There's a yogic practice called vajrolī, and the aim of it is to draw a partner's sexual fluid back up into your own body during intercourse. The training is a graded series: you learn to draw up and hold water, then milk, then clarified butter, then honey, and last of all mercury — held for three hours without spilling a drop.1
Then, in the next sentence:
Don't believe everything you read here because mercury, for one thing, is toxic to the body.1
Credit where it's due. The training is printed and then warned against on plain medical grounds, and the warning is correct — mercury poisoning is not a theoretical risk, and a person holding a bladder of it for three hours is doing something that will damage them whatever else it does.
⚑ Nothing here is offered as practice. The training is recorded only as what the source records, with the hazard stated, and it isn't reproduced in detail. [POPULAR SOURCE]
What happens next is unusual. The objection doesn't get made once. It gets made four times, on four unrelated grounds, and none of the four leans on the others.
It gets you nothing even if it succeeds. Grant that the transfer works, and you've still got a problem: "even if you were successful in using vajroli mudrā techniques to retrieve someone else's energy and bring it into your own bladder, consider that from there you still couldn't transform it into chi!"2 The stuff you've collected isn't in a form the body's conversion process can use. You have it, and you can't do anything with it.
There's a cheaper way to get hormones. Stated deadpan: "if you believed that the hormones within such secretions would help you, it would be better to just go for a hormone shot."2
Stealing destroys merit, and you need merit. "If the idea is to help yourself by harming another through stealing, then how can you possibly achieve enlightenment in this way?"2 On this scheme's own accounting, the practice wrecks the thing the practice needs.
People died. "The history of the Tao school is littered with the bodies of people who actually died from this technique," and the deaths are claimed to look the same each time — "most died quite horrible deaths with blood streaming out of their eyes, nose or ears."2 🚩 No story, source or name is given for any of it. [SINGLE SOURCE]
Four arguments is more than the position needs. Each is aimed at a different kind of reader — the first at somebody who half believes it, the second at somebody being practical, the third at somebody who cares about the path, the fourth at somebody who's nervous. Writers don't usually build four separate defences against a practice nobody wants to try.
The most interesting objection has nothing to do with ethics. It comes out of what jing actually is, and it turns the whole practice inside out. Jing is the body's basic vital substance — the stuff you're born with a fixed amount of and spend by living. And here's the claim:
in considering the transformation of jing to chi, all these schools mistakenly take jing to be the man's semen or female's sexual fluids. They make the mistake of fixating on this specific form of jing when this isn't even the true, purified jing of the road of cultivation. Yes, jing is indeed related to the semen and vaginal-ovarian secretions, but this isn't the "good stuff" or pure jing of the physical body. It's just a form of turbid jing, though undeniably the most noticeable form of jing that we possess.2
Turbid means muddy, clouded, the settled-out dregs. So the sexual fluids are jing, and they're the worst grade of it. The good grade is spread through every cell of you and isn't a fluid at all. You can't collect it, bottle it, hand it over or take it.
Which means the only kind of jing that can move between two bodies is the kind that's already finished. And the source is blunt about what it thinks of that kind: these fluids "are like shit, phlegm, pus, and farts in that they're poisons once released from the body. That being the case, why would you want to suck them from another body into your own?"2
So the practice isn't just wrong about who it harms. It's going after the one version of the substance whose availability is the evidence that it stopped being worth having. Getting hold of some proves you were after the wrong thing.
And the blame gets moved off the traditions, which is rarer here than the attack. "The Wu Liu school of Taoism doesn't actually say that jing is semen, nor do the actual teachings of yoga or Esoteric Buddhism," but some people read them that way and end up in what the text calls devil's practices.2 So the misreading belongs to the practitioners, not to the schools.
The merit objection is worth pulling out on its own, because it isn't a moral afterthought bolted onto a technical argument. It's the one argument here that touches the machinery, and it's the reason the whole practice collapses rather than merely being disapproved of.
