The Kinship of the Three
| Cantong qi | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 參同契 | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 参同契 | ||||||||||||
| Hanyu Pinyin | Cāntóng qì | ||||||||||||
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| Zhouyi cantong qi | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 周易參同契 | ||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 周易参同契 | ||||||||||||
| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhōuyì cāntóng qì | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Cāntóng qì |
| Wade–Giles | Ts'an1 T'ung2 Ch'i4 |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Jyutping | Caam1 tung4 kai3 |
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhōuyì cāntóng qì |
| Wade–Giles | Chou1 Yi4 Ts'an1 T'ung2 Ch'i4 |
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 a well-established traditional view, 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. Besides this one, there has been, within the Taoist tradition, a second way of reading the text: in agreement with its title, the Cantong qi is concerned not with one, but with three major subjects, namely Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), and Alchemy, and joins them to one another into a single doctrine.
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 (豐惠) in present-day Shangyu, about 80 km (50 mi) 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). According to this record (trans. Campany, 2002:368-69), Wei Boyang was the son of a high-ranking family. He and three disciples retired to a mountain and compounded an elixir. When they tested it on a dog, the dog died. Despite this, Wei Boyang and one of his disciples decided to ingest the compound, and they also died. After the two other disciples had left, Wei Boyang came to life again. He poured some of the elixir into the mouths of the dead disciple and the dog, and they also revived. Thus Wei Boyang and his faithful disciple attained immortality. With an abrupt change in tone and language, the account ends with a final paragraph, which mentions Wei Boyang’s authorship of the Cantong qi and of another work entitled The Five Categories (Wu xianglei 五相類), criticizing at the same time those who read the Cantong qi as a work concerned with cosmology instead of alchemy.
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