CINNABAR LIBRARY AND RESEARCH NOTES
- Mar 9
- 5 min read
A View into the Alchemist’s Tower
Issue 1
by Prof. Dr. Dan KJ Vercammen
Last year’s move to France included organizing the transport of our Chinese library. In fact, the thousands of booksmade up the major part of our ten-tonne move. Building book cabinets and shelves took us a while, but last week we were able to fill the shelves and create order in the chaotic collection of cardboard boxes full of precious writings.
In this article I take you into my research tower and lift the veil of what I keep myself occupied with. Chinese traditions(read my blog post on traditions and lineages) tend to write down the essentials of their teachings and knowledge, so they can be passed down to future generations. Taoist traditions are no exception, even if Taoism is called the “teaching without words”. So, if you want to understand Taoism, you need to read and study the writings to supplement your practices. And you also need a “bridge”, provided by your teacher(s), to introduce you to the secrets of the texts (especially if you don’t read classical Chinese). (S)he shows you how to understand the texts, not just read the characters.
The texts are seen as “threads”, 經 jing. Jing literally are the main threads of a fabric; they connect the parts, sustain the whole, and maintain its existence. But they are used metaphorically for important, continuous things, such as texts, that are transmitted from one person to another or from one generation to another.
The representatives of a tradition can be seen as the possessors and even weavers of the fabric. They contribute to the texts by producing new texts or, more commonly, by writing commentaries on the texts. And they are responsible for the survival of the texts and their contents, i.e. they do all that is necessary to preserve them, and this means that they also teach the things discussed in the texts and do whatever is necessary to make students grasp what is written. Hence the image of the bridge for such a person.
A stone bridge used to lead to the premises where we live, now long gone. There is still an imaginary bridge linking our somewhat remote home to the rest of our small village. There is a strong feeling of connection and belonging between our neighbors and us. There is no literal bridge our students need to cross to reach us, but there should be a sense of connection to the tradition by seeing me as the connector.
Now that the books are again accessible to me, I leave behind the research-less period and pick up the “thread” again of researching the texts, translating and commenting on them, and making them available to our students.
In these blog posts, I’ll keep you posted about what I’m doing, preparing, reading, researching, and so on.
I’ve named this kind of post “Cinnabar Library and Research Notes”. It stands for what we also call TASC, the Taoist Alchemical Studies Center. Our main focus is what the Chinese alchemists call “danshu 丹術”: cinnabar arts or alchemical practice.
Therefore, it is appropriate to give our library room the name “Cinnabar Library” (dan tushufang 丹圖書房).
Mind you, there is much more to our library, as it contains a great number of books on martial arts, qigong, history of China, anthropology, Chinese philosophy, Chinese fine arts, etc. It actually reflects what, to use a Chinese expression, I have in my belly (meaning what I study, embody, and memorize).
The character we use for a room (fang 房), as in the above-mentioned tushufang, consists of a part representing a kind of roof structure with underneath the character fang 方 — from which the whole character borrows its sound — but which also means “square” or “rectangular” (rooms usually are of that kind), “side”, and “direction”.
You could say a room shows you the direction or purpose for which it is meant. It also keeps you “within the square”: you do what you need to do there.
In the ancient Chinese view of the universe — Heaven and Earth, as the Chinese say — you can’t have squareness without roundness. Yinyang, of course. Earth is represented as a square and Heaven is seen as round.
Our library and research room combines the Heaven and Earth shapes: the square library area gives access to my round research room. A fine motivating surrounding for me to stay focused on Yinyang as the source of Taoist philosophy and practices, as I move from the library to my little research snug and back.
Every subject present in my library will pop up in the blog posts in some way or other; sometimes only as a source (e.g. history can provide background information about the Chinese period in which an alchemical text was written), sometimes as a real subject on its own.
If I say that now there is order in the chaos of lots of boxes full of books, it does not mean that all is ready for me to dive into deep research. So, my essential task in the coming period will be to simplify my investigations by, for instance, adding labels to Chinese book boxes.
Chinese book boxes? Yes, our library contains traditional Chinese book collections.
The Chinese used beautiful boxes made out of cardboard or wood, covered in cloth (usually embroidered silk for precious books), that are closed by (unfortunately) ivory teeth or pegs. In those boxes are the books: thin, folded double pages bound by thread, and with a front and back cover (usually blue). To the front cover is glued a paper label with the title of the text or text collection.
These book boxes are stored horizontally and one box is placed on top of another. Unless the books in the boxes have their title written on the lower edge of the books, there is no way of knowing what a book box contains.
So, I need to remake labels with the titles, which I’ll hang from the boxes (the old ones have faded). I don’t object and don’t find it a waste of time, because it allows me to take a good look at the contents again and refresh my memory of the texts. My predecessors had to do the same. You need to know your subject(s) through and through, and this is another way to work on the fabric of the tradition.
After that, a lot of research and writing work is planned as we get closer to the start of the two academies I’m involved in: the Taoist Lifestyle Academy and the Academy of the Free Mind (Amsterdam). Texts to check, translations to make, publications to prepare, courses and lectures to revise or create…
You and we have a bunch to look forward to.
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