To succeed in cultivation you need merit, and if the idea is to help yourself by harming another through stealing, then how can you possibly achieve enlightenment in this way? That's certainly not the path of spirituality, and therefore it's certainly not a path with merit that would enable you to end up living longer.2
Merit isn't decoration in this scheme. It's a stated requirement, and it's tangled up with attainment in both directions — you need merit to get samādhi, and samādhi is itself counted as a kind of merit. So an act that destroys merit doesn't slow you down by a few years. It removes something the whole process needs in order to run at all.
Which makes the practice self-defeating in a way that isn't obvious from outside. The person trying it is trying to get past a real bottleneck. Jing genuinely is the slow, limiting substance in this system, and being impatient with that is understandable. But the shortcut is paid for out of merit, and merit is what gates the attainment the jing was being saved up for in the first place.
The language from there gets severe — such practices "truly land people in the hells," and teachings on taking energy from a partner "can't be anything but evil."2 Read that as arithmetic rather than as heat. The claim isn't that this is a slower path. It's that it runs the account backwards, which on this scheme's own numbers is worse than not practising at all.
One thing never gets addressed, and it's the obvious defence. If merit goes because somebody was harmed, what about a partner who agrees and isn't harmed? The answer is buried in three words — no real master would do this "even if it was offered"1 — so the objection is to taking, not to taking without permission. But that's never argued for, and it's exactly the joint where the whole merit case would have to be defended.
The strongest thing said against all of this closes the section. It's a good image because it's about material rather than about effort, which is a much harder objection to answer. Effort you can always be told to increase.
If you do not stop sexual desires while you want to attain samādhi, it's like trying to steam sand to make rice. Even if you steam sand for hundreds of aeons, it will always remain sand.3
The longer version, spoken to Ānanda, spells out why. "If carnality is not wiped out, the practice of dhyāna is like cooking gravel to make rice; even if it is boiled for hundreds and thousands of aeons, it will only be hot gravel. Why? Because instead of rice grains it contains only stones."3 Stones do not soften.
Nobody is being told to try harder. You could steam that pot for a thousand years, with perfect technique and perfect patience, and get nothing but hot sand. The input can't become the output, because it's the wrong thing in the pot, and no amount of heat or time converts one into the other.
Which is the same conclusion the turbid-jing argument reaches, arriving from scripture instead of from physiology. One says the transferable form is already spent. The other says the material is the wrong kind for the process. Neither needs the other, and both rule out the same family of practices.
The summary is short: "There's actually no such thing as spiritualizing lust."2 Not that it's difficult, or advanced, or reserved for people with a teacher. That there is no such operation at all, in the way there is no such thing as a dry swim.
And then the part that keeps this from turning into ordinary prudery. You have to cut off the desire in body and mind — and then "you must even go a step further so as to become free of the idea of cutting off sexual desires." The source gives two pictures for it: forgetting your body and mind, and then forgetting the act of forgetting, so nothing is left. And "a fire that burns away impurities, and then burns itself out so that even the fire (as an impurity) is no longer left."2
So the prohibition is temporary too, which is not how prohibitions usually work. Somebody who has made abstinence into who they are has picked up the very thing the fire was supposed to burn off, and they will be harder to shift than the person who never started.
Having taken the practice apart, the passage gives the reading it thinks is correct. It moves the whole yin-and-yang vocabulary from between two people to inside one, and once you see that, the external version stops looking like a variant and starts looking like a mistranslation.
The true idea behind the teachings of yin and yang energies is that you master the yin and yang forces within your own body, as you often see in the medieval European prints of alchemy topics. When you can balance these internal yin and yang forces through the practice of meditation, which produces an internal uniting of the yin and yang, then you can succeed in cultivation. But this balancing is not something you have to try to force into happening, for it happens naturally and spontaneously through the practice of non-effort. In fact it only happens through the practice of no-effort!2
The alchemy prints are the source's own reference and they support the reading. Those pictures show one figure holding both principles, a single body with the sun on one side and the moon on the other. Not a couple, and not an exchange between two people.
No-effort, with the exclamation mark, is the opposite of everything a transfer technique requires. A transfer needs timing, control, a partner and a procedure, all of it done deliberately and in the right order. This needs you to stop doing any of that.
