Seeking a True Master, Gaining the True Method: A Direct Path to the Golden Elixir Great Way

Across the ages, alchemical scriptures have stressed the importance of a "true master" — which quietly tells us something: in an era when information traveled slowly, Taoist Golden Elixir culture could never quite break free of the tangled thicket of "three thousand side-door petty arts." This is the very situation that Eastern Han Wei Boyang describes in his Cantong Qi (The Kinship of the Three): "The world loves petty arts and never examines how deep the Way truly runs."

We know traditional Golden Elixir culture by another name too: the Golden Elixir Great Way. The very first piece in the Collected Works of Master Zhang Sanfeng is the Treatise on the Great Way — an elegant text that lays out the original meaning of Golden Elixir culture. Divided into three parts (upper, middle, and lower), the Treatise covers the cosmology Golden Elixir culture shares with the Tao Te Ching, the historical lineage running from Wudang Golden Elixir to the Wuzhen Pian (Awakening to Reality), the relationship between Golden Elixir culture and the three teachings (Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist), and the Quanzhen Changchun teaching of "dwelling in a heaven that never darkens, wandering amid scenes of eternal spring, lasting as long as heaven and earth, shining as bright as the sun and moon." Taken together, these ideas form the foundational theory of Wudang Golden Elixir Tai Chi culture.

Anyone who loves Wudang Golden Elixir Tai Chi culture and truly wants to seek the Way at Wudang should begin with Zhang Sanfeng's major works: the Treatise on the Great Way, Straight Talk on the Mysteries, Essentials of the Profound, and Plain Words on the Way. These texts cover the core ground of Chinese Golden Elixir culture and serve as the threshold one crosses to enter the "Awakening to Reality" tradition of cultivation.

Most of the Alchemical Way taught by today's inheritors barely strays beyond a narrow band of practice: anchoring the mind in the dantian, circulating qi along the Ren and Du meridians. This habitually leads people toward arts centered on bodily apertures and uncanny abilities, and keeps them from earnestly studying the Golden Elixir thought the patriarch unfolds in his Treatise. Once they wander off the path, those abstract introductory passages become even harder to penetrate.

In Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng's Treatise on the Great Way, he says:

"Cultivating the Way takes self-cultivation as the foremost priority; yet to cultivate the self, one must first rectify the mind and make the will sincere. When the will is sincere and the mind is rectified, all desires for material things are eliminated, and only then can we discuss the foundation of laying the base.

Qi serves as the messenger, spirit serves as the master. When a beginner first sets out, he must know the moment when the first stir of yang arises, and the instant when true lead is first generated. At that moment, qi moves as fast as lightning and cannot linger long in the prenatal state: in a breath it gives rise to Gui water, in a flash it turns into flowing essence. By the time it has taken shape and condensed into form, it has already entered the postnatal and can no longer be used.

Above the Kunlun lies the Mysterious Gate, whose aperture is exceedingly small. When yin and yang meet and unite, it must not be stirred or shaken. Wait for emotion and innate nature to resonate, and self and other will naturally communicate.

Nothing with form or substance can ascend into that aperture. Only true qi — the cosmic bellows — can enter it. Thus the sages point directly to the one prenatal qi, which bursts the gate open. They also say: this is the path of cultivation; it can extend life and add years, cultivate the truth and return to complete wholeness, with no coming or going, no birth and no death."

This passage from the Treatise on the Great Way lays out, in essence, the core content of Wudang Golden Elixir culture.

The patriarch says, "Cultivating the Way takes self-cultivation as the foremost priority." Self-cultivation, in the traditional Taoist sense, embraces the dual cultivation of innate nature and life (xingming shuangxiu). Taoists understand the essence of life as a movement from the formless to the formed — "something arising from nothing." The formless gives rise to what has form, and the formless is what governs it. This is the cosmology of life the Treatise on the Great Way inherits from the Tao Te Ching.

Once you understand Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng's Treatise on the Great Way, you'll see why Zhang Boduan regarded the Tao Te Ching and the Yinfu Jing (Hidden Agreement Classic) as the supreme texts of Golden Elixir culture.

Zhang Boduan's Wuzhen Pian says: "The precious characters of the Yinfu number more than three hundred; the spirit-text of the Daode runs to five thousand. Immortals past and present, beyond all count, have reached true understanding right here." It seems, then, that the strange and bizarre alchemical paths that keep appearing — and the whole question of what Golden Elixir culture really is — still comes down to one simple fact: most people cannot actually read texts like the Tao Te Ching.

