Taoist Spirit Maps (靈圖, Língtú)

This is a Lingtu, a spirit map, sourced from the Dao Zang Jing, the Daoist canons, said to be a spirit map of the Nine Heavens. Looks kind of familiar, doesn't it? The Nine Sector Law Shu Magic Square? Before you can access the Nine Heavens, according to the text, you first need to pass through the Five Tribulations to achieve transcendence and heightened understanding. Only after passing the Five Tribulations will you have what it takes to navigate the Nine Heavens, armed with this spirit map. Let's take a look at more spirit maps, ones found in the scriptures of the Shang Qing traditional lineage. There's a claim that these date back to the Jin Dynasty, 260 AD to 420 AD, as part of the Orthodox Daoist canons. But this specific book only dates to the Ming Dynasty, in a collection from the National Library of China. They're taken from a set of grimoires or books of methods, Fa Shu. The Fa Shu you're looking at cover Fu talismans, spirit maps, meditation techniques for cultivating stronger qi and occult power, and astral journeying to various spirit realms. Shang Qing is considered one of the historical Orthodox lineages of Daoist magic and mysticism. Shang Qing, often translated to Lineage of the Supreme Clarity, was founded by Wei Hua Cun, a 3rd century government official and woman. She was a Daoist priestess who taught a form of meditation where you'd visualize deities within your body, who would in turn amplify your powers and abilities. Just a quick reminder, the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, is a mythical, maybe or maybe not historical, sovereign of Neolithic China, predating the Shang Dynasty. That's the dynasty the Zhou Dynasty overthrew. That's the dynasty in which we get the I Ching Book of Changes. In terms of a timeline, what dates are we talking about? Oh, I don't know, 2500 BC to 2300 BC, give or take. We're talking before Yu the Great. Remember Yu the Great from previous videos? He's supposedly some far and distant descendant of the Yellow Emperor, and we date the mythic Yu the Great to sometime between the 20th and 23rd century BC. This was the revelation of the He Tu Luo Shu diagrams that helped prevent a second apocalyptic flood from happening, and yes, the He Tu and Luo Shu are also considered a form of spirit map, Ling Tu. So Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, we'll often hear his name dropped in Daoism, especially in Daoist magic, a lot more so than philosophical Daoism. In esoteric Daoism, you have texts like the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canons, Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Emperor's Book of the Mysterious Talismans, Huangdi Yingfujing, Four Books of the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi Sijing. Yeah, he really does get namedropped a lot. This is a spirit map from the Southern Song Dynasty, also sourced from the Dao Zang, the Daoist Canons, scriptures from the Ling Bao tradition. According to the text, this is a talismanic spirit map that reveals to you secret mysteries from the beginning of time, and the true image of change. Render the spirit map in a purple-colored ink, an ink made from the root of the purple grongwell plant known as Zi Cao in Chinese. If you can master true knowledge of this spirit map, you will master the way of life in this world and exert control over all ghosts and spirits. As a Fu talisman, place this facing the northwest, and its power will safeguard your life and livelihood. Spirits, Ling, can read the messages embedded in this image, this spirit map, Ling Tu, and will come to protect you. Purple grongwell root extract is prized and used across East Asia. In Korea. In Japan, it's the Murasaki plant, often used as a prized dye for kimonos. Zi Cao, or purple grongwell root extract, is a powerful healing herb. It fights off viral infections, not to mention its use as a dye or for a luxuriant purple ink. Grongwell root can allegedly slow the signs of aging, and as for its antiviral properties, it contains chikonin, which gives it its purple pigment but also blocks SARS-CoV-2 enzymes from replicating. And this is the same enzyme that the drug Paxlovid targets for treating COVID-19. Just interesting. The only point I'm trying to make here is to show the connection between historically documented medicinal properties and the ceremonial ritual properties ascribed to it for rendering talismans and spirit maps. This is the Die Xian Ling Tu, kinda like a Ouiji or spirit talking board. Translated to English, this is the spirit map of the Butterfly Immortal. It's believed that this spirit map is enlivened or ensouled with Die Xian, the Butterfly Immortal. You place a planchette atop this spirit map and light red candles along the four corners, then invoke the Butterfly Immortal. The immortal spirit enters your body, the one whose hands are atop that planchette, and utilizes your motor functions to move it and dictate out its message. The Ling Tu spirit map acts as a sort of nexus that will allow spirits from the other world to pass through into our physical earthly world. And likewise, we can send our consciousness through the portal that the spirit map opens for us and access the non-material, non-physical spirit world. Ling Tu spirit maps are in effect Jian. Jian means thresholds, in-between chambers that connect you between worlds. And in the most fundamental terms, there are two. The living world, where people exist in reality, is referred to as Yang Jian, the physical world that is attributed to Yang. The realm where spirits dwell is the Yin Jian, the realm of Yin. Spirit maps help us, dwelling