In agreement with its title, the Cantong qi is concerned with three major subjects, Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), and Alchemy.
The best-known account of Wei Boyang is found in the Shenxian zhuan (Biographies of the Divine Immortals), a work attributed to Ge Hong (283–343).
[2][3] With Peng Xiao, Wei Boyang becomes a learned master who is competent in prose and poetry, is versed in the esoteric texts, cultivates the Dao “in secret and silence,” and nourishes himself “in Empty Non-being.” At the end of his account, moreover, Peng Xiao gives further details on the early history of the text, saying: Wei Boyang secretly disclosed his book to Xu Congshi (徐從事), a native of Qingzhou, who wrote a commentary on it keeping his name hidden.
[5]While Wei Boyang was a southern alchemist, Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were representatives of the cosmological traditions of northern China.
Sources prior to Peng Xiao show that Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were originally believed to be the main authors of the Cantong qi.
[10] With the possible exception of Ge Hong, the first author known to have attributed the composition of the whole Cantong qi to Wei Boyang is Liu Zhigu (Chinese: 劉知古), a Taoist priest and alchemical practitioner who was received at court by Emperor Xuanzong around 750 CE.
[6] Two centuries later, another alchemist, Peng Xiao, cites and praises Liu Zhigu’s discussion, and becomes the first major author to promote the same view.
Moreover, commentators (e.g. Peng Xiao and Zhu Xi) and scholars (e.g. Yang Xiaolei and Meng Naichang)[11][12] have suggested that the Cantong qi is also related to the so-called "apocrypha" (weishu 緯書), a Han-dynasty corpus of cosmological and divinatory texts that is now almost entirely lost.
As he pointed out, no extant alchemical work dating from the Han period is based on the doctrinal principles of the Cantong qi, or uses its cosmological model and its language.
[17] Pregadio's views are even more radical in this regard: "First, neither the Cantong qi nor its cosmological and alchemical models play any visible influence on extant Waidan texts dating not only from the Han period, but also from the whole Six Dynasties (i.e., until the sixth century inclusive).
It is found in a piece by the poet Jiang Yan (444–505), who mentions the Cantong qi in a poem devoted to an immortal named Qin Gao.
The relevant lines of the poem read, in Arthur Waley’s translation:[19] He proved the truth of the Cantong qi;in a golden furnace he melted the Holy Drug.
If this point is taken into account, it appears evident that those who gave the Cantong qi its present shape could only be the nameless representatives of the Taoist traditions of Jiangnan, who had essential ties to the doctrines of the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi.
Despite this, the Cantong qi draws some of its terminology from texts pertaining to Taoist meditation, and in particular from the "Inner” version of the Scripture of the Yellow Court (Huangting jing), a work belonging to the Shangqing revelations of 364–70.
On the basis of the above evidence, Pregadio concludes that "the Cantong qi was composed in different stages, perhaps from the Han period onward, and did not reach a form substantially similar to the present one before ca.
Part 3 is made of several additional compositions: (1) An "Epilogue" ("Luanci" 亂辭), mostly written according to the saoti 騷體 prosody, so called after the Lisao (Encountering Sorrow) piece in the Songs of Chu (Chuci).
[b]The origins of the Ancient Text can be traced back to Du Yicheng (杜一誠), who came from Suzhou (like Yu Yan) and wrote a now-lost commentary on it in 1517.
Several authors of commentaries to the standard version of the Cantong qi have regarded the Ancient Text as spurious, and similar criticism has also been voiced by Chinese scholars from the Qing period onward.
The Ancient Text gives prominence not only to the three main subjects of the Cantong qi, but also to the three authors traditionally considered to be involved in its composition.
According to the new version, Wei Boyang wrote the portion entitled "Canon" ("Jing") in verses of 4 characters; Xu Congshi—whom the Ancient Text exegetes regularly identify as Xu Jingxiu (徐景休), as also did Yu Yan—contributed a "Commentary" ("Zhu" 注) in verses of 5 characters;[22] and Chunyu Shutong added a final section, entitled "The Three Categories" (Chinese: 三相類; pinyin: Sanxianglei).
Although these names belong to the vocabulary of the Book of Changes, in the Cantong qi they denote formless principles that serve to explicate how the Dao generates the world and manifests itself in it.
The main images of Kan and Li are the Moon and the Sun, which alternate in their growth and decline during the longer or shorter time cycles.
"Inferior virtue", instead, focuses on seeking; its unceasing search of the One Breath needs supports, and the postcelestial domain is "used" to find the precelestial state hidden within it.
The first consists of non-alchemical practices, including breathing, meditation on the inner gods, sexual practices, and worship of spirits and minor deities: 是非歷臟法、內觀有所思、履行步斗宿、六甲以日辰、陰道厭九一、濁亂弄元胞、食氣鳴腸胃、吐正吸外邪。This is not the method of passing through the viscera,of inner contemplation and having a point of concentration;of treading the Dipper and pacing the asterisms,using the six jia as markers of time;of sating yourself with the nine-and-one in the Way of Yin,meddling and tampering with the original womb;of ingesting breath till it chirps in your stomach,exhaling the pure and inhaling the evil without.This "treading the Dipper and pacing the asterisms" refers to yubu and bugang.
With the exception of the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi, few Taoist texts have enjoyed an exegetical tradition as voluminous and diversified as the Cantong qi.
His work, which is divided into 90 sections, has not reached us in its original form; there is clear evidence that it was altered in the early thirteenth century with the incorporation of several dozen readings drawn from Zhu Xi’s text.
The first text to be based on a comparison of earlier editions was established by Zhu Xi, but his work was deprived of most of its critical notes by the mid-fourteenth century.
Yu Yan’s learned commentary contains quotations from about one hundred different texts, and is accompanied by philological notes on variants found in earlier editions.
[28] With the exception of Zhu Xi’s work, all extant commentaries to the Cantong qi written through the Yuan period (1279–1368) are related to the Taoist alchemical traditions.
), Peng Haogu 彭好古 (1599), Qiu Zhao’ao 仇兆鰲 (1704), and Liu Yiming 劉一明 (1799), whose authors were affiliated with different Ming and Qing line-ages of Neidan.