devices that require no background in Chinese culture to understand or
employ.
The Secret of the Golden Flower represents a way of approaching
completeness of energy through completeness of mind. This teaching calls
itself a "special transmission outside of doctrine," free from attachment to
dogma and form, based on direct perception of the essence of mind and
recovery of its inherent potential. This is the hallmark of Chan, which is
sometimes called the school of the enlightened mind.
For practical purposes, a distinction is made in the golden flower
teaching between the "original spirit" and the "conscious spirit " The
original spirit is the formless essence of awareness; it is unconditioned and
transcends culture and history. The conscious spirit is the mind-set of
feelings, thoughts, and attitudes, conditioned by personal and cultural
history, bound by habit to specific forms. These terms are employed in both
Chan and Taoist traditions.
Intuition belongs to the original spirit; intellect belongs to the conscious
spirit. The essence of Taoism is to refine the conscious spirit to reunite it
with the original spirit. In Chan Buddhism, the primal original spirit is also
known as the host, while the conditioned conscious spirit is known as the
guest;
the original spirit is the master, and the conscious spirit is the servant. In
these terms, self-delusion occurs when the servant has taken over from the