So the inside reading and the outside reading aren't two versions of the same teaching. They can't both be run, because one is something you do to another person and the other is what happens when you stop doing things. And the positive instruction, when it finally comes, is one line: "All you need do is rest the mind and stay in the present moment, and then all these transformations will occur spontaneously as they should."2 The name given for it is the method of no method.
The rule that does the real filtering isn't any of the four objections. It's a general one, it applies to every technique anybody will ever offer you, and it disqualifies vajrolī before anybody gets to ethics or physiology.
This is the true way of Tao for the Tao is totally natural and would not be the Tao if it involved a secret technique or artificial process. Theoretically, the Tao should be achievable even if you didn't know about any artificial means of practice at all.2
Take that seriously and it sorts every transmitted technique into two piles. There are the ones that speed up something you could reach without them — those are fine, and the text says as much, since "there are all sorts of available artificial cultivation techniques to help you with this or that problem." And there are the ones claimed to be necessary, without which you'd never get there. The second pile is disqualified by the claim itself.
Vajrolī fails this before any of the rest gets a hearing. Nobody is going to stumble into a five-stage bladder-training programme ending in mercury — it could only ever arrive by being handed to you, and on this rule that alone rules it out. The ethics and the physiology never have to be reached.
Which gives you a test you can run on any teaching without knowing the first thing about what it involves. You only need to know what's being claimed for it, which is usually stated on the first page. There's a matching line about which way things move: "The Tao embodies the idea of universal compassion and giving rather than taking."2 Put the two rules together and you have a filter that needs no expertise at all. If a practice can only reach you through a secret, and if what it moves comes toward you, it fails both.
Somebody offers you a technique. A teacher, a course, a book, a partner. Here's how to sort it, and none of it requires you to understand the technique.
Start with the cheapest test, which is about what's being claimed rather than what's being done. Ask whether the teaching says you could get there without this. If the answer is no — if this technique is presented as the thing without which nothing happens — then on this rule it's already out, whether or not it works. A method that speeds up something reachable on its own is a help. A method claimed to be necessary is claiming the road doesn't exist without it, and roads that need a secret to be walked aren't roads.
Then check which way things are meant to flow. No real master would take energy from another person "even if it was offered."1 The objection is to the taking, not to the permission — so a partner agreeing doesn't touch it, and the presence of consent in the sales pitch is not an answer to the argument.
Ask what's actually being extracted, and whether it's the good grade. On this scheme the movable form of anything is the used-up form by construction. So a technique that succeeds in moving something has, by succeeding, shown you it was aimed at the dregs.
Don't take a face as evidence, in either direction. "You can look at the faces of people who try to suck energy from their partners… and immediately know"2 can't be checked, and the same move gets used elsewhere in this book for a completely different argument. It's the kind of proof that arrives when the real proof would be hard to get.
Treat the merit cost as a hard limit rather than a moral flourish, because in this system it's a working part. And last, don't turn the prohibition into a personality. Even the idea of cutting off desire has to go — the fire burns the rubbish and then burns itself out.2
[POPULAR SOURCE] throughout. The mercury warning is medically sound and correctly placed, which is worth saying because very little else in this passage is checkable.1
And there is a ceiling over the whole argument that the passage never mentions: the transformation this practice is trying to force has only conventional standing in the book's own accounting.4 Whatever is being transferred, the destination was never the real one.
The strongest argument here is the turbid-jing one, because it works inside the scheme rather than from morality. If the good grade is spread through every cell and only the spent grade can be moved, then transfer is chasing the wrong thing on the theory's own terms, and it would still be chasing the wrong thing if everybody involved were willing.2
⚠ The tension the source doesn't close, and both halves are within two pages. The Śiva Saṃhitā and Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā "incorrectly teach this sort of thing,"1 and "the actual teachings of yoga" don't identify jing with semen.2 Either the texts teach it or the readers misread them, and the page asserts each in turn.
