Paper short abstract:

By relying on materials that are for the most part unpublished or less known to modern readers, this paper will discuss how European scholars between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century approached Chinese alchemy, when they first encountered these doctrines and mediated them to Europe.

Paper long abstract:

As is characteristic of many religious ‘esoteric’ traditions (e.g. the parallel case of the Greek Hermetica or the Chaldaean Oracles), Daoism attests the occurrence of some practical techniques that often coexist and overlap with spiritual doctrines of more philosophical inspiration. They include alchemical recipes and tools in order to be healthy, to prolong life, and even attain immortality.

By relying on materials that are for the most part unpublished or less known to modern readers, this paper will discuss how European scholars (mainly Jesuit missionaries) between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century approached Chinese alchemy, when they first encountered these doctrines and mediated them to Europe in their writings. While most of these authors, led by a certain penchant for Confucianism and its ethics, blamed Daoism (and Buddhism) as false philosophies and superstitions, highlighting their triviality, yet it is possible to retrace in some works (e.g. Couplet’s "Brevis Notitia Sectae Li lao Kiun Philosophi") a different interpretation of Daoism. These works in some respects paved the way for a renewed interest in Chinese esoteric doctrines on the part of Western scholars at the end of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century.