The Bird’s path: selfhood and embodiment in Xu Haiyin’s internal alchemy

This article explores the alchemical teaching of Xu Haiyin 徐海印, a leading master of the Western School of Daoist internal alchemy who characterizes cultivation as the ‘bird’s path,’ a traceless glide through the void. It argues that Xu recasts internal alchemy as a relocation of selfhood and a reconfiguration of embodiment. Practitioners exteriorize breath and awareness, identify with a generative emptiness and discard the ordinary body-image through breaking bodily borders and forgetfulness (an infant-like poise). From this basis an intention-generated body (yisheng shen 意生身) – ‘with image but without substance,’ composed of Former-Heaven qi – arises, apprehensible to meditative vision. Immortality, therefore, is not preservation of flesh but the emergence of a luminous imaginal body from emptiness. Methodologically, Xu privileges spontaneous unification with the Dao over procedural regimens popular among some contemporaries. The study highlights the centrality of body-image and imaginal body (over the physiological body) and advances a metaphysical claim: selfhood holds ontological priority – more fundamental than consciousness or material form – as the axis where human and cosmos converge.