Louis Komjathy

The Daoist Mystical Body

Specific Daoist adherents and communities emphasize the importance of corporeality and physicality, specifically one’s body as the Dao as sacred locale. But the “Daoist body,” as those who are familiar with the work of such influential scholars as Kristofer Schipper, Livia Kohn, and Catherine Despeux know, is multidimensional. It is not simply the anatomical and physiological given of contemporary biomedicine. In the case of certain Daoist movements, one’s body is understood to have subtle, esoteric dimensions that become activated through Daoist religious praxis. Here the body itself becomes the means through which the Dao manifests its own self- unfolding, and the means by which the Daoist adept experiences the Dao as numinous presences. This is what I mean by the “Daoist mystical body.”

Ordinary Human Being

The early Quanzhen adepts made a distinction between the ordinary human being and those engaging in religious training. The four primary Quanzhen views of self may be identified: Self as decaying corpse; Self as psychosomatic process, including osmological affinities and influences; Self as divine endowment and spiritual abode; and Self as alchemical crucible. The first was to be overcome through Quanzhen religious praxis, while the latter three became actualized through dedicated training. This chapter sets the foundation for a larger cross-cultural and comparative perspective. Every transformative technique or training regimen embodies, quite literally, a specific view of self. According to the early Quanzhen adherents, ordinary human beings are habituated, turbid, and self-disrupting entities. The decision to leave the mundane world and embrace a religious way of life, to dedicate oneself to a movement from habituation to self-transformation, was justified in early Quanzhen Daoism.Keywords: alchemical crucible; decaying corpse; early Quanzhen; human being; psychosomatic process; religious training; spiritual abode