in the world of Yang, to pass through and navigate the world of Yin. And likewise, are windows through which those from the world of Yin can have direct access to help us in our world. Through a spirit map, a practitioner can send their consciousness, or super-consciousness, an aspect of themselves through the threshold and enter the realm of gods, immortals, ghosts, and spirits. In kind, an occupant of the spirit realm can send their consciousness, or however you want to call it, through the threshold, and enter physical bodies in the realm of Yang to navigate our world, just as we might navigate theirs. Or at least, so goes the occult philosophy. After ritual consecration of an image or seal of a divine being, that image becomes empowered as a Ling Tu, a painting of a divinity by a practitioner, by one with certain cultivated Qi, has the power to render the painting into a Ling Tu. A Taoist priest or practitioner would invest in original hand-painted scrolls or artwork of their patron gods. Who the artist is would, from a Taoist perspective, matter a lot, because that Qi is getting transferred into the painting and will either increase or obstruct the potency of the Ling Tu. The artist's character, spirituality, and ritual processes during the painting of the divinity are all important points of consideration. The spiritual rationale is, if the divine being doesn't like the Qi of the artist, then nothing you do will empower that painting into a Ling Tu. And it doesn't end there. The painting or illustration also has to undergo a consecration ritual called Kaiguang, opening of the light, for it to become empowered as a Ling Tu. The Ling Tu, or spirit map, is a term you'll find frequently used and referenced throughout Taoist scriptures on magic and mysticism. It's also a bit of a catch-all term, meaning that Ling Tu can refer to quite a wide-ranging variety of diagrams, though the common point of unity here is that it involves connecting two spirit realms by way of some form of writing or drawing. Portraits of deities and immortals can become enlivened, and when they are, they're referred to as a form of Ling Tu. This would be a slightly separate category from statues and figurines of gods. Mural paintings in a temple that have been consecrated and enlivened are also a form of Ling Tu. In the Taoist canons, there is a portfolio of legendary spirit maps passed down from the times of the Yellow Emperor, or so goes the mythology. You can access various astral realms through prescribed methods of meditation or altering your state of consciousness, either by gazing at these spirit diagrams or visualizing a memorized replica of it in your mind's eye. Fu talismans, which is what my second book, The Tao of Craft, was all about, is also a subcategory of Ling Tu when the purpose of the Fu talisman aligns with how we define Ling Tu. So not all Fu talismans are spirit maps, but some Fu talismans are. Here's a schematic Venn diagram of where Fu talismans and spirit maps intersect. When a Fu talisman's purpose is to be a portal bridging our realm and the spirit realm, then it's a form of Ling Tu. Let's learn some Chinese. Ling means spirit or soul, that which is of the realm of Yin, the yin jian. Ling can also mean mysteries, as in esoteric mysteries. By the way, look at the base of the word Ling. By now, many of you who've been watching my videos recognize this word already, Wu, the word that often gets translated to shaman, but can mean a sorceress, spell crafter, or psychic medium, one who channels Ling. Tu means a diagram, a chart, a map, something in symbolic pictorial form. Fu means talisman, charm, a symbolic representation of an edict, a petition, intention, or request. These Fu talismans are from the Ling Bao school of Taoist mysticism. They're an orthodox lineage tradition that rose to prominence during the 3rd through 5th centuries AD. The Ling Bao system syncretizes Taoism and Buddhism. During the Jin dynasty, Ge Chao Fu attested that he received a divine transmission, which he wrote down and called the Five Talismans, Wu Fu Jing, which became the cornerstone scripture of the Ling Bao tradition. An intriguing concept found in Ling Bao is the prophecy of an apocalypse to come based on the Wu Xing Five Movements. We touched a bit on this in the previous video on the Wu Xing, if you recall. Taking it a step further, the Ling Bao believe that at the end of days, Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, will appear to us here on Earth and save a select few, taking the selected to some heavenly paradise. One belief is that there is a closely guarded secret spirit map, Ling Chu, that is the gateway through which Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, will deliver salvation. But I digress. Visiting the He Tu Luo Shu diagrams, yes, these are spirit maps. You could make the argument that they're primordial spirit maps not just to one place, but they're the blueprints used to design many different astral places. For instance, that first spirit map we saw at the start of this presentation, a Ling Chu or spirit map of the Nine Heavens, and the Five Tribulations that one must pass in order to attain right of access to the Nine Heavens. One leads into the other, and so the He Tu Luo Shu river maps, these spirit maps, are interconnected. In Taoist cosmology, there is this concept of nine firmaments above us, that's the Nine Heavens. There are nine layers vertical, a stratosphere of heavenly firmaments, much like the European medieval concept of a plurality of heaven. However, there are also nine sectors laterally, nine regions of heaven, basically forming a cube of