元始說先天道德經註解

Yuánshǐ shuō xiāntiān dàodé jīng zhùjiě 元始說先天道德經註解

Annotated Commentary on the “Scripture of the Way and Its Power of the Anterior Heaven, as Preached by the Primordial Beginning”

commentary by Lǐ Jiāmóu 李嘉謀 (jìnshì 1166), edited and re-engraved by Zhāng Shànyuān 張善淵 (fl. 1280–1294), five juan, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0003 / CT 3), 洞真部 本文類

About the work

A five-juan paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the Xiāntiān dàodé jīng 先天道德經, a short Sòng-era pseudo-scripture framed as the discourse of Yuánshǐ tiānzūn 元始天尊 on the five undifferentiated modes of being that preceded phenomenal existence — miào 妙 (“subtlety”), yuán 元 (“origin”), shén 神 (“spirit”), zhēn 眞 (“authenticity”), dào 道 (“way”) — which together constitute an explicit Daoist counterpart to the Lǎozǐ Dàodé jīng 老子道德經. The parent scripture is organised into five piān 篇 (“sections”), one per term, each of 1,000 characters and subdivided into nine zhāng 章, so that the whole runs to five thousand characters and deliberately parallels the Dàodé jīng’s conventional length. Lǐ Jiāmóu’s commentary runs beneath each textual unit, explicating it in philosophical rather than liturgical terms. The transmission history of the commentary, sketched in the preface (below), is unusually well documented: Lǐ Jiāmóu composed and first printed it in Shǔ 蜀 (Sichuan) in the late twelfth century; the Shǔ blocks were lost; by the Bǎoyòu 寳祐 era (1253–1258) Xiè Túnán 謝圖南 recovered a manuscript from “an otherworldly gentleman of Shǔ” and had it re-engraved through the patronage of the Grand Academician Lǐ Zēngbó 李曾伯 (1198–1280+) and the Jiāxīng 嘉興 Daoist Lǐ Kějiǔ 李可久, who supplemented the commentary with an appended Bāwēi lóngwén 八威龍文 (independently preserved as DZ 30); Zhāng Shànyuān of Wújùn 吳郡 (Suzhou) produced the final, critical re-engraving c. 1280–1294 that survives in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng.

Prefaces

Preface by Zhāng Shànyuān 張善淵 (fl. 1280–1294), undated (c. 1280–1294), prefacing his re-engraved edition.

This scripture was annotated paragraph-by-paragraph by Mr. Lǐ Jiāmóu, styled Xízhāi xiānshēng 息齋先生, of the former Sòng; his commentary was printed in woodblocks in Western Shǔ some years ago. By the Bǎoyòu era, when Master Xiè Túnán, styled Tiānyízǐ 天飴子, supplied a preface and transmitted [the text], the Shǔ edition was already no longer extant. Earlier, while serving in office on the Southern Frontier (Lǐngbiǎo 嶺表), he had sought this scripture out and obtained it from the hand of an otherworldly gentleman of Shǔ, a find he regarded as a supreme treasure. Having come subsequently to Western Zhèjiāng, he presented it to the Grand Academician of the Guānwén Palace (觀文殿大學士) Kězhāi 可齋, Lǐ Zēngbó, who magnanimously entrusted it to the Jiāxīng Daoist Master Lǐ Kějiǔ, who engaged craftsmen to engrave and transmit it. He also came into possession of the so-called Bāwēi lóngwén, which likewise issues from the [teaching of] the Anterior Heaven (先天) and had been handed down from an adept; the two were engraved together to constitute a complete edition for the age. At that time the Guānwén Lord, while holding the supervisorship of Dòngxiāo Abbey 洞霄宮, also wrote a preface; but both preface-writers largely followed Master Xiè’s interpretation, calling [the five sections] the Fūluò wǔpiān 敷落五篇 of the Daoist scriptures — claiming that the text forms itself by “falling into place” (敷布) within the emerald heavens (碧落) and is not something human beings could compose. Both gentlemen, unfortunately, perpetuated earlier errors.

By my own reading: the Fūluò wǔpiān are the true talismans by which Yuánshǐ [tiānzūn] stabilises and settles [the cosmos] — they are what we of [this] school transmit as fúzhuàn 符篆 that coagulate through the movement of pneumas (隨炁以結成): first the Míngqì 明炁, second the Tàidān 太丹, third the Huángzhēn 黃眞, fourth the Sùwēi 素威, fifth the Xuánjīng 玄精. That is all. By contrast, the present scripture — the five sections Miào, Yuán, Shén, Zhēn, Dào preached by Yuánshǐ — consists of five piān, each containing multiple zhāng, each zhāng made of [many] words, together totaling five thousand, transmitted in the world alongside the five thousand [characters] of our Lǎozǐ’s Dàodé [jīng], and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Fūluò.