🚩 The claim that people died of this is offered as the result of researching the stories, with no story named, no source and no figure.2 ⚠ The face test can't be falsified and is used twice in this book for two different arguments.2 ⚠ On citation: the vajrolī training is introduced in the body as explained by Robert Svoboda in Aghora, and footnoted to David Gordon White's The Alchemical Body.1 Two authors, two books, one quotation — most likely White quoting Svoboda, but the page doesn't say so. ⚑ Per this build's standing rule for the source's physiological material, the training is reported only as recorded, with the hazard stated, and not set out as practice.
Open question. If the movable form of a resource is always the spent form, does that hold generally? Somewhere in this comparison there may be a tradition claiming a genuinely transferable spiritual substance, and it would be worth finding out whether it survives the same objection.
Two things this material says about sex pull against each other, and a practitioner has to work out which one is running at any given moment. Both are stated within a page of one another.
One says the body is the road. Jing, chi and shen have to be fine-tuned and balanced or samādhi won't happen at all, so the physical transformation is a necessary stage and it will occur if you cultivate correctly.
The other says desire is the obstacle, full stop. Steam that sand for a thousand years and it stays sand, and there is no such thing as spiritualising lust.
Both are on the same page. What resolves them is a distinction never stated: the substance matters and the wanting doesn't, and the practice is about conserving one while dropping the other. A reader who misses that will either treat the body as irrelevant or treat sex as a technique, and the second mistake is the one this whole passage exists to attack.
Read with The No-Leakage Principle Across Traditions the collision is sharper still. That page records an intercourse technique in which neither partner loses their jing, described approvingly and by result only. This page condemns a technique described the same way — by result, with no observable difference given between them.
What can be taken was never the valuable part — The Advantage a Competitor Can't Even Diagnose. That page's argument is that most business advantages get copied eventually. Pricing, supply chains, campaigns, product features — all reverse-engineerable, given time and money. What survives is the thing a competitor can't even name, because it isn't a component. It's spread through how the whole operation works, and there's nothing to lift.
That's the same shape as the jing argument, arriving from a completely different direction. The good grade is in every cell and isn't a fluid, so there's nothing to take. The bad grade can be collected — and its collectability is what tells you it's finished.
So in both accounts, being extractable is a symptom. Anything that can be lifted out and carried off was, by that very fact, a separable part rather than the working whole. A rival who copies your pricing has copied a number. A practitioner who succeeds in the transfer has moved a fluid.
Which gives a test that runs in either field and costs nothing: ask what a thief could actually walk away with. If the answer is a specific thing — a number, a fluid, a list, a file — that thing was never where the value lived, and losing it will cost less than anybody fears. If the answer is nothing, really, you've found the real asset, and you've also found out why nobody can hand it to you either.
The uncomfortable half runs the other way. It means the shortcut everybody wants doesn't exist in either domain, and for the same reason. You can't buy the competitor's judgement and you can't take somebody's jing, not because it's forbidden but because it isn't a thing with edges. Every technique for acquiring it will turn out, on inspection, to be a technique for acquiring the packaging.
(One handshake. The other candidate — that four separate arguments against one practice tells you it's a live temptation — is a remark about how the passage is written rather than a finding from another field.)
Sharpest implication. Being able to take a thing is evidence that it stopped being worth having. The good grade of jing is in every cell and has no handle on it; the grade you can move is the grade the body has already finished with and put out. So the practice fails on its own terms before anybody reaches the ethics, and the successful thief is the clearest case of the mistake rather than the exception to it.
The second edge is what the four arguments tell you about who was reading. Nobody builds four unrelated defences against a practice their readers have no interest in. The technical argument is for the person who half-believes it, the hormone-shot line is for the person being practical about it, the merit argument is for the person who cares about the path, and the dead bodies are for the person who's nervous. That's a writer who has met all four.
And the thing all four are working around is real. The jing bottleneck is genuine on this system's own account — the substance is limited, it is the rate-limiting step, and there is no fast way through it. The practice being attacked is a wrong answer to a right question, which is why it needed four answers instead of one, and why it keeps coming back.
Generative questions.