Qi leaves seed — the jade inscription on circulating the qi as a manual of vitality and procreation

A practised breath gathers qi, and the blood follows it into the cinnabar field, the lower Dantian. A jade knob of the Warring States period describes the same path in thirteen short phrases: deep, gather, expand, descend, settle, become firm. Then it goes on: sprout, grow, recede, heaven. "Follow it and you live; oppose it and you die." Roth and Harper read the inscription as a text on breathing. Read link by link against its contemporaries, the second half is about seed. In the Neiye, in Aristotle and in the Mawangdui manuscripts, seed is tied to breath. The firmness of the stone is the firm grip of the infant in the Laozi, whose member rises in the next sentence as "the utmost of essence". The later Daoist tradition used the stone's pair of words, follow and oppose, for begetting. The inscription is a manual of vitality, and of how life is passed on.