Hudson, The Statistical Study of Neidan Literature 1 “The Statistical Study of Neidan Literature” (please note new title). Clarke Hudson, Dept. of Religious Studies, University of Virginia A paper for the panel “Internal Alchemy,” in the conference, “Daoism Today: Science, Health, Ecology,” the Sixth International Conference on Daoist Studies, at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, June 2-6, 2010. In this presentation I will make some claims about the overall evolution of the neidan field between the Tang and Ming dynasties, including both changing trends and unchanging tendencies, with specific examples, and with special attention to the appearance of Chan Buddhism-related language in neidan texts. But before I get to that, I will spend a few minutes talking about the research method I have developed for this study, which I am calling “corpus analysis.” This approach is experimental, and I would appreciate feedback. Neidan writings, with their often obscure and technical language, are not an easy read! And yet it can be quite rewarding when we enter this world of discourse, find our bearings, and begin to grasp the religious teachings of these writings. Practitioners may appreciate neidan writings’ instructions on training the body, mind, and spirits, while students of comparative religion may appreciate neidan’s special perspectives on self-perfection and cosmic apotheosis. We may even find that the abstract language of li and kan, mercury and lead, dragon and tiger, xing and ming, or wuwei and youzuo モЖ is not simply a medium for transmitting a religious message, but rather that this flow of language is a religious practice in and of itself, a sort of textual participation in cosmic creation and transformation (zaohua 庁×). The most manageable way to study of neidan writings is to make a close reading of one text, or a group of related texts. This is how neidan has been studied by most Western scholars, and I think it is indeed the most sound and fruitful approach. Yet if we study one text, or one author, we must also have some knowledge about the contexts of the text or author, be they historical, literary, religious, or sociological. Because the authors of neidan texts