Mo PaiArchive

The Body · zhong dan tian

The Middle Dan Tien

中丹田

The chest centre. Described in detail by classical alchemy, and passed over almost entirely by the Mo Pai sources.

reconstructed Refines Qi → shen. Energy refined into spirit.
The Mo Pai body map — front view A standing human figure seen from the front. Three dan tien are marked on the midline of the body: the upper between the brows, the middle behind the breastbone, and the lower below the navel. The ren mai runs down the midline through all three, from the face to hui yin at the perineum. The spine, its three gates and the du mai are behind the body and appear in the side view. Bai hui 百會 crown Upper dan tien 上丹田 shen → xu Middle dan tien 中丹田 qi → shen Lower dan tien 下丹田 jing → qi Hui yin 會陰 the lock Ren mai — down the front of the midline
Front view. The Middle Dan Tien on the midline. Every other marker is a link.
The Mo Pai body map — side view The same figure seen from the side, facing left. The three dan tien appear at their depth inside the body, on the vertical axis between the front of the abdomen and the spine. Behind them the du mai runs up the spine from wei lu at the coccyx, through jia ji between the shoulder blades and yu zhen at the base of the skull, over the crown at bai hui, and down the front as the ren mai to hui yin at the perineum, closing the circuit of the small circulation. Bai hui 百會 crown Upper dan tien 上丹田 Yu zhen 玉枕 third gate Middle dan tien 中丹田 Jia ji 夾脊 second gate Lower dan tien 下丹田 Wei lu 尾閭 first gate Hui yin 會陰 the lock Ren mai — down the front Du mai — up the spine, through the three gates
Side view. The Middle Dan Tien seen at depth, with the spine behind it.

Where it is

Behind the breastbone at roughly the level of the heart, in the centre of the chest cavity. As with the lower field it is treated as a volume inside the body, not a point on the chest wall.

Also called

  • Zhong dan tian (中丹田), "the middle cinnabar field"
  • Jiang gong (絳宮), "the crimson palace"
  • Associated on the surface with shan zhong / tan zhong (膻中), the point on the sternum between the nipples

What Mo Pai says

Almost nothing. The middle field belongs to the vocabulary Mo Pai inherited, and the sources use the word dan tien unqualified to mean the lower one. No published or leaked Mo Pai instruction places a practice here.

This archive's own reconstruction places the relocation of attention to the middle field somewhere around levels 13 to 15, following the order the classical corpus gives. Those entries are drawn from alchemy rather than from the lineage, and they say so.

What classical alchemy says

In neidan the middle field is where the emotional life is implicated in the work. The requirement stated over and over is that shen cannot be refined in an agitated heart, which makes emotional settling a technical prerequisite rather than a moral one. Traditional accounts describe old grief and anger surfacing at this stage and having to be burned through.

It is also the stage at which the classical literature stops being describable in mechanical terms. The lower field has instructions you can follow; the middle field has conditions you have to meet.

Reported signs

What goes wrong

See Safety. Nothing on this page is instruction.

Levels that concern this centre

13 Turning Inward Attention relocates from the lower dan tien to the middle. reconstructed 14 The Middle Cauldron Work in the middle dan tien; the emotional body is implicated. reconstructed 15 Clearing the Heart The classical requirement that shen cannot be refined in an agitated heart. reconstructed

Terms used on this page

Sources for this entry