How to Adjust When Things Go Awry? Discover the Hidden Wisdom in Ancestor Chen Tuan's Wuji Diagram

In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, there lived a famous "Sleeping Immortal" named Chen Tuan, styled Mr. Tunan, on Mount Hua. While others practiced Taoism through alchemy and fasting, he did so through sleeping—it was said he could sleep for three months straight, and when he woke up, he would stare blankly at the stone wall, clutching a crumpled half-sheet of diagram in his hand.

This diagram was no ordinary doodle. It was said to be a treasure passed down from Laozi and Heshanggong, handled by Wei Boyang, Zhongli Quan, and Lü Dongbin along the way, before being officially carved into the stone wall of Mount Hua by Chen Tuan, who named it the *Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Wuji Tu)*. According to Huang Zongyan of the late Ming Dynasty in his *Debates on the Confusions of the Book of Changes*, the diagram has five layers, starting from the "Gate of the Mysterious Female" all the way up to "Refining Spirit to Return to Emptiness, Returning to the Supreme Ultimate"—a veritable ancient manual for physical and spiritual cultivation.

Don’t think this is some mystic nonsense. Put simply, it’s a method to help people sort out the mess in their lives. Back then, scholars traveling to the capital for the imperial examinations would climb up to chat with Chen Tuan whenever they felt their luck was off and needed guidance. Chen Tuan never put on airs; he would draw five circles on the ground with a twig, starting from the bottom "Getting the Knack" layer, and ask after each layer: "Which layer are you stuck on now?"

A failed scholar squatted beside him crying, saying this year’s exam questions were absurdly off-topic—nothing he’d reviewed was tested, and everything tested was what he hadn’t studied. He was utterly unlucky. Chen Tuan poked the bottom circle with his twig: "Look at this first layer, the Gate of the Mysterious Female. Put simply, you have to find the root first. Are you truly unlearned, or do you just memorize model essays without being flexible? Once you find the root, the rest of the path will follow."

The scholar was stunned for a moment, then admitted he’d only focused on guessing the exam topics and hadn’t thoroughly studied the classics. Chen Tuan drew two more circles upward: "The second layer is refining essence into qi, and the third is refining qi into spirit—this is the key to improving judgment: first solidify your skills, then steady your mind, so you won’t panic and make hasty choices when things come up. If you don’t even understand the books properly, of course everything on the exam will look like the right answer to you."

As he spoke, he pointed to the top "Supreme Ultimate" circle: "The topmost layer is called Returning to the Supreme Ultimate. What does it mean? It means that when you truly reach the point where you don’t take success or failure to heart, you will反而 succeed. Many people try everything to adjust when things go wrong, but it’s all useless because they only fixate on the result anxiously, forgetting to look back and check if their own foundation is steady."

After hearing this, the scholar suddenly saw the light. He went back and studied diligently for three years, and sure enough, he passed the exam the next time. The inheritance of this diagram is also quite interesting—Chen Tuan passed the *Prior Heaven Diagram* to Zhong Fang, who passed it to Mu Xiu, who then passed the *Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate* to Zhou Dunyi, the man who wrote *On the Love of the Lotus*. Later, it was passed down further, reaching the Fire Dragon Immortal of Zhongnan Mountain, and finally ending up with Zhang Sanfeng, becoming the foundational knowledge of the Wudang lineage.

It’s funny to think about: people nowadays are always looking for secrets to quick success, but Old Ancestor Chen Tuan already carved the answer on the stone wall long ago: climb up layer by layer, build your foundation step by step. When you truly understand and cultivate yourself well, all those annoying troubles will naturally sort themselves out.