Documented: the received text is a late 17th-century product of Longmen-lineage spirit-writing circles, planchette revelations dated 1688 and 1692, attributed doctrinally to Lu Dongbin while preserving older Zhong-Lu meditation material. Wilhelm obtained a reprint in 1920s Beijing, translated it into German in 1929 months before his death, and Jung's psychological commentary made it the first inner-alchemy manual widely read in Europe. Thomas Cleary's 1991 retranslation worked from a fuller 13-chapter recension and charged the Wilhelm text was a garbled translation of a truncated version of a corrupted recension.
The folk telling: a half-broken woodblock in a Beijing bookstore, a few thousand copies for an esoteric circle, a missionary in the audience, a dying translator, a psychologist waiting for exactly this book, Jung wrote that for fifteen years he had found no parallel confirming the collective unconscious until Wilhelm's manuscript arrived. The Golden Flower thus became the hinge of the whole Jung-East encounter by what reads like luck.
The claim: the text was let out on schedule, an operating manual for the exit file surfacing in the West exactly when the reducing-valve thesis needed a technical appendix, the golden flower as the grown exit-body, the immortal embryo as the part of the self that survives the harvest.
What survives a transmission chain that long, the teaching, or the telephone game?