The Body · zhong dan tian
The Middle Dan Tien
中丹田
The chest centre. Described in detail by classical alchemy, and passed over almost entirely by the Mo Pai sources.
- Bai hui 百會 crown
- Upper dan tien 上丹田 shen → xu
- Middle dan tien 中丹田 qi → shen
- Lower dan tien 下丹田 jing → qi
- Hui yin 會陰 the lock
- Bai hui 百會 crown
- Upper dan tien 上丹田
- Yu zhen 玉枕 third gate
- Middle dan tien 中丹田
- Jia ji 夾脊 second gate
- Lower dan tien 下丹田
- Wei lu 尾閭 first gate
- Hui yin 會陰 the lock
Where it is
Behind the breastbone at roughly the level of the heart, in the centre of the chest cavity. As with the lower field it is treated as a volume inside the body, not a point on the chest wall.
Also called
- Zhong dan tian (中丹田), "the middle cinnabar field"
- Jiang gong (絳宮), "the crimson palace"
- Associated on the surface with shan zhong / tan zhong (膻中), the point on the sternum between the nipples
What Mo Pai says
Almost nothing. The middle field belongs to the vocabulary Mo Pai inherited, and the sources use the word dan tien unqualified to mean the lower one. No published or leaked Mo Pai instruction places a practice here.
This archive's own reconstruction places the relocation of attention to the middle field somewhere around levels 13 to 15, following the order the classical corpus gives. Those entries are drawn from alchemy rather than from the lineage, and they say so.
What classical alchemy says
In neidan the middle field is where the emotional life is implicated in the work. The requirement stated over and over is that shen cannot be refined in an agitated heart, which makes emotional settling a technical prerequisite rather than a moral one. Traditional accounts describe old grief and anger surfacing at this stage and having to be burned through.
It is also the stage at which the classical literature stops being describable in mechanical terms. The lower field has instructions you can follow; the middle field has conditions you have to meet.
Reported signs
- Reconstructed. The classical texts describe emotional volatility, surfacing memory, and a shift in the felt centre of practice from the belly to the chest.
What goes wrong
- Practising in an agitated emotional state is one of the traditional causes of deviation, and intensive practice can itself precipitate psychological difficulty. The modern contemplative-science literature documents this and it is not controversial.
See Safety. Nothing on this page is instruction.
Levels that concern this centre
Terms used on this page
Sources for this entry
- The classical neidan corpus — Zhong-Lü texts, Wuzhen pian, Longmen commentaries, and the wider internal alchemy literature — the actual technical parent of Mo Pai's methods.
- Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.