The Secret of the Golden Flower
The Secret of the Golden Flower
Translation by Thomas Cleary
The Secret of the Golden Flower was written in the late 1600s. It is a Taoist book, first translated into German by a missionary to China, Richard Wilhelm, in 1929. Wilhelm’s version, now deemed incomplete and inaccurate, was read by his friend and famous German psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung was sufficiently influenced by the book to write an extensive introduction for Wilhelm’s book.
Cleary’s translation is based on the complete original work. What follows is a short excerpt from his introduction, which provides some context for the book and its central themes.
“The Secret of the Golden Flower is a lay manual of Buddhist and Taoist methods for clarifying the mind. A distillation of the inner psychoactive elements in ancient spiritual classics, it describes a natural way to mental freedom practiced in China for many centuries.
The golden flower symbolizes the quintessence of the paths of Buddhism and Taoism. Gold stands for the light, the light of the mind itself; the flower represents the blossoming, or opening up, of the light of the mind. Thus the expression is emblematic of the basic awakening of the real self and its hidden potential.
In Taoist terms, the first goal of the Way is to restore the original God-given spirit and become a self-realized human being. In Buddhist terms, a realized human being is someone conscious of the original mind, or the real self, as it is in its spontaneous natural state, independent of environmental conditioning.
The original spirit is also called the celestial mind, or the natural mind. A mode of awareness subtler and more direct than thought or imagination, it is central to the blossoming of mind. The Secret of the Golden Flower is devoted to the recovery and refinement of the original spirit.
This manual contains a number of helpful meditation techniques, but its central method is deeper than a form of meditation. Using neither idea nor image, it is a process of getting right to the root source of awareness itself. The aim of this exercise is to free the mind from arbitrary and unnecessary limitations imposed upon it by habitual fixation on its own contents. With this liberation, ,Taoists say, the conscious individual becomes a "partner of creation" rather than a prisoner of creation.
The experience of the blossoming of the golden flower is likened to light in the sky, a sky of awareness vaster than images, thoughts, and feelings, an unimpeded space containing everything without being filled. Thus it opens up an avenue to an endless source of intuition, creativity and inspiration. Once this power of mental awakening has been developed, it can be renewed and deepened without limit.”
— Thomas Cleary
The Secret of the Golden Flower, HarperCollins Publishers, 1991; Pages 1-2