Descriptions of practices here are historical and educational, not personal instruction or health advice.
Life
Wei Boyang is the name tradition gives to the author of the Zhouyi cantong qi (Token for the Agreement of the Three According to the Book of Changes). Little can be verified about his life beyond an Eastern Han setting in the southeast; later biographies add legendary detail. The Cantong qi weaves Yijing cosmology, Huang-Lao thought and the language of furnace alchemy into a dense symbolic poem. From the Tang onward both laboratory and inner alchemists claimed it; Song and later neidan lineages especially treated it as the root classic. Modern scholarship reads it as a layered text whose final form may postdate any single second-century author.
The system
- Yijing trigrams and hexagrams as a map of alchemical timing.
- Union of the 'three': Changes, Huang-Lao, and furnace language.
- Symbolic fire-phasing later read as neidan (inner alchemy).
Key works
- Zhouyi cantong qi (Token for the Agreement of the Three)
Where to start
- Begin with a modern annotated Cantong qi; treat laboratory readings as historical symbolism.
- Fabrizio Pregadio's studies and translations of the Cantong qi tradition.
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