The source of Golden Elixir culture lies in the culture of the three teachings. The heart of Confucian culture is the sequence of cultivating the self, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to all under heaven. Master Zhang Sanfeng inherited the central Buddhist and Taoist thought of the Wuzhen Pian, and went further: he forged a grand fusion of Confucian culture with Golden Elixir culture.

Zhang Sanfeng's contribution to Chinese Golden Elixir culture lies precisely in this deeper weaving of Confucian thought into the system. Where Confucian ideas and vocabulary are concerned, he understood them far more thoroughly than Zhang Boduan did. In the Treatise on the Great Way and in his other writings, Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng's use of Confucian terms is markedly richer than what you find in the Wuzhen Pian. This is the natural fruit of an age in which the three teachings grew side by side. When we talk about Wudang culture, the central themes of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are simply unavoidable.

Those who try to sever Wudang culture from Buddhist and Confucian culture will never grasp its real meaning.

How, then, do we practice the Awakening to Reality alchemical Way? Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng tells us the starting point is self-cultivation. Once you understand this, read the passages on Golden Elixir culture in Li Luoneng's Xingyiquan Boxing Manual, and you'll see that Li Luoneng's terms — dual cultivation of nature and life, nurturing haoran (vast and upright) qi, the one true qi, moving from the postnatal back to the prenatal — all run deep into Golden Elixir culture.

We believe the healthy development of modern martial arts cannot be separated from a reading of Golden Elixir culture. Why today's internal arts are called "internal" — that answer has to be sought in the heartland of Wudang culture. Once we grasp the Awakening to Reality side of Golden Elixir culture, we can naturally make sense of the many Taoist terms packed into the Xingyiquan Boxing Manual. The genuine content lying hidden in internal martial arts, and the cultural knots that have long troubled practitioners, will at last come clear.

Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng says: "To cultivate the self, one must first rectify the mind and make the will sincere. When the will is sincere and the mind is rectified, all desires for material things are eliminated, and only then can we discuss the foundation of laying the base." Once we get clear on what "rectifying the mind and making the will sincere" actually means, we won't be confused any longer about what the "three internal harmonies" of Xingyiquan refer to.

Xingyiquan calls for "the unity of heart and intention." Intention is a heart free of distracting thought, so Xingyiquan and Golden Elixir culture both speak of "true heart, true intention." Master Zhang Sanfeng calls these "true spirit" and "spirit that is not spirit."

What a cultivator must accomplish at the very start, in the Taoist vocabulary, is called "refining the self." Refine the self first; only then can the next stage — "laying the foundation" — even be discussed.

Refining the self to lay the foundation; laying the foundation to refine the self — this is the sole gate of Golden Elixir practice, and the simplest, most ordinary Great Way there is.

The Treatise on the Great Way is dotted with a string of terms — "first stir of yang," "arising from nothing," "union of yin and yang," "resonance of emotion and nature," "self and other communicating," "moving from cultivation to complete wholeness" — the kind of specialized vocabulary that daunts any beginner.

In truth, all these Golden Elixir terms are bound by countless threads to Xingyiquan's "three harmonies of heart, intention, and qi," and every martial artist has to work them out.

Therefore Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng emphasizes in the Treatise on the Great Way that, before we have ever heard the Way, our foremost task is to find a master who truly understands it.

Then, once we have a master who can illuminate the Way for us, we must honestly and humbly seek the "medicine." And that medicine is the prenatal, formless, true and singular qi that the sages point to directly.

Master Li Luoneng says in the second preface to the Xingyiquan Boxing Manual:

"(Xingyiquan) is intention on the inside, form on the outside. This art is the very root of self-cultivation, the Great Way of illuminating the mind and seeing one's true nature (returning to the origin), grasping the creative transformations of yin and yang, turning the pivotal hinge of heaven and earth — truly it is a shortcut to strengthening the body."

The words of this generation's leading Xingyiquan master tell us plainly: Golden Elixir Great Way culture is the cultural source of Wudang internal martial arts, including the essential nature of both Xingyiquan and Tai Chi.

Wudang Xingyi and Tai Chi are the outer forms that Golden Elixir self-cultivation takes. If we trace them back to their source, we can let go of our attachment to flashy postures and elaborate routines, and turn, gradually, toward the inner work of true, singular qi.

Wudang is bound to flourish in the days to come. How do we make good on that hope? By rebuilding a new system of Wudang Golden Elixir Tai Chi culture, interpreting these core Wudang terms, and helping people understand Wudang Taoist culture correctly — only then can we lead a fresh current of xinyi, xingyi, and Tai Chi cultivation culture across the world.

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