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The Taoist I Ching
The Taoist I Ching
Cleary’s translation of Liu I-ming’s eighteenth-century Taoist commentary on the I Ching — the text that reads the hexagrams not as divinatory answers but as stages of inner alchemical cultivation. Liu I-ming (1734–1821) was a Complete Reality school Taoist whose commentary re-reads the Yi as a manual of neidan, inner alchemy, with each hexagram registering a specific cultivational task.
Liu I-ming’s testimony, which Cleary translates in the preface, is direct: “after he had met genuine teachers following years of fruitless search, ‘all my doubts disappeared’” (Cleary 1986). The commentary proceeds by Taoist logic rather than Confucian harmonization. Revolution (hexagram 49) is read as “conquering the ego and returning to propriety, getting rid of falsehood and maintaining truthfulness, burning away all the pollution of conditioning and bringing to light the true essence of the primal unified awareness, reaching this state, returning to the fundamental” (Cleary 1986). The hexagrams are stages on the way to what Taoist alchemy calls the spirit body returned to its source.
The book is the primary support for the iching-as-spiritual-alchemy thread and the Eastern counterpart of the Hermetic-alchemical texts at the Western end of the Seba spine. Its convergence with Jung’s reading of the Secret of the Golden Flower is explicit: Jung treats Chinese inner alchemy and Western alchemy as parallel articulations of the individuation process, and Liu I-ming’s I Ching commentary is the classical Chinese form of the same work.