heavenly space. Nine by nine is 81, and that's another one of those magical numbers in Taoist mysticism. There are a lot of 81 things when you get into various magical and occult texts. In fact, there's this scripture called the Tai Xuan Jing, dated to around the Western Han Dynasty, which often draws comparison to the Zou Yi or the I Ching Book of Changes. That's because the Tai Xuan Jing, the Book of Supreme Mysteries, is a book of 81 diagrams, similar in concept to the I Ching, but instead of 64 six-line hexagrams, the Tai Xuan Jing consists of 81 four-line tetragrams. If I Ching is the Book of Changes, then Tai Xuan Jing is the Book of Supreme Mysteries, a text dating back to about 2 BC during the Western Han Dynasty. You'll recall how the I Ching hexagrams consist of a binary yin and yang lines that form the trigrams that form the hexagrams. In the Book of Supreme Mysteries, there are three types of lines called tai, three statuses, or three abilities. This is in place of yin and yang lines. Instead, we've got heaven, marked by a single solid line, similar to yang, then earth, marked by two lines, similar to yin. The third, and here's where we diverge from the I Ching, is the cai, or status of humanity, marked by three lines. Stack combinations from these three cai, or statuses, in sets of four. When you group three possibilities in sets of four, you get a total of 81 tou, or chiefs, producing a total of 324 lines of ternary code. Instead of hexagrams, the Book of Supreme Mysteries consists of tetragrams. Instead of a binary code, here we're working with a ternary code of triplicities. There's a reason why I'm bringing up this I Ching version 2.0 in a talk on the subject of Taoist Spirit Maps. A wheel showing the various combinations and multiplicities of the tetragrams in the Book of Supreme Mysteries, not unlike I Ching wheels, is referenced as a ling tou, a spirit map. This is a map of the whole universe, or so says the scriptures, yi zhou wan ling tou, a spirit map of the myriad palaces of the heavens. If you look at the center, xuan, meaning mysteries, is the center point of a nine-sector subdivision of heaven. And for those of you who know a little Chinese and are now like, is that xuan as in jiu tian xuan ni, lady of the nine heavens? Yes. Yes, it is. And just like the Tai Xuan Jing, the I Ching is also, at its essence, a portfolio of spirit maps. For this video, I wanted to talk about the recurring references to ling tou, spirit maps, throughout the Taoist canons. They're maps, diagrams of places, not of our realm, or at least beyond physical access that we must journey to in astral spirit. These diagrams can be found throughout the leaves of the canons, noted as ling tou lei, genera or types, classifications of spirit maps. Lei, remember this word from a previous video on interpreting I Ching hexagrams? Lei is an integral part of Confucian and Taoist philosophy, espoused by Zheng Yi, which we apply to the I Ching and also here in Taoist mysticism. On screen, you're seeing a qi, or legend, to one of the spirit maps, noting the wuxing five movements. There are correspondences to constellation maps, a concept likened to planetary spirits and the realms that these planetary spirits occupy. Apologies, this facsimile isn't great. What you're looking at is a spirit map from the canons that utilizes I Ching hexagrams to mark pinpoints of space-time. The center constellation is the Big Dipper. Perhaps you recall that several of the spirit maps we looked at earlier in this video prominently feature the Big Dipper. Let's put a pin in that. The Big Dipper is kind of a big deal, but a bit outside the scope of this topic. I just wanted to alert you to it so that when we bring it up again in the context of esoteric Taoism, you'll be like, oh yeah, I remember that. This brings us to why I thought this video would be a fun addition to my I Ching series, utilizing the diagrams of the Yi as spirit maps, like a longitude and latitude coordinate system that ultimately helps us to navigate the He Tu Luo Shu river maps, the foundational blueprints for the I Ching, and thus really the architecture of the entire universe. The Divine Spirit of the Dragon Horse, which we characterize as Yang, is a spirit map of primordial chaos driven by the five movements. But chaos that isn't chaotic. It's formulaic, if you know what you're looking at. The Dragon Tortoise, which we characterize as Yin, is a spirit map of how we can override, control, navigate, and anticipate the five movements of nature. To summarize, we've got three types, classifications, lei of Ling Tu spirit maps. The first type is a diagram of a region on the astral plane that you can send your consciousness to and journey around. The second type of diagram is one that enshrines a spirit or god, Shun, or an immortal, Xian. And through this diagram, you can communicate with that spirit. The spirit map of the butterfly immortal is one example. Consecrated images of gods and goddesses are another example of spirit maps in this category. The third type of spirit map is the Fu talisman. In short, spirit maps are Jian, an identified moment of space-time, or a realm, a connector point between realms. Yin Jian is the spirit realm. Yang Jian is our world. The hexagrams of the I Ching Book of Changes, when stacked into a circle, because the Book of Changes is a circle, one of the core tenets we learn from the Ten Wings, it can encompass all three types of Ling Tu spirit maps. Any questions? I'll see what I can answer. I was like super dressed up in the first video in this series, and now I'm just like, whatever. And do let me know how my audio is.