VDB: In your January 2000 Seminar you defended the notion that the plurality of religious beliefs and philosophical traditions may best be engaged by means of a similar plurality. But so what about the Shaolin 'monks' you introduced today, plus more particularly what many will interest, traditional  Chinese Medicine?

Physicians of Chinese medicine currently employ more than one hundred different diagnostic systems. At least seven methods of pattern differentiation are taught in today's universities and colleges. To these might be added a large number of other widely used methods, including biomedical diagnostics and methods derived from biomedicine but assimilated into Chinese medicine. There is no agreement between physicians about which method should be applied to a particular case, nor are there any established mechanisms to bring about convergence.

Today methods of diagnosis are often divided in classical/gudaide, traditional/chuantonde, modern/xiandaide, and new/xin. No unanimity exists, however, regarding the details of specific diagnostic techniques, the interpretation of diagnostic data thus obtained, or the relative value of various types. One can find, for instance, several different systems of pulse diagnosis on various sites of the body.

Treatment practices are equally varied, and the history of Chinese medicine is characterized by polemics between advocates of different schools of thought. Such polemics might concern theoretical issues or the correct interpretation of textual sources as much as the diagnostic and treatment techniques appropriate to a given case. The same acupuncture point is located differently by different physicians, and points are also selected on the basis of personal experience and stimulated by means of highly individualized needle techniques. That is, practitioners may use the same stylized terms taken from the canonical literature to describe a therapeutic intervention, but in practice they apply to it their own interpretations.

VDB: In 2000 along with the above you also gave a brief historical overview of what has been popularized as internal Alchemy, can you repeat some of that briefly? And that Shaolin who rally where Buddhist monks imported some of that from India?

In fact discussions of breathing practices and animal movements as in Shaolin point toward later ideas of attuning oneself to the universal Way outside of ritual, moral, or social order. And the Shaolin of today in their performances for audiences incorporate a lot of what simple is Chinese acrobatics. See the pictures below of a performance I helped organize and is part of a tour that next stretched southwards with our last performance three weeks later in Singapore where I currently live. (1)

Also, the study of alchemy in China is still immature, for example scholars are far from understanding the transition from Waidan to Neidan, and how alchemy's promoters located their traditions in cultural space. Alchemy has become quaint part of public culture around the world, but differently in China than in the West.

The famous 'Secret of the Golden Flower' text by Richard Wilhelm and interpreted by Carl Jung was initially the 'Grand Unity's' Instructions (on Developing) Golden Florescence (a light body)’, and came from at least two separate spirit-writing cults next to Patriarch Lu Dongbin active in the late seventeenth century.

Although this text was the first major Chinese alchemical text appearing in Western language, Jung's emphasis on the cross-cultural validity of his ideas on psychic individuation and archetypal symbolism downplayed the cultural specificity of the text and its tradition. In China, adepts responded not by abandoning their traditions (as when chemistry overtook alchemy in Europe by first narrowly redefining and then undercutting it), but by enriching them. Chinese compiled written texts and embedded their traditions into grand genealogical structures marked by textual elaboration, and spiritual meaning.

Among the most prominent examples here is that of the division of corporeal alchemy into five collateral branches, each corresponding to one of the five standard directions - south, north, center, east, and west that articulated space in traditional China.

This geo-genealogical five-lineage structure built on the cultural model of the Southern and Northern branches of contemplative alchemy, and sought to embed new patriarchs, scriptures, into familiar structure.

And to give their traditions durable geo-cultural foundation that could outlast the political decay and disintegration they faced.

To date, most scholars have studied the Completion of Authenticity (Quenzhen), later dubbed the Northern Branch, followed by studies of the Western Branch. In recent times, several studies have emerged relating to Lu Xixing and the Eastern Branch.

VDB: Is Egyptian and Greek Alchemy, the variety that most influenced the West, older or younger then its Chinese counterpart ?

Neither in China nor in the West can scholars approach with certitude the origins of alchemy, but the evidences in China appear to be slightly older.

Belief in physical immortality among the Chinese seems to go back to the 8th century BC, and belief in the possibility of attaining it through drugs to the 4th century BC.

The genesis of alchemy in China may have been a purely domestic affair. It emerged during a period of political turmoil, the Warring States Period (from the 5th to the 3rd century BC), and it came to be associated with Taoism.

The Taoists were a miscellaneous collection of 'outsiders', in relation to the prevailing Confucians, and such mystical doctrines as alchemy were soon grafted onto the Taoist canon. What is known of Chinese alchemy is mainly owing to that graft, and especially to a collection known as Y'n chi ch'i ch'ien ('Seven Tablets in a Cloudy Satchel'), which is dated 1023. Thus, sources on alchemy in China (as elsewhere) are compilations of much earlier writings.

