太上三十六部尊經

Tàishàng sānshíliù bù zūnjīng 太上三十六部尊經

Venerable Scriptures of the Most High in Thirty-Six Sections

anonymous Northern-Sòng compendium of excerpts from the thirty-six canonical Daoist scriptures distributed across the three realms of Yùqīng 玉清, Shàngqīng 上清, and Tàiqīng 太清 (twelve per realm), six juan, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0008 / CT 8), 洞真部 本文類 — the catalog title 太上三十六尊經 is a short form; the source and DZ text head 太上三十六部尊經

About the work

A six-juan compilation presenting the Sānshíliù bù zūnjīng 三十六部尊經 — the canonical list of thirty-six Daoist scriptures, twelve in each of the three celestial realms — as a single unified text, with excerpts, paraphrases, or outright newly-composed parallel material for each of the thirty-six titles. The structure follows the three-realm canon-template: the Yùqīng jìng 玉清境 (“Jade-Pure Realm,” twelve scriptures including Shàngqīng jīng 上清經, Miàozhēn jīng 妙真經, Tàiyī jīng 太一經, Miàolín jīng 妙林經, Kāihuà jīng 開化經, Xiānrén jīng 仙人經, etc.); the Shàngqīng jìng 上清境; and the Tàiqīng jìng 太清境, closing with the Xiǎojié jīng 小劫經. Each section is framed as direct revelation by Tiānzūn 天尊 to zhēnrén 真人 assemblies, and at least six scriptures per realm are grouped as same-juan (“以上六經同卷”). The compendium is neither a mere anthology nor a simple summary; substantial passages are newly composed, and several thirty-six-fú talisman-sets are integrated for use in salvation rituals. The text closes with the formal 終 (“End”) of the Xiǎojié jīng of the Tàiqīng realm.

Prefaces

No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the list of the twelve scriptures of the Jade-Pure realm and proceeds through the thirty-six sections without preface, postface, or colophon.

Abstract

The Sānshíliù bù zūnjīng as a scripture-title concept originates in the polemical list embedded in [[KR5a0004|DZ 4 Wúshàng nèibì zhēnzàng jīng]] 4.1b, where the “ignorant” are criticised for classifying Daoist books into the traditional three-dòng/twelve-bù framework while failing to recognise that “all beings alike constitute the matter of scripture.” The Zhēnzàng jīng, in reply, enumerates a new list of thirty-six scriptures — an overtly Buddhist-inflected ninefold × fourfold canon structure calqued on the Mahāyāna navāṅga or dvādaśāṅga schemes. The present work is the expanded-scripture realisation of that polemical list: it provides, under each of the thirty-six titles, actual scriptural content (or content claiming to be such). John Lagerwey, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon 2, §— (DZ 8 entry), identifies the compendium as a Northern-Sòng composition retrofitted to the Zhēnzàng jīng’s table of contents, pointing to the following datable features:

1. Mention of the Northern-Sòng ritual complex of the Sìshèng 四聖 (“Four Saints”) and the Tiānxīn 天心 (“Heart of Heaven”) methods (at 6.6b).
2. A ritual of the Shíyī yào 十一曜 (“Eleven Luminaries”; 3.12a), a Sòng astral-ritual development.
3. A series of thirty-six fú 符 talismans for use with [[KR5a0318|DZ 318 Dòngxuán língbǎo zìrán jiǔtiān shēngshén zhāng jīng 洞玄靈寶自然九天生神章經]] in rites of soul-deliverance.
4. The assertion that the alchemical practice of “returning the elixir” can harm nature and life (xìngmìng 性命; 5.12a), which aligns with the doctrinal landscape of Sòng internal-alchemical critique.

Textual parallels link the work intimately to [[KR5a0009|DZ 9 Tàishàng yīshèng hǎikōng zhìzàng jīng 太上一乘海空智藏經]] — for example, 1.12a–b and 6.15a–b of the present text correspond to 7.14a–b and 7.11b–12a of DZ 9; and the two texts reference the early Heavenly-Master jìjiǔ 祭酒 priesthood in complementary ways (DZ 9 7.16b–17a; this text 2.6b–7b). Lagerwey concludes that the two scriptures issue from the same milieu and at roughly the same time, although DZ 9 is ideologically somewhat more archaic. The frontmatter accordingly brackets the work notBefore 960 (start of Northern Sòng) / notAfter 1127 (end of Northern Sòng), with dynasty 北宋.

Doctrinally the scripture stands at an interesting remove: it is polemically aligned with the early-Táng monastic-Buddhist-inflected stratum of Daoist scriptures (DZ 4, DZ 9) but deploys Sòng-era ritual and alchemical vocabulary. The author or authors are anonymous and no attributed compiler is listed in the catalog meta.

Translations and research

No translation exists. Standard scholarly entry: John Lagerwey, “Taishang sanshiliu bu zunjing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2, §— (DZ 8, adjacent to the DZ 9 entry). The wider Sānshíliù bù scriptural-canon concept is treated by Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾 in Dōkyō to sono kyōten 道教とその經典 (Sōbunsha, 1997) and by Yoshikawa Tadao 吉川忠夫 and Mugitani Kunio 麥谷邦夫 eds., Shin-kō kenkyū: yakuchū-hen 真誥研究：譯注篇 (Kyoto University Institute for Research in Humanities, 2000), in the context of Shàngqīng canon-formation. Livia Kohn, Laughing at the Tao: Debates among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China (Princeton, 1995), treats the Buddhist-Daoist scripture-polemic into which the Sānshíliù bù concept emerges.

Other points of interest

The text is a valuable witness to Northern-Sòng Daoist scripture-composition practice: rather than simply anthologising pre-existing scriptures, the compilers of DZ 8 produced new passages in the voice of Tiānzūn for each of the thirty-six canonical titles, generating what is effectively a set of pseudepigraphic “scripture-summaries” that purport to deliver the essence of each title. This technique — Sòng-era composition under the signs of pre-existing canonical scripture titles — is directly comparable to the contemporaneous sixty-juan expansion of the Dùrén jīng (KR5a0001). The thirty-six-scripture framework became the basis of the classifying architecture of the entire Daoist canon as eventually printed in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5a0008
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 — DZ 8 entry (John Lagerwey).