Robinet, The World Upside Down: Essays on ... - The Golden Elixir

<strong>The</strong> Alchemical Language,or the Effort to Say the ContradictoryINTRODUCTION<strong>The</strong> alchemical masters face the universal problem of transmittingand translating the unspeakable into words. “How can we seek themysterious and the wondrous in a discourse?” asks Zhang Boduan. 1<strong>The</strong> Dao is unspeakable and the mystical experience is inexpressible;yet, say the masters, in order to expound and transmit them, one isbound to use the language. Mindful of the words of Zhuangzi,according to whom one could speak for a whole day without sayinganything, but also be speechless for a whole day without ever beingsilent, 2 they resort to a language that leaves space to silence, whichthey always evoke, to the unspoken, and to the additional meanings.Since there is always something left unexpressed, the masters summarizeand remind what has already been said, they repeat and expandthe old discourses, attempting at the same time to recover the world,the language, and the use that was done of it, and to complete andrenew it.<strong>The</strong> alchemists’ undertaking, nevertheless, consists in methodicallyrelying on language in order to transmit and to instruct. Remindingthe value of silence is not sufficient: they try to introduce it in theirdiscourse. <strong>The</strong>y reiterate that their discourse is only a vehicle thatleads to the wondrous, or—using another image of the Zhuangzi—a1Wuzhen pian, “Jueju,” poem no. 2.2Zhuangzi, chapter 27; trans. Watson, <strong>The</strong> Complete Works of ChuangTzu, p. 304: “With words that are no-words, you may speak all your life longand you will never have said anything. Or you may go through your whole lifewithout speaking them, in which case you will never have stopped speaking.”www.goldenelixir.com/press/tao_02_robinet.html