The magical drug, namely the 'elixir of life' (elixir is the European word), is mentioned about that time, and that most potent elixir, 'drinkable gold,' which was a solution (usually imaginary) of this corrosion-resistant metal, as early as the 1st century BC many centuries before it is heard of in the West.

First invented by the scholar-official, Ge Hong (283-343), the Way of the Golden Elixir attracted disaffected literati seeking spiritual advancement through elixir-making.

Ge's alchemy combined three traditions, and included divine rituals and formulas for preparing and ingesting mineral or metallic compounds, each of which gave specific powers to chose who took them. Ge uses the term Golden Elixir to name the best synthesis that would lead to the highest form of transcendence, but the wide readership of his book ensured that this term would become the generic label for alchemy.

When later writers resorted to the same name, they often had something quite distinct from Ge's ideas on the Golden Elixir in mind. They not only added new writings, deities. structures, and goals to their alchemical pursuits in the centuries after Ge's death, but from the tenth century, they frequently omitted any evidence of laboratory knowledge at all.

The Warring States next generated new approaches to life. Fears that spirits (shen) prematurely leave the corporeal form prompted some to focus on cultivating the body's vitalities.

Golden Elixir alchemy as it exists today, built upon the established traditions of sacred places on mountains and in temples as elements of marketing systems. Developments occurred within the matrix of learning, including the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist classics and several of their recent incarnations.

Arabic alchemy partly Greek seem to have been significantly different. The respect in which Physical et mystical was held by the Greek alchemists was bestowed by the Arabs on a different work, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos, the reputed Hellenistic author of various alchemical, occultic, and theological works.

Beginning 'That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above,' it is brief, theoretical, and astrological.

The Emerald Tablet, comes from a larger work called Book of the Secret of Creation, which exists in Latin and Arabic manuscripts and was thought by the Muslim alchemist ar-Razi to have been written during the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mun (AD 813¨C833), though it has been attributed to the 1st-century-AD pagan mystic Apollonius of Tyana.

Some scholars have suggested that Arabic alchemy descended from a western Asiatic school and that Greek alchemy was derived from an Egyptian school. As far as is known, the Asiatic school was not Chinese or Indian. What is known is that Arabic alchemy was associated with a specific city in Syria, Harran, which seems to have been a fountainhead of alchemical notions. And it is possible that the distillation ideology and its spokeswoman, Maria, as well as Agathodaimon, represented the alchemy of Harran, which presumably migrated to Alexandria and was incorporated into the alchemy of Zosimos.

The existing versions of the Book of the Secret of Creation have been carried back only to the 7th or 6th century but are believed by some to represent much earlier writings, although not necessarily those of Apollonius himself. He is the subject of an ancient biography that says nothing about alchemy, but neither does the Emerald Tablet nor the rest of the Book of the Secret of Creation. On the other hand, their theories of nature have an alchemical ring, and the Book mentions the characteristic materials of alchemy, including, for the first time in the West, sal ammoniac. It was clearly an important book to the Arabs, most of whose eminent philosophers mentioned alchemy, although sometimes disapprovingly. Those who practiced it were even more interested in literal gold making than had been the Greeks. The most well-attested and probably the greatest Arabic alchemist was ar-Razi (c. 850¨C923/924), a Persian physician who lived in Baghdad. The most famous was Jabir ibn Hayyan, now believed to be a name applied to a collection of 'underground writings' produced in Baghdad after the theological reaction against science. In any case, the Jabirian writings are very similar to those of ar-Razi.

Ar-Razi classified the materials used by the alchemist into 'bodies' (the metals), stones, vitriols, boraxes, salts, and 'spirits,' putting into the latter those vital (and sublimable) materials, mercury, sulfur, orpiment and realgar (the arsenic sulfides), and sal ammoniac. Much is made of sal ammoniac, the reactive powers of which seem to have given Western alchemy a new lease on life. Ar-Razi and the Jabirian writers were really trying to make gold, through the catalytic action of the elixir. Both wrote much on the compounding of 'strong waters,' an enterprise that was ultimately to lead to the discovery of the mineral acids, but students have been no more able to find evidence of this discovery in the writings of the Arabic alchemists than in those of China and India. The Arabic strong waters were merely corrosive salt solutions.

Ar-Razi's writing represents the apogee of Arabic alchemy, so much so that students of alchemy have little evidence of its later reorientation toward mystical or quasi-religious objectives. Nor does it seem to have turned to medicine, which remained independent. But there was a tendency in Arabic medicine to give greater emphasis to mineral remedies and less to the herbs that had been the chief medicines of the earlier Greek and Arabic physicians. The result was a pharmacopoeia not of elixirs but of specific remedies that are inorganic in origin and not very different from the elixirs of ar-Razi.

