The Secret of the Golden Flower

The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi) is the Chinese inner-alchemical text, probably of Quanzhen Daoist origin and of uncertain composition date, that Richard Wilhelm translated into German in 1929 and published with a substantial commentary by Jung. The encounter with the text — in which Jung recognized, in the meditative practice of the “circulation of the light,” the same structural dynamic he had been sketching from his own dreams and from the mandalas of his patients — is one of the decisive moments in the formation of his mature psychology.

Jung’s commentary, later expanded into the book Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, names the text as an Eastern articulation of what Western alchemy formulated in its own idiom: the circulation of psychic energy around a centering image, the mandala as the phenomenology of the self, the goal of the work as the constitution of a subtle spiritual body. The encounter with the Golden Flower is the occasion on which Jung first articulates the concept of the Self as the organizing archetype of wholeness. See richard-wilhelm and alchemy.

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• richard-wilhelm
• carl-jung
• mandala