Unlike the Hindu traditions, the Daoist mysticism of China locates the unitive in the perceptible world. The Dao (Chinese: “way” or “road”) is both transcendent and immanent, both spiritual and material. The Dao is unnameable and ineffable, yet it is present in and as all things. Although lay Daoists do not necessarily seek mystical experiences, for initiated Daoist priests the whole of Daoism is mystical. The mystical nature of Daoism is indicated in the “sacrifice of writings,” which is performed in a temple or other designated area. The ritual space contains a stepped altar that represents a mountain. The gods are assembled on the north, east, and west of the altar, and venerated dead and lesser spirits occupy the south wall. The chief cantor chants formulas of invocation, consecration, purification, elevation, and confession while beating rhythmically on a wooden block. The priest, who is called a Great Master, murmurs sacred formulas, makes hidden finger gestures in the sleeves of his robe and signs in the air with incense smoke, and breathes in and out facing the different directions. While performing these actions, he cultivates a mystical experience. He meditates on the words that the cantor recites. Summoning the 24 energies of his body, he inhales, directing his breath and energies from a point situated between his eyebrows and his lower abdomen, which are known as the Upper Palace and the Cinnabar Field, respectively.

The priest then picks up the incense burner and lights it while meditating on another text that the cantor chants. At a certain point in the text, the priest redirects his breathing and energies to the Upper Palace and imagines the colours blue-black, yellow, and white. He turns toward his birth star and contemplates each of 36 gods as the name of the god is recited. At the end of this rite, he puts a pin shaped like a flaming pearl in his crown, signifying the lighting of the incense burner in the Cinnabar Field within his body.

In his visionary experience, the priest transforms his energies and body into the gods of his pantheon. He speaks their names and meditates on them individually, arranges them in order of rank, and creates a procession that moves with him in his inner experience to the gates of heaven. When the priest reaches the proximity of the Golden Gate of heaven, he dismisses the emissary spirits in his vision and performs a physical ritual. When he holds out his arms, his assistants take his sword and bowl of lustral water and hand him a tablet. After walking in the pattern of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), the priest prostrates himself in a fetal position, with his face resting on his hands, which continue to hold the tablet. He envisions a newborn child in the Cinnabar Field and meditates on his heart, where he finds a newborn child, called the True Person, who is escorted by two generals in military garb. The priest then visualizes the group standing at dawn on a terrace. Other generals escort them as they climb a 12-story tower that is the priest’s trachea and present themselves at his throat, which is the Pass of the Tiger and the Leopard. They proceed into his mouth, nose, and eyes, which are the Gates of the Sun and Moon. From a point between the priest’s eyebrows, they proceed to the top of his head, where they enter the cavity inside his crown, which is again the Golden Gate. There the True Person presents the memorial to the Heavenly Chancellors and turns back. On the way back he appears as an old man, the Great Lord of Long Life, and he slowly descends to merge into the Cinnabar Field that is his place of origin.

Many other Daoist rites are similarly performances for the laity, in which a cantor and other assistants help a priest cultivate a mystical experience. In keeping with the unitive ideology at the core of Daoist thought, the priest’s experience is not an instance of timeless, unchanging oneness. It is a rapidly changing vision of a spiritual journey into the sky that is conceptualized in a unitive way. The locations of the journey are both in the sky and within the priest’s body, as though the priest were a macroanthropos—a cosmic man who houses the heavens within his head. The ideology—it cannot accurately be called a theology or a philosophy—unites the cosmos and the body to such an extent that the ideology enters into the content of the vision near the vision’s end, when bodily parts are understood conceptually as the celestial locations into which they are rapidly transformed. The thoroughgoing mesh of visionary experience and unitive ideology in Daoism makes it impractical to restrict the term mystical to unitive experiences while treating visions as a separate category. It would be equally arbitrary to impose such a distinction in the case of shamanism.