This new pharmacopoeia was taken to Europe by Constantine of Africa, a Baghdad-educated Muslim who died in 1087 as a Christian monk at Monte Cassino (Italy). The pharmacopoeia also appeared in Spain in the 11th century and passed from there to Latin Europe, along with the Arabic alchemical writings, which were translated into Latin in the 12th century.

VDB: So what about so called Latin alchemy?

In the 12th century the Christian West began to shed its habit of indifference or hostility to the secular literature of ancient and alien civilizations. Christian scholars were particularly attracted to Muslim Spain and Sicily and there made translations from both Arabic and Greek works, many of which were in some degree familiar, but some of which, including the literature of alchemy, were new.

The Greek alchemy of the Venice-Paris manuscript had much less impact than the work of ar-Razi and other Arabs, which emerged among the voluminous translations made in Spain about 1150 by Gerard of Cremona.

By 1250 alchemy was familiar enough to enable such encyclopedists as Vincent of Beauvais to discuss it fairly intelligibly, and before 1300 the subject was under discussion by the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon and the German philosopher, scientist, and theologian Albertus Magnus. To learn about alchemy was to learn about chemistry, for Europe had no independent word to describe the science of matter. It had been touched upon in works concerned with other forms of change e.g., the motion of projectiles, the aging of man, and similar Aristotelian concepts.

On the practical side there were also artists' recipe books; but for the first time in the works of Bacon and Albertus Magnus change was discussed in a truly chemical sense, with Bacon treating the newly translated alchemy as a general science of matter for which he had great hopes.

But the more familiar alchemy became, the more clearly it was understood that gold making was the almost exclusive objective of alchemy, and Europeans proved no more resistant to the lure of this objective than their Arabic predecessors. By 1350, alchemical tracts were pouring out of the scriptoria (monastic copying rooms), and the Europeans had even taken over the tradition of anonymity and false attribution. One authority wrote at length about supposed disagreements between two Arabs, Iahiae Abindinon and Geber Abinhaen, who were probably two versions of the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan. The most famous Jabirian work in Europe, The Sum of Perfection, is now thought to have been an original European composition. At about this time personal reminiscences of alchemists began to appear. Most famous was the Paris notary Nicolas Flamel (1330¨C1418), who claimed that he dreamed of an occult book, subsequently found it, and succeeded in deciphering it with the aid of a Jewish scholar learned in the mystic Hebrew writings known as the Kabala. In 1382 Flamel claimed to have succeeded in the 'Great Work' (gold making); certainly he became rich and made donations to churches.

By 1300 alchemists had begun the discovery of the mineral acids, a discovery that occupied about three centuries between the first evidence of the new strong water (aqua fortis'ªi.e., nitric acid) and the clear differentiation of the acids into three kinds: nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric. These three centuries saw prodigious efforts in European alchemy, for these spontaneously reactive and highly corrosive substances opened a whole new world of research. And yet, it was of little profit to chemistry, for the experiments were inhibited by the old objectives of separating the base metals into their 'elements,' concocting elixirs, and other traditional procedures.

The 'water of life' (aqua vitae; i.e., alcohol) was probably discovered a little earlier than nitric acid, and some physicians and a few alchemists turned to the elixir of life as an objective. John of Rupescissa, a Catalonian monk who wrote c. 1350, prescribed virtually the same elixirs for metal ennoblement and for the preservation of health. His successors multiplied elixirs, which lost their uniqueness and finally simply became new medicines, often for specific ailments. Medical chemistry may have been conceived under Islam, but it was born in Europe. It only awaited christening by its great publicist, Paracelsus (1493¨C1541), who was the sworn enemy of the malpractices of 16th-century medicine and a vigorous advocate of 'folk' and 'chemical' remedies. By the end of the 16th century, medicine was divided into warring camps of Paracelsians and anti-Paracelsians, and the alchemists began to move en masse into pharmacy.

Paracelsian pharmacy was to lead, by a devious path, to modern chemistry, but gold making still persisted, though methods sometimes differed. SalomonTrismosin, purported author of the Splendor Soils, or 'Splendour of the Sun' (published 1598), engaged in extensive visits to alchemical adepts (a common practice) and claimed success through 'kabalistic and magical books in the Egyptian language.' The impression given is that many had the secret of gold making but that most of them had acquired it from someone else and not from personal experimentation. Illustrations, often heavily symbolic, became particularly important, those of Splendor Solis being far more complex than the text but clearly exercising a greater appeal, even to modern students.