The Circulation of the Light, and a Legendary Attribution

The Secret of the Golden Flower is a Chinese neidan, or internal alchemy, text describing a meditative practice usually rendered in English as the circulation of the light, aimed at refining the practitioner's vital energies to cultivate an immortal spiritual body, transmitted within Quanzhen Daoist lineages and traditionally attributed to the semi legendary Tang dynasty immortal Lu Dongbin.

Modern textual scholarship regards this attribution as almost certainly a pious legend rather than a historical fact, since the text as it survives shows signs of a considerably later compilation, likely drawing together older oral and manuscript material during the Ming or Qing period rather than descending intact from a single named Tang dynasty author. The work presents its meditative instructions in dense, symbolically layered language characteristic of the neidan genre, in which physiological, alchemical and cosmological vocabulary overlap deliberately, so that a term can refer simultaneously to a bodily process, an internal alchemical operation and a cosmic principle, a density that makes the text difficult to read without guidance from within its own transmission lineage. Later Daoist and Chinese textual scholarship has questioned several details of the traditional transmission story.