Today, the editor of chinastory.com has brought you an article about Taoism’s “corpse decomposition into immortality”. Welcome to read it~
As two traditional religions, Taoism and Buddhism have existed in China for thousands of years. They not only learn from each other and integrate ideas and doctrines, but also have differences because of different ideas. But anyway, Taoism and Buddhism are all religions aimed at persuading people to be good. The goal of Buddhist practice is to get rid of Nirvana and the suffering of life and death. All efforts in this life can be rewarded in the afterlife. Different from Buddhism, Taoism advocates immortality and noble life, and hopes to eventually become immortals through various ways of practice, so as to achieve the goal of long-term vision.
Looking at the legend of immortality in Taoism, we can conclude that there are many ways of immortality in Taoism, such as rising in the daytime, autopsy, etc. Ge Hong, a famous Taoist in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, wrote in baopuzi: “the staff sergeant raises his form and rises to emptiness, which is called the celestial being; the sergeant swims in the famous mountains, which is called the earth fairy; the corporal dies first and then sheds, which is called the corpse decomposition fairy.”
Due to the difference in practicing Taoism, a very small number of immortals became immortals in the way of “rising in the daytime”. For example, Master Zhang Daoling received the Taoist Dharma from the Supreme Lord and rose in the daytime with his disciples; Wei Huacun, the wife of Nanyue, was “a ghost in her heart and worked hard with all her sincerity”. At the age of 83, the fairy sent by the West King’s mother came to meet her and led her to become an immortal; The Heavenly Master Xu Xun rose in the daytime at the age of 136 because of his perfect merits and virtues
The rising of the sun belongs to the level of “celestial beings” and belongs to the top grade of immortals. However, most immortals can’t reach that kind of Taoist practice when practicing, and they become immortals by means of “corpse decomposition”. What is autopsy? According to the Taoist classic “Yun Ji Qi Tiao”: “the man who disintegrates the corpse changes the shape of the corpse. The essence is refined and degenerated, the body quality is changed, and the five genera are hidden and suitable.” Autopsy is that after people die first, they can become immortals like cicadas molting their shells. The corpse remains in the world, and the yuan God becomes immortals.
Du Guangting said in his “Yong Cheng Ji Xian Lu Xu”: “the man who is the top of the gods and immortals, the cloud car and the feather cover, the form and spirit fly; secondly, the female Valley and the forest, the hidden scenery is hidden; secondly, the shape of the elephant is removed, and the snake sloughs and cicadas fly. However, the person who soars to the sky is superior, and the person who is disintegrated is inferior.” Although both belong to immortality, compared with the rise of body and divine consciousness at the same time, the autopsy of immortality is a lower class.
There are many ways for Taoism to decompose corpses into immortals. Taoism divides them into “military solution, hydrolysis, fire solution, sword solution” and other ways. According to the seven signs of cloud collection, “if you apply charcoal with the spirit pill of record shape, others will see the shape and burn to death, which is called fire solution. If you drink it with a pill and water, and lie down with a wood, others will see that they have been injured and died in an empty room, which is called soldiers solution.” In short, practitioners cannot become immortals directly. They need to achieve it by burning, flooding, weapons and other means. For ordinary people, these practitioners have died after autopsy, but they can come back from the dead and become immortals.
During the period of the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan, there was a man named Ning Fengzi, who was engaged in the official position of firing pottery. One day, a strange man came to visit Ning Fengzi and burned the fire of the pottery kiln for him, which could produce smoke with five colors. Ning Fengzi was surprised when he saw it. He thought that this kind of fireworks could make people become immortals, and hoped to master this skill.
The strange man taught this method to Ning Fengzi. Ning Fengzi gathered firewood and burned himself. His body can follow the rise and fall of the five colored auspicious smoke. When people around saw the ashes burned out, they could also see the bones of Ning Fengzi, so they buried them in the mountains of ningbei. People thought he was dead. In fact, Ning Fengzi had already become an immortal through “fire solution”.
“Yun Ji Qi Qian” also records the legend of Wang Jiabing’s solution. Wang Jia and two apprentices from Anyang, West Gansu, were killed by Yao Chang, the founding emperor of the late Qin Dynasty. Yao Chang “first sent people to Longyou, and the two disciples of Feng Jia had been killed for more than a thousand miles. It was Jia RI that killed Jia. Jia Shi Shu and Chang, Chang Ling sent Jia and the coffin of the two disciples, there was no corpse, and each had a bamboo stick”. When they opened the coffin, they didn’t find the body, but only a bamboo stick. This is Wang Jia’s long-term solution to immortality.
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