Making a Homunculus

One of the things that separates Daoism from other religious world-views is the way it has traditionally posited that the human body is an important part of the spiritual man. In contrast, most other religions have tended towards a form of dualism where something like a "soul" inhabits a body like a human being driving a car. In philosophy this dualism is known as the "Cartesian Theatre".



The Cartesian Theatre seems like a reasonable hypothesis to the naive person, but suffers from being subject to an infinite regress. If the only way we can explain consciousness is by having a little man who lives in our heads (or a soul in the machine), then doesn't the "little man" also have to have a little man in his head (or, doesn't the soul itself have to be inhabited by a soul)?

In answer to this problem, modern psychologists have posited that human consciousness is a result of complex processes that take place in the entire body. And with a little reflection this should make sense to everyone. After all, a lot of our consciousness is controlled by hormones. Our sex drive makes us act in ways that has nothing to do with reason or logic, for example. In fact, almost all of our behaviour is ultimately driven by emotions that are instinctual in nature: fear, hunger, anger, lust, envy, jealously, etc.

Physiologists refer to the human sensory nerves by creating an image that they call a "homunculus". The idea is to draw a human being where the size of the various bodily parts corresponds to the relative density of nerve endings in that specific part.



By doing so, they are presenting a pictoral representation of how our body actually feels to the conscious mind. Since the process of neidan ("internal alchemy") involves becoming more and more aware of how the internal body operates, it actually involves changing the way we experience the body we inhabit. As a result, someone who had practised a style of internal alchemy for a long time, for example taijiquan, would have a different homunculus drawing to represent how they experience the world around them. A taijiquan player homunculus, for example, be shown with a much larger set of hips and spine, as the process of learning taijiquan involves learning to be much more aware of those parts of the body than is normal in our society. Modern science shows that this is possible because the human brain can and routinely does change itself in response to the behaviour of the individual. In the case of the internal alchemist, the hours and decades of disciplined practice changes the way the brain is organized.

Beyond the nerve endings that control our muscles and joints, there are also hormones that flow through our bodies. A homunculus rendering that attempted to show how our hormones affect our emotions would be a much more difficult thing to render, but it might be interesting to think about what it might look like. For example, I have a tendency to weep at the drop of a hat when I am overcome with strong emotions. (I cry buckets at sappy movies.) I can also become filled with rage at a drop of hat. (This is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.) This also has characteristic responses, such as clenching various muscles.


Through the ages different Daoists have noticed these sorts of things and have attempted to integrate them into their understanding of the human being. An early idea was that there were specific "gods" or "demons" that inhabited different parts of the body. The idea was that the alchemist should learn to control these different Gods by living a life that starved them of what they needed to become active. In the popular Daoist book Journey to the West, Monkey (who epitomizes the untrained human mind) has a terrible temper and when he "loses it" the narrator talks about the "brain worms" going wild in his head. Similarly, there are texts that talk about different "demons" or "worms" living in the heart, liver, etc-----organs that had their own specific influence on different elements of the human consciousness.

Daoists have also created their own homunculus diagrams in order to illustrate the way that various parts of the human body interact and work to modify our consciousness. The most famous one was copied from a stone carving in the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. It is called the "Neijing Tu". I have a copy on the wall of my hermitage's shrine room and have spent more than a little time looking at it trying to learn from it.


The version that I have is slightly different from the one above, but the main thing to remember about it is that it is the result of a tradition of people spending a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with the way their consciousness interacts with their body. The important point for the practitioner is not to learn how to decode the symbols that abound in the diagram, but to think about how their own experience of their body relates to the pictorial representations and what they might inform their own experience. That's because the experience of neidan is so personal that unless you find someone else who has made the same sort of efforts as you, it will be impossible to explain exactly what you are talking about without hopelessly confusing the other person. As such, the best you can do is what the person who carved the stele at the White Cloud Temple has done and leave a hint for the odd individual who will live in future generations.