The Yang Shen · 陽神 · yang shen

Level 39: The Bathing

Mu yu — periods in which the alchemical fire is deliberately withdrawn.

reconstructed Status Drawn from classical neidan by this archive, to show the shape of the band. Time in grade Ten months of gestation, then three years of suckling: the canonical schedule, given in the Zhong-Lü material and repeated across the corpus. It is figurative in the way a pregnancy is figurative — a fixed sequence rather than a fixed calendar. Body map The dan tien and the gates

Description

Mu yu — periods in which the alchemical fire is deliberately withdrawn. Over-application of will is said to destroy what is being grown.

This entry is a reconstruction. Mo Pai publishes no curriculum for level 39, so what appears above is drawn from the classical stage this band corresponds to — the gestation of the immortal embryo — shi yue huai tai (十月懷胎), the ten months — and from the shape the Mo Pai literature implies for the "The Yang Shen" band. It is a map of the territory that tradition describes, written by this archive and not taken from the lineage.

Practice

Reconstructed from the mu yu (沐浴) material — "bathing". At fixed points in the firing schedule the fire is withdrawn entirely and the work is left alone. The classical texts place these at the cardinal positions of the cycle and treat them as no less technical than the active phases.

Signs and effects

Over-application of will is said to destroy what is being grown.

How it is tested

Not published. Teacher-verified, as at every level below — and unverifiable here in a second sense, since the classical account below is not Mo Pai's.

Obstacles

Diligence, which at this stage is the failure. The commentaries return again and again to the practitioner who cannot stop attending, and describe the result as an embryo cooked rather than carried.

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.
The Zhong-Lü corpus — The Tang–Song material attributed to Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin: the first systematic step-by-step internal method, and the source of the ten months, the three years and the nine years.
The Wuzhen pian — Zhang Boduan's verse classic of 1075, the central text of the Southern lineage — and the sharpest classical source on the difference between the yin shen and the yang shen.
Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.