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 well-established view 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). In agreement with its title, the Cantong qi is concerned with three major subjects, Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), and Alchemy.
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 (Chinese: 豐惠) in present-day Shangyu, about 80km (50miles) 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). The work mentions Wei Boyang’s authorship of the Cantong qi and of another work entitled The Five Categories, criticizing at the same time those who read the Cantong qi as a work concerned with cosmology instead of alchemy.[1]
Several centuries later, Peng Xiao (?-955) gives a different portrait of Wei Boyang in his commentary, dating from 947 CE.[2] With Peng Xiao, Wei Boyang becomes a learned master who is competent in prose and poetry, is versed in the esoteric texts, cultivates the Dao “in secret and silence,” and nourishes himself “in Empty Non-being.” At the end of his account, moreover, Peng Xiao gives further details on the early history of the text, saying:
Elsewhere in his work, moreover, Peng Xiao reveals a different view on the authorship of the Cantong qi:
While Wei Boyang was a southern alchemist, Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were representatives of the cosmological traditions of northern China. Xu was a native of Qingzhou, in the present-day region of Shandong. His disciple, Chunyu, was a "master of the methods" (fangshi) specialized in cosmology, prognostication, and the related sciences.
Sources prior to Peng Xiao show that Xu Congshi and Chunyu Shutong were originally believed to be the main authors of the Cantong qi.[3] [4] [5] To give one example, an anonymous commentary to the Cantong qi, dating from ca. 700, is explicit about the roles played by Xu Congshi, Chunyu Shutong, and Wei Boyang in the creation of the text, saying:
Elsewhere, the same commentary ascribes the Cantong qi to Xu Congshi alone. For example, the notes on the verse, "He contemplates on high the manifest signs of Heaven" (「上觀顯天符」), state: "The True Man Xu Congshi looked above and contemplated the images of the trigrams; thus he determined Yin and Yang."[6]
The passages quoted above reflect contrasting views on the authorship of the Cantong qi, between those who maintained that the text pertained in the first place to the northern cosmological traditions, and those who saw it as a product of the southern alchemical traditions. Taking this point into account, it has been suggested that the final paragraph in the Shenxian zhuans account may have been added at a later time to further the second view.
With the possible exception of Ge Hong, the first author known to have attributed the composition of the whole Cantong qi to Wei Boyang is Liu Zhigu, a Taoist priest and alchemical practitioner who was received at court by Emperor Xuanzong around 750 CE.[3] Two centuries later, another alchemist, Peng Xiao, cites and praises Liu Zhigu’s discussion, and becomes the first major author to promote the same view. With the development of the Neidan traditions, this view became established. Since then, there has been virtually unanimous consent that the Cantong qi was not only transmitted, but also entirely composed, within the context of the alchemical tradition.
The three subjects mentioned in the Cantong qi raises inquiries into the dates of each of the respective portions.
(1) Cosmology. The cosmological views of the Cantong qi are rooted in the system of the Book of Changes. Moreover, commentators (e.g. Peng Xiao and Zhu Xi) and scholars (e.g. Yang Xiaolei and Meng Naichang) have suggested that the Cantong qi is also related to the so-called "apocrypha" (weishu 緯書), a Han-dynasty corpus of cosmological and divinatory texts that is now almost entirely lost. While this relation has often been taken as evidence of a Han date of the Cantong qi, other scholars (e.g., Fukui Kōjun) have suggested that a work entitled Cantong qi may have existed during the Han period, but if it did exist, it was not the same as the present-day text.
One further point deserving attention in this context is the fact that two passages of the Cantong qi are similar to passages found in the Yijing commentary written by Yu Fan (164–233), a major representative of the cosmological tradition. Suzuki Yoshijirō suggested that Yu Fan drew on the Cantong qi for his commentary on the Yijing. Pregadio has suggested, vice versa, that the Cantong qi presents a poetical rendition of Yu Fan’s passages. If this suggestion is correct, the cosmological portions of the Cantong qi were composed, or at least were completed, after the end of the Han period.
