Book Note

Fabrizio Pregadio. Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xvii+367 pp. $60.

Reviewed by Hilary A. Smith

Most scholars of Chinese alchemy have focused on two phases: the "external" alchemy (waidan) fashionable from about the 7th century to the 10th, in which alchemists cooked metallic mixtures in crucibles, and the "internal" form (neidan) that gradually supplanted waidan. Neidan was meant to achieve the same result by generating the elixir inside the practitioner's own body through physical discipline and meditation. Pregadio traces the rise and fall of an earlier Chinese alchemy that appears in scriptures from the 3rd to 6th centuries and was associated with the Great Clarity tradition of Daoism (or Taoism). Readers educated in chemistry will enjoy the author's annotated translations of these scriptures, which specify the steps for producing elixirs that would protect the successful practitioner from aging, injury, and demons and help him communicate with deities. Great Clarity alchemy spread quickly in southern China, but by the 7th century, proponents of newer, more powerful Daoist lineages there demoted the status of Great Clarity scriptures and reinterpreted alchemy as a way to understand the cosmos rather than to join the heavenly bureaucracy.