The Daoist (Taoist) master, alchemist, and pharmacologist Tao Hongjing was born in 456 near modern Nanjing. He served in various positions at the courts of the Liu Song and Qi dynasties until 492. In that year he retired to Mount Mao, the seat of Shangqing or Supreme Purity, a Daoist tradition based on meditation and visualization techniques. The retreat he built on the mountain was to remain the center of his activities until his death in 536.
After his initiation into Daoism around 485, Tao set out to recover the original manuscripts, dating from about one century before, that contained the revelations at the source of the Shangqing tradition. Tao authenticated and edited the manuscripts, and wrote extended commentaries on them. This undertaking resulted in two texts completed in ca. 500, the Zhengao (Declarations of the Perfected) and the Dengzhen yinjue(Concealed Instructions on the Ascent to Perfection, only partially preserved). These and other works make Tao Hongjing the first...
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Honzōkyō shūchū (Bencao jing jizhu; Collected Commentaries on the Shennong bencao). Reconstruction by Mori Risshi (ca. 1850), reedited and published by Okanishi Tameto. Osaka: Minami Osaka Insatsu Center, 1972.
Needham, Joseph, et al. Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. VI. Biology and Botanical Technology. Part 1. Botany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Robinet, Isabelle. Taoist Meditation. The Mao‐shan Tradition of Great Purity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Strickmann, Michel. On the Alchemy of T'ao Hung‐ching. Facets of Taoism. Essays in Chinese Religion. Ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. 123–92.
Unschuld, Paul. Medicine in China; A History of Pharmaceutics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986.
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Pregadio, F. (2008). Tao Hongjing. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9389
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