The Yang Shen · 陽神 · yang shen
Level 45: Nursing
Three years of "suckling" the emerged spirit body.
Description
Three years of "suckling" the emerged spirit body. The classical prescription; the emerged shen is treated as an infant.
This entry is a reconstruction. Mo Pai publishes no curriculum for level 45, 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 "three years of suckling" — san nian bu ru. The emerged spirit body is treated in the texts as an infant: it is fed, kept close, and not permitted to go far, and the practitioner's own practice for the period is described as its nursing.
Signs and effects
- The classical prescription; the emerged shen is treated as an infant.
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
- Miscarriage, in the texts' own word. Emission, a violent emotion or a shock during gestation is said to end it, and to end it in a way that cannot simply be restarted.
- Premature emergence. The spirit body is said to be let out too early by practitioners impatient for the sign, and to be unable to return.
- The mo jing (魔境), the demonic states: visions, voices and temptations that the corpus treats as a predictable feature of this stage rather than as an interruption of it. They are to be neither believed nor fought.
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- Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.