The Secret of Unified Triplicity 抱一函三秘诀

Attributed to Compiled by Jin Yueyan, inheritor of the orthodox Quanzhen tradition; Transmitted by Huang Gongwang, the Great Fool, inheritor of Quanzhen

Huang Gongwang, courtesy name the Great Fool Taoist, was a renowned painter of the Yuan Dynasty and a follower of the Quanzhen Dao.

The Secret of Unified Triplicity

This work is a single volume, included in the Alchemy Section of the Dongxuan Section of The Daozang.

The book elaborates in detail on the way of Internal Alchemy cultivation, spanning from the formation of heaven and earth and the conception of the human body, to the refinement of the Jade Elixir and the Returned Elixir, and finally to the transcendence of the mortal body and spiritual transfiguration. Its doctrines are based on the Neo-Confucian diagrammatic studies of the I Ching in the Song Dynasty and Zhang Boduan’s internal alchemy theories, and interspersed with more than ten diagrams, including the innate and acquired Eight Trigrams diagrams, the diagram of the fifty-five numbers of heaven and earth, the diagram of the numbers of creation and formation, the diagram of the reversed Five Elements, the diagram of the mutual application of Kan and Li, and the diagram of the natural ascent and descent of yin and yang from beginning to end. Integrating mathematical principles with alchemical theories, it forms a distinctive school of thought of its own.