page_title: Neiye
section_title: Dating
hierarchical_section_title: Neiye / Book / Dating
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of a model of the ancient city of Linzi in the Museum of the Qi State.
context_page_description: The c. 350 BCE Neiye 內業 or Inward Training is the oldest Chinese received text describing Daoist breath meditation techniques and qi circulation. After the Guanzi political and philosophical compendium included the Neiye around the 2nd century BCE, it was seldom mentioned by Chinese scholars until the 20th century, when it was reevaluated as a "proto-Daoist" text that clearly influenced the Daode jing, Zhuangzi, and other classics. Neiye traditions also influenced Chinese thought and culture. For instance, it had the first references to cultivating the life forces jing "essence", qi "vital energy", and shen "spirit", which later became a fundamental concept in Daoist Neidan "internal alchemy", as well as the Three Treasures in traditional Chinese medicine.
context_section_description: The date when the Neiye was compiled is uncertain. Rickett dated the text to the late 4th or early 3rd century BCE, Graham to the 4th, and Roth to the mid-4th (Kirkland 1997: 3); it is thus generally dated to around 350–300 BCE (Kirkland 2008: 771). Campany rejects Roth's arguments for dating the Neiye to the 4th century BCE because they are based on his "speculative and wishful assumption" that political considerations were added only later to an "original Dao" (2005: 26).
  The problem of the dating of the Neiye is connected to some other texts within the Guanzi. Four chapters (piān 篇) have descriptions of meditation practices: Xinshu 心術 "Techniques of the Mind I and II" (chapters 36 and 37), Baixin 白心 "The Purified Mind" (38), and Neiye 內業 "Inward Training" (49). The Guanzi is an heterogenous collection of writings by diverse Legalist, Confucianist, and Daoist authors; compilation probably began around 300 BCE and material may have been added until 26 BCE when Liu Xiang edited the received text (Roth 1999: 18). 
  Since these four texts are the only Guanzi chapters to mention the significance of breath meditation, researchers tend to consider them together (Roth 1999: 18). Furthermore, all four exhibit the irregular rhyme patterns thought to be characteristic of the Chu region variety of Chinese (Roth 1994: 11). Many scholars have debated over the relationship between Neiye, Xinshu I and II, and Baixin. Most concur that these texts were written by Huang-Lao Daoist philosophers at the Jixia Academy in the Qi capital of Linzi, but many disagree over the dating of the texts and identity of the redactors. After analyzing the structure and rhetorical characteristics of the Daode jing, Neiye, Xinshu I, and Baixin, The Chinese linguist William H. Baxter proposed that they constitute a specific literary genre, which emerged from "a distinctive tradition of philosophical verse with strong oral elements and little concept of individual authorship" (1998: 240–243, 249).
  In order to estimate the dates of compilation for these Guanzi writings about breath circulation techniques, Roth analyzed the linguistic features of the Neiye, Xinshu I and II, and Baixin; and concluded that the Neiye is a genuine 4th-century BCE text while the others are derived from it (1999: 23–25). The first three works have close conceptual and textual parallels, but the Baixin—which is a mostly prose essay on how a sage ruler can apply the meditation techniques to governing—is considered the latest work in the group. Three types of evidence support the antiquity of the Neiye. First, its distinctive literary structure as a composition of originally independent, rhythmic and rhymed verse is a sign of oral transmission before literacy became widespread in the latter half of the 4th century BCE. Second, the Neiye does not contain the kind of sustained argumentation typically found in 3rd-century BCE philosophical essays, and it shows only a loose principle of organization between its verses. Third, the absence of the correlative cosmology of yin and yang and the Five Phases, characteristic of 3rd-century BCE texts. Using redaction criticism – analyzing the production a text from how the redactors (editors, compilers) combined and arranged the source materials – Roth found that the Xinshu II is an original prose essay in which the redactor deliberately extracted and rearranged Neiye verses for the purpose of advocating the political benefits of inner cultivation methods (1994: 34). It thus complements Xinshu I and accounts for the Guanzi labeling them as parts of one essay (1999: 26).
  More specifically, Roth proposes that the Neiye's exclusively verse format and absence of political thought would support a date of mid-4th century at the latest. The first part of Xinshu I contains verses that are almost as old, but since they begin to advocate applying inner cultivation techniques to the task of governing and show evidence of interaction with rival intellectual positions, he dates them to about 300 BCE. The commentary contained in the second part of Xinshu I shows t
caption: Model of ancient Linzi.
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