(2) Alchemy. Among the large number of Chinese scholars who have expressed their views about the date of the Cantong qi, the opinions of Chen Guofu (who was for several decades the main Chinese expert in this field) are especially worthy of attention. As he pointed out, no extant alchemical work dating from the Han period is based on the doctrinal principles of the Cantong qi, or uses its cosmological model and its language. Pregadio's views are even more radical in this regard: "First, neither the Cantong qi nor its cosmological and alchemical models play any visible influence on extant Waidan texts dating not only from the Han period, but also from the whole Six Dynasties (i.e., until the sixth century inclusive). . . . Second, the same can be said with even more confidence about Neidan, since no text belonging to this branch of Chinese alchemy has existed—or has left traces of its existence—until the eighth century".
The earliest explicit mention of the Cantong qi in relation to alchemy was pointed out by Arthur Waley in the early 1930s. It is found in a piece by the poet Jiang Yan (444–505), who mentions the Cantong qi in a poem devoted to an immortal named Qin Gao. The relevant lines of the poem read, in Arthur Waley’s translation:
(3) Taoism. The "Taoist" portions of the Cantong qi make a distinction between the paths of "superior virtue" (shangde) and "inferior virtue" (xiade)—i.e., the paths of non-doing (wuwei) and of alchemy. This distinction is drawn from the perspective of the former path, and conforms to principles set forth in the Daode jing and elaborated on in the Zhuangzi. If this point is taken into account, it appears evident that those who gave the Cantong qi its present shape could only be the nameless representatives of the Taoist traditions of Jiangnan, who had essential ties to the doctrines of the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi.
Moreover, as it has been pointed out by Fabrizio Pregadio, the Taoist portions of the Cantong qi contain passages that criticize the Taoist methods of meditation on the inner deities. Despite this, the Cantong qi draws some of its terminology from texts pertaining to Taoist meditation, and in particular from the "Inner” version of the Scripture of the Yellow Court (Huangting jing), a work belonging to the Shangqing revelations of 364–70. Since the shared terms are evenly distributed among the different parts of the Cantong qi, it seems clear that an anonymous "hand"—the collective hand of the southern Taoist traditions—revised the text, probably after the end of the fourth century.
On the basis of the above evidence, Pregadio concludes that "the Cantong qi was composed in different stages, perhaps from the Han period onward, and did not reach a form substantially similar to the present one before ca. 450, and possibly one or even two centuries later."
In most redactions, the Cantong qi is divided into 3 parts. Parts 1 and 2 contain the main text. With the exception of a few short passages in prose, they are written in 4- or 5-character verses (the 5-character verses prevail in the first part, while the second part is almost entirely made of 4-character verses). Several poems written in either meter mirror one another in subject matter and vocabulary.
Part 3 is made of several additional compositions: (1) An "Epilogue" ("Luanci" 亂辭), mostly written according to the saoti 騷體 prosody, so called after the Lisao (Encountering Sorrow) piece in the Songs of Chu (Chuci). (2) The "Song of the Tripod" ("Dingqi ge" 鼎器歌), a poem in three-character verses, another prosodic form not found in the first two parts. (3) A final section—entitled in different ways by different commentators—stating that the teachings of the Cantong qi are based on the Book of Changes, Taoism, and alchemy, and containing a final poem in which the author describes himself and his work.
In some redactions, moreover, the third part is concluded by an anonymous postface entitled "Eulogium" ("Zanxu" 讚序).
In the early sixteenth century, a new version of the Cantong qi, anachronistically called Guwen cantong qi, or Ancient Text of the Cantong qi, was created on the basis of a complete rearrangement of the scripture. This version divides the sections in verses of 4 characters from those in verses of 5 characters, following a suggestion that was first given by Yu Yan in his commentary of 1284. Yu Yan refers to this as a sudden realization that he had after he finished to write his work: