The Secret of the Golden Flower (also known as The Secret of the Golden Flower of Absolute Unity, or The Secret of the Golden Flower of Yoga) is a Chinese text attributed to a Taoist adept named Lu Tung-pin (Lu Tzu) who is believed to have lived around the turn of the ninth century, CE.  Lu claimed to have acquired its insights from Kuan Yin-hsi, for whom, according to legend, Lao Tzu wrote his Tao Te Ching.  Indeed The Secret of the Golden Flower is said to more openly explore the same territory as that secreted in the Tao Te Ching’s verses.  As with so many Taoist yoga texts, alchemical metaphors and analogies were employed to describe psychological and transformative processes in a coded fashion. The version presented here has dispensed with this confusing terminology in favor of less cryptic language.

Read The Secret of the Golden Flower text

Many thanks to Thomas Cleary and Shambala Books, whose English translations of Zhan Boduan's and Lui I-Ming's texts, as well as so many others, have been of invaluable servive. Mr. Cleary's own translations of The Secret of the Golden Flower, The Inner Teachings of Taoism, Understanding Reality, Awakening to the Tao and The Taoist I Ching are all highly recommended.

Also worthy of note is Richard Wilhelm's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, with a commentary by C.G. Jung.

Kawase Hasui's artwork can be examined in greater detail in the book Visions of Japan.