ABSTRACT
This article examines passages from tenth through thirteenth century Daoist Neidan (“internal alchemy”) texts that describe or hint at sexual body alteration. Concretely, in the case of women, sexual body alteration was said to take the form of the flattening of the breasts; in the case of men it was maintained that the penis could shrink or disappear – or even transform into something like a vagina (according to Chen xiansheng neidan jue). In such claims regarding sexual bodily alteration, the implied significance tended to lie less in the changing of sex, and more in the transformation into the non-sexual prepubescent state where one’s vitality is pristine.
