The Microcosmic Orbit

Five points along one loop · a map

A Daoist map of the loop qi is said to travel: from the belly, down and back, up the spine, over the crown, and home down the front.

How to read it

This names the stations along the circuit, not how qi is meant to be moved between them. Neidan holds that the orbit is opened by a teacher, directly, not assembled from a diagram — this page maps where the loop is said to pass, nothing more.

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Lower dantian

Xia dantian, “lower field of elixir”

Where the tradition says the loop begins.

Below the navel, the tradition places the body's lower reservoir — where qi is said to be stored before the circuit starts, and where it is said to return once the loop closes.

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Weilü, the tailbone

Weilü, “the rudder” — tailbone gate

The first gate, at the body's root.

At the tailbone, texts describe a gate said to be the hardest to pass — where the ascending vessel is thought to begin its climb up the spine's length toward the head.

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Up the spine

Du mai, the governing vessel

Yang qi is said to climb the back.

The governing vessel is described as running the length of the spine, carrying yang qi upward from the tailbone toward the crown — the ascending half of the circuit, in the tradition's account.

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Baihui, the crown

Baihui, “hundred meetings” at the vertex

The high point, where ascent turns to descent.

At the crown of the head, the tradition places the point where the climbing vessel is said to turn over — the highest station of the loop, and the hinge between rising and returning.

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Down the front

Ren mai, the conception vessel

The loop closes where it first began.

The conception vessel runs down the body's front midline, said to carry qi from the crown back to the lower dantian — completing, in the tradition's telling, one full circuit of the orbit.

One loop, five points — opened, the tradition says, by a teacher, not a description.

Daoist neidan (inner alchemy) tradition; the Governing and Conception Vessels are also named in classical Chinese medicine as Du Mai and Ren Mai.

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