Huang Fulong(黄辅隆): The Taoist Who Drank from His Own Spring
Paul Peng
He did not mine cinnabar. He did not smelt gold. He did not climb to the stars or hold a mirror to the moon. He swallowed. Huang Fulong (黄辅隆) was a man of Nanyang during the Eastern Han. The Outer Biography of Emperor Wu of the Han preserves his name and his practice in a few compressed lines. He studied under a master named Liu Jing and received the secret techniques of cultivating the body. What he did with those techniques was so simple, so inward, so entirely reliant on the resources of his own mouth and his own breath, that it stands as one of the quietest and most radical practices in the early Taoist tradition. He drank from a spring that no one else could see. The spring was inside him.
The Spring Within
The Outer Biography records Huang Fulong’s primary practice in three words: he regularly took jade spring water. Jade spring water—yuquan (玉泉)—is not water that flows from a mountain rock. It is saliva. The fluid that gathers beneath the tongue, clear and slightly thick, produced by the body itself, available at every moment without cost or extraction or danger. In Taoist physiology, this fluid is not a waste product. It is a distillate of the kidney qi, the primordial essence that rises from the lower body and condenses in the mouth as the tangible form of the body’s deepest vitality. The practice of swallowing it—yan jin (咍津), “swallowing the liquid”—is one of the oldest documented techniques in Taoist internal cultivation. The Laozi itself hints at it, in its imagery of the infant who “can cry all day without becoming hoarse, because its harmony is perfect.” The infant does not drink water. It drinks its own saliva, its own inner fluid, and it thrives. Huang Fulong made this infant practice the centre of his adult cultivation. He did not seek rare minerals. He did not travel to distant mountains. He sat, and breathed, and gathered the fluid in his mouth, and swallowed it, and felt it descend through his throat into the centre of his body. Day after day. Year after year. The spring was always flowing. He only had to learn to drink from it.
The Three Worms
But there was an obstacle. The Outer Biography says that Huang Fulong took the jade spring water to eliminate the three corpse worms. The three worms—sanchong (三虫), also called sanshi (三尸)—are spiritual entities that live inside the human body, one in the upper dantian in the head, one in the middle dantian in the chest, and one in the lower dantian in the abdomen. The worms feed on the body’s vital energies. And on the gengshen day—the fifty-seventh day of the sexagenary cycle, which occurs every sixty days—they wait until the person is asleep, then ascend to the heavens and report that person’s transgressions to the Director of Destinies. The Director shortens the person’s life accordingly. The jade spring water, swallowed regularly, was believed to starve these worms. The fluid was too pure for them to absorb. It passed through the body’s three centres and flushed them clean. A person who had eliminated the three worms was no longer under surveillance. His lifespan was his own. Huang Fulong was not merely cultivating health. He was conducting a quiet war within his own body, an exorcism without ritual or talisman, using only the substance that his own mouth produced.
The Kidneys, the Teeth, and the Vital Breath
Once the worms were gone, the jade spring water could do its deeper work. The Outer Biography lists the effects in a sequence that reveals the logic of Huang Fulong’s practice: strengthen the kidneys and teeth, regulate qi and refine essence. In Chinese medicine, the kidneys store the jing (精)—the essence that is the foundation of all vitality, the substance that is depleted by ageing, illness, and excess. The teeth are the outward signs of the kidney’s strength. By swallowing the jade spring water—the condensed form of the kidney’s own essence—Huang Fulong was recycling vitality within a closed circuit. The kidneys produced the essence. The essence rose to the mouth as saliva. The saliva was swallowed and returned to the kidneys. The circuit was self-sustaining. Regulating qi and refining essence was the next stage. This is the foundation of Taoist inner alchemy—the body’s own fluids and energies as the only ingredients, the practitioner as both the alchemist and the furnace.
The Mica Capstone
Alongside the jade spring water, Huang Fulong took mica pills—yunmu wan (云母丸). Mica is the substance that Pei Xuanren had consumed as cloud-fungus and floral dew, the shimmering mineral that the Baopuzi placed among the highest grades of elixir. But Pei Xuanren had eaten mica in its raw form, gathered from the mountains and consumed with dew. Huang Fulong took it as a pill—processed, compounded, measured. The wan (丸) form implies a deliberate dosage, a pharmaceutical preparation rather than a wild harvest. The mica pills were the outer complement to the inner work of the jade spring. The saliva nourished the body from within, recycling its own essence. The mica nourished the body from without, supplying the mineral lightness that would eventually allow the flesh to ascend. The Outer Biography records the result: he had a light and healthy body with a vigorous complexion. “Light and healthy body” is shen qing ti jian (身轻体健)—the characteristic sign of the Taoist adept who has begun the process of transformation. The body that will eventually become light enough to ascend begins by losing its heaviness.
The Inner and the Outer
Huang Fulong and Yin Gui form a matched pair of Taoist healers, but in reverse. Yin Gui wore ten bamboo tubes of elixir around his waist and gave medicine to the sick. His practice was outward. He took what he had refined and poured it into others. Huang Fulong took no disciples. He gave no medicine. His practice was entirely inward. He took what his own body produced and poured it back into himself. Both models are necessary. The Taoist tradition has always included the physician who treats the community and the solitary who treats himself. They are practising the same art on different subjects. Yin Gui’s bamboo tubes and Huang Fulong’s jade spring water are the same medicine, administered in different directions.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Huang Fulong represents a vital dimension of Taoist practice that is often invisible: the cultivation of the body’s own resources in the midst of ordinary life. The Zhengyi tradition does not require its practitioners to retreat to a mountain for forty years. Most Zhengyi priests live in communities, serve parishes, and perform liturgies while maintaining families and households. For such practitioners, the extreme alchemies of Mao Bodao’s furnace or Peng Zong’s three-day breath are not realistic options. But the jade spring water is always available. Swallowing the saliva, regulating the breath, refining the essence—these are practices that can be done in a quiet room after the liturgy is finished, or in the early morning before the day’s work begins. They require no rare substances and no dangerous techniques. They require only attention and persistence. Huang Fulong is the patron of the everyday Taoist practitioner—the person who cannot leave the world but who can still cultivate the inner spring, who cannot build a furnace but who can still swallow the light that the body itself produces.
What the Man Who Drank from Himself Left Behind
Huang Fulong left no writings. No disciples are recorded. His name appears in the Outer Biography of Emperor Wu of the Han and in the Comprehensive Mirror of True Immortals, and then disappears. But his practice has never disappeared. The technique of swallowing the jade spring is still taught in Taoist temples and qigong studios throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The war against the three worms is still being fought in the bodies of practitioners who have learned to starve the parasites with their own purity. He was a man of Nanyang who learned a secret from a master named Liu Jing. He drank from a spring that no one could see, and it kept him light, kept him strong, kept his teeth in his head and his colour in his cheeks. The spring is still flowing. Anyone can drink from it. Huang Fulong was the first to show that the medicine was already in the mouth, waiting to be swallowed.
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