Decoding the "Divine Consciousness" of the Temple of Heaven: The "Mandala" Writing of Daoist Alchemy
International Journal of Philosophy August 18, 2025 Yanning Pang
This paper deciphers the "divine consciousness" embedded in the Beijing Temple of Heaven—a Ming-Qing imperial sacrificial site for heaven worship—through the lens of Daoist alchemical "mandala" (坛城 Tancheng). As a physical manifestation of ancient Chinese cosmology and spiritual pursuit, the Temple is interpreted as a three-dimensional mandala encoding the stages of Daoist Internal Alchemy (内丹学...