The Neijing Tu
The Neijing Tu (Chart of the Inner Landscape) is a Daoist body map engraved on a stone stele at Beijing's White Cloud Temple in 1886. The inscription says it was copied from an older silk scroll, but no evidence fixes that exemplar 1,700 years earlier. The diagram renders the body as a cultivated landscape: mountain peaks in the head, a winding spinal route, an iron ox ploughing the lower field, and figures drawn from cosmology and internal-alchemical practice. It is best understood as a late-Qing synthesis of older traditions, not an anatomical chart or a securely dated second-century image.
The Body as Landscape
The Neijing Tu does not present the body as a dissection. It overlays bodily sites with a sacred geography of mountains, passes, stars, fields, animals, and working figures. The head evokes Kunlun; the lower abdomen becomes a field cultivated by an iron ox; the spinal route is read through gates and waterways. This is a map for contemplative practice: the body understood as a microcosm to be cultivated, not a claim that its landscape corresponds to anatomical structures.
The Waterwheel and the Pump
The diagram's waterways and the paired figures working a treadwheel have been read in relation to the Waterwheel or Microcosmic Orbit: an internal-alchemical circulation linking channels and bodily centres. The imagery belongs to a technical religious vocabulary, not a literal hydraulic mechanism. The extant stele was engraved in 1886. It recombines older ideas, but the age of the silk model named in its inscription is unknown, so the former 1,700-year pedigree cannot be stated as fact.
From External Physics to Internal Experience
Everything before this archive entry has treated energy as something measured from outside. The Neijing Tu turns the instrument inward. Cowherd and Weaving Girl inhabit the body; fields are ploughed; furnaces refine; celestial patterns descend into flesh. These are not anatomical structures or experimentally measured energy channels. They are a Daoist vocabulary for disciplined inner transformation — a body made large enough to contain a cosmos, then cultivated from within.
Artifact Profile
- Artifact ID
- 006-005
- Discipline
- philosophical
- Cultural context
- Chinese
- Collection terms
- daoism · qi · alchemy · anatomy · microcosm
About the visual
- Visual type
- The Human Archives artwork
- Authored caption
- Ink rubbing of the Neijing Tu stele, rendering a Daoist inner-alchemical body through the visual language of mountains, waterways, fields, stars, and cultivation.
Sources and provenance
- Komjathy — Mapping the Daoist Body: The Neijing tu in History
- Wang — The Neijing Tu: A Daoist Diagram of the Internal Circulation of Man
- Baldrian-Hussein — history of Daoist inner alchemy
- Despeux — Chinese Inner Alchemy and Body Maps
- Komjathy, L. (2008). Mapping the Daoist Body: The Neijing tu in History. Journal of Daoist Studies.
- Presentation version
- f8d550d04a34f025
- Recorded review
- 2026-08-30
Revision and release records are shown where available. This page does not imply every historical edit has a review record.
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