Daoist Internal-Alchemical Diagrams and the Operability of Visualization in Thunder Rites: Song Sources and a Ming Case Study

This article examines how Daoist visualization operated within Internal Alchemy (neidan 內丹) and Thunder Rites (leifa 雷法), asking how images and ritual texts structured the body, deities, and cosmic processes into practicable forms. It focuses on Song-dynasty (10th–13th centuries) internal-alchemical diagrams and their comparison with related bodily and cosmological patterns in later thunder-rite manuals, especially the Divine Empyrean materials related to Wang Wenqing 王文卿 (1093–1153) and the Great Thunder Rite for Praying for Rain at the Emerald Pond of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian bitanlei daoyu dafa 九天碧潭雷禱雨大法). The study combines historical analysis of sources, close reading of ritual texts, and close comparison of diagrams with ritual procedures to compare how diagrams and ritual instructions present bodily sites, temporal sequences, and divine offices. It shows that internal-alchemical images did not merely illustrate doctrine but can be read as visual models that direct attention to the viscera and divine offices while presenting fire times and sequences of cultivation as ordered procedures. The thunder-rite texts associated with Wang Wenqing, together with the Jiutian bitanlei daoyu dafa, articulate comparable body-cosmos relations in ritual terms. The article concludes that these sources show two related ways in which visualization guides practice: diagrams organize bodily and cosmological relations for contemplative attention, whereas ritual instructions enact comparable relations through temporally ordered bodily and divine actions.