I, Zhāng Shànyuān, the Daoist Léisuǒ Guǐfù 雷所癸復 of Wújùn, having obtained this book, have reverently called together support to engrave it anew and transmit it. I have appended these words after the scripture’s title solely to disabuse those who, on opening the scroll, have not yet understood — that this text is not the Fūluò section.

Abstract

The Xiāntiān dàodé jīng itself is an anonymous pseudo-scripture that cannot be dated earlier than the Sòng; Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon 2, notes that passage 4.12b of the present commentary corresponds (with minor textual variation) to a quotation under the title Yuánshǐ bìyán 元始秘言 that appears c. 1226 in Xià Yuándǐng’s 夏元鼎 Huángdì yīnfú jīng jiǎngyì 黃帝陰符經講義 4.9a (DZ 109) — giving a terminus ante quem of c. 1226 for the parent scripture. The commentary by Lǐ Jiāmóu cannot be dated tightly: Lǐ obtained his jìnshì in 1166, and the catalog meta gives only that year as a fixed point. His commentary was printed in Shǔ “many years” before the Bǎoyòu era (1253–1258) per Zhāng Shànyuān’s preface, which places the composition broadly in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.

The received recension is Zhāng Shànyuān’s re-engraving, which can be dated to his floruit c. 1280–1294 — i.e., to the early Yuán, since Southern Sòng had fallen in 1279. Zhāng’s preface is critically significant: in opposition to his predecessors Xiè Túnán and Lǐ Zēngbó, who had identified the five piān of the Xiāntiān dàodé jīng with the five Fūluò talismans famous from the Língbǎo / Shénxiāo ritual tradition (cf. DZ 1 Dùrén jīng 1.10b, DZ 147 Dùrén jīng fútú 3.12a–15b, DZ 219 Dùrén jīng dàfǎ 69.15a–25a), Zhāng insists that the parent text is a philosophical scripture on Yuánshǐ’s five undifferentiated modes of being, deliberately paralleling the Dàodé jīng in length and structure, and has no liturgical-talismanic function. His reading is the one that has governed the scholarly understanding of the text ever since.

Frontmatter dating here brackets the whole composition-plus-redaction arc: notBefore 1166 (Lǐ Jiāmóu’s jìnshì, earliest plausible date for his commentary) and notAfter 1294 (the upper limit of Zhāng Shànyuān’s recorded activity). Dynasty is given compositely as 南宋—元 to reflect the commentary’s Southern-Sòng composition and its Yuán-era redaction.

Note on persons: Lǐ Jiāmóu corresponds to CBDB id 22635 (fl. 1166); a second 李嘉謀 (CBDB id 618812) without dates is a homonym and not this figure. Zhāng Shànyuān corresponds to CBDB id 107198 (fl. 1279), whose dates align with Cedzich’s “fl. 1280–1294”; a different Zhāng Shànyuān (CBDB id 107199, 1206–1275) belongs to the prior generation and is not the editor of this text. Lǐ Zēngbó 李曾伯 (1198–1280+), Xiè Túnán 謝圖南, and Lǐ Kějiǔ 李可久 are mentioned in Zhāng’s preface but are not listed in the catalog meta and accordingly are not linked in frontmatter.

Translations and research

No complete translation exists. The standard scholarly entry is Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, “Yuanshi shuo xiantian daode jing zhujie,” in Kristofer Schipper & Franciscus Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Vol. 2, §3.A.1.d (“Commentaries on Zhengyi, Shangqing, and Lingbao Scriptures”), which gives the structure, transmission, and the date of the parent scripture. The related Yuánshǐ bāwēi lóngwén jīng 元始八威龍文經 (DZ 30), whose text was appended to this commentary in the Lǐ Kějiǔ edition, has its own S-V notice. On Zhāng Shànyuān’s wider Daoist and ritual-text editorial activity — he is also associated with the compilation of the Shàngqīng língbǎo dàfǎ 上清靈寶大法 (DZ 1221) in Suzhou — see Boltz, A Survey of Taoist Literature (1987), and Matsumoto Kōichi 松本浩一, Sōdai no dōkyō to minkan shinkō 宋代の道教と民間信仰 (Kyūko Shoin, 2006).

Other points of interest

The preface is the principal historiographical witness for the transmission of several Sòng–Yuán Daoist texts beyond the Xiāntiān dàodé jīng itself — notably the circulation of the Bāwēi lóngwén in the south-east after the fall of Sichuan, and the involvement of the Jiāxīng Daoist cleric Lǐ Kějiǔ in re-engraving Sòng-era scripture editions under the patronage of the jurist-official Lǐ Zēngbó. Zhāng Shànyuān’s polemic against the identification of the five piān with the Fūluò talismans is an early example of a critical-editorial Daoist consciousness operating within the Dàozàng tradition and is frequently cited in modern scholarship on the boundary between philosophical and talismanic Daoist literature.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5a0003
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.1.d — DZ 3 entry (U.-A. Cedzich).