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Concept
Cantong qi
Summary
The Cantong qi is deemed to be the earliest book on alchemy in China. The title has been variously translated as Kinship of the Three, Akinness of the Three, Triplex Unity, The Seal of the Unity of the Three, and in several other ways. The full title of the text is Zhouyi cantong qi, which can be translated as, for example, The Kinship of the Three, in Accordance with the Book of Changes.
According to the traditional view, well-established in China, the text was composed by Wei Boyang in the mid-second century CE, and deals entirely with alchemy—in particular, with Neidan, or Internal Alchemy. Besides this one, there has been, within the Taoist tradition, a second way of reading the text: in agreement with its title, the Cantong qi is concerned not with one, but with three major subjects, namely Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), and Alchemy, and joins them to one another into a single doctrine.
For about a millennium, the authorship of the Cantong qi has been attributed to Wei Boyang, who was said to have been a southern alchemist from the Shangyu district of Kuaiji in the region of Jiangnan, corresponding to Fenghui (豐惠) in present-day Shangyu, about east of Hangzhou.
The best-known account of Wei Boyang is found in the Shenxian zhuan (Biographies of the Divine Immortals), a work attributed to Ge Hong (283–343). According to this record (trans. Campany, 2002:368-69), Wei Boyang was the son of a high-ranking family. He and three disciples retired to a mountain and compounded an elixir. When they tested it on a dog, the dog died. Despite this, Wei Boyang and one of his disciples decided to ingest the compound, and they also died. After the two other disciples had left, Wei Boyang came to life again. He poured some of the elixir into the mouths of the dead disciple and the dog, and they also revived. Thus Wei Boyang and his faithful disciple attained immortality.
Official source
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