the ordinary breath,
but the *yuanqi, the Original Pneuma that antedates Heaven and Earth and
is the source of the world.
As the center of human life,ji is the heart-mind (*xin) or the Spirit (*shen),
which is associated with the Northern Dipper (*beidou) in Heaven, with the
Thunder in Earth, and with the zhen ~ == trigram, whose single Yang line that
is beginning to ascend is correlated with the Celestial Stem geng. The alchemist
aims at uniting the human ji with the tianji, the Celestial Mechanism.

Isabelle ROBINET
III Qing Xitai 1994, 2: 305-8; Robinet 1994b, 40-45; Robinet 1995a, 103-20

* dong and jing; fan; xuanpin; zaohua; ziran

Ji Zhizhen

II93-1268; original ming: Yi W; zi: Fuzhi lWll~ ; haD: Zhichang zi
~ ~ T (Master Who Knows the Eternal)

Ji Zhizhen, who came from Zezhou 7~ j+l (Shanxi), was a scholar educated
during the last decades of the Jin dynasty When the Jurchen succumbed to
the assaults of the Mongol armies, he followed the same path as many of his
fellow literati, taking refuge in the *Quanzhen order. Ji became a refugee in 1221
and was adopted by *Wang Zhijin as a disciple in 1234. His intellectual talents
gained wide recognition, and he taught at Taoist schools (xuanxue K "') set
up by the Quanzhen hierarchy from 1252 onward. After his master's death, he
served for a few years as abbot of the Chaoyuan gong Jji}J 5t '§ (Palace of the
Audience with the [Three] Primes) in Kaifeng (Henan), the main monastery
of Wang Zhijin's lineage. The two figures, however, appear utterly different.
While Wang Zhijin was a charismatic leader and an indefatigable preacher,
Ji Zhizhen has left few traces of his activity but imparted his posterity with
the largest corpus of prose and poetic writings for a Quanzhen author after
those of *Wang Zhe and *Ma Yu.
His collected works, Yunshan ji % ill ~ (Anthology of Cloudy Mountains;
1250; CT II40), are included in the Taoist Canon, but the Beijing ational Library
holds a substantially different 1319 edition. This edition includes prose treatises
on Taoist philosophy and mysticism, a rather rare genre among Quanzhen
Taoists. Ji Zhizhen also wrote lost commentaries to the Daode jing, the *Yijing,