Gāoshàng Yùhuáng tāixī jīng 高上玉皇胎息經
Embryonic-Breathing Scripture of the Supreme Jade Emperor
an anonymous short prose scripture on tāixī 胎息 (“embryonic breathing”) framed as the pronouncement of Yùhuáng tiānzūn 玉皇天尊, fifty-eight characters in a single prose passage, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0014 / CT 14), 洞真部 本文類 — bundled in the source with [[KR5a0012|DZ 12 Běnxíng jīng suǐ]] and [[KR5a0013|DZ 13 Xīnyìn jīng]] under 三經同卷
About the work
A single-paragraph Daoist tāixī 胎息 (“embryonic breathing”) scripture in fifty-eight characters, assigning the classical tāixī doctrine — that the adept should return to the gestational breath-state by which the embryo is formed and sustained, thereby attaining longevity — to the mouth of Yùhuáng tiānzūn. The full text (minor orthographic regularisation):
玉皇天尊曰：胎從伏氣中結，氣從有胎中息。氣入身來謂之生，神去離形謂之死。知神氣可以長生，故守虛無以養神氣。神行即氣行，神住即氣住。若欲長生，神氣相注，心不動念，無來無去，不出不入，自然常在。勤而行之，是眞道路。
Translation:
The Jade Emperor, the Celestial Worthy, said: The embryo congeals amid the hidden qì; the qì [continues to] breathe within the formed embryo. When qì enters the body, we call it birth; when spirit departs the form, we call it death. Knowing that spirit and qì together bring long life, one therefore holds to emptiness-and-nothingness in order to nourish spirit and qì. When spirit moves, qì moves; when spirit stills, qì stills. If one seeks long life, let spirit and qì interfuse; let the mind not stir a thought — no coming, no going, no outgoing, no incoming — spontaneously and constantly present. Practise this assiduously: this is the true path of the Way.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text consists of a single spoken pronouncement framed by the opening “玉皇天尊曰” and closing “是真道路”; the paragraph is followed only by the closing title 高上玉皇胎息經.
Abstract
The Tāixī jīng of the Jade Emperor is anonymous and undated. The tāixī doctrine itself — the cultivation of embryonic or fetal breathing — has deep Daoist roots reaching to Hàn-era breath-cultivation texts (e.g., Tāixī jīng 胎息經 quoted in the Yúnjí qīqiān 雲笈七籤 60.27a–28b, which is a different text), and the Táng-era Tāixī jīng zhù 胎息經注 (Schipper & Verellen 1: on DZ 130 and its cognates) provides the canonical commentarial tradition. The present scripture is, however, a distinct and much shorter composition, attaching the tāixī doctrine to the Jade Emperor — a pairing that presupposes the mature Jade-Emperor cult and thus the Northern-Sòng or later. The frontmatter brackets the composition notBefore 800 (earliest plausible post-Tāixī jīng zhù Daoist circulation of a short tāixī scripture) / notAfter 1279 (fall of the Southern Sòng, by which date the Jade-Emperor cult of DZ 10 was fully established and this scripture must already have been in circulation). Dynasty 唐—南宋.
The text stands in the Daozang as one of the three bundled “essentials” of the Jade-Emperor corpus (with DZ 12 and DZ 13) and functions in modern Daoist temple liturgy as a foundational tāixī-cultivation scripture. No author is attributed.
Translations and research
Eva Wong, Cultivating Stillness: A Taoist Manual for Transforming Body and Mind (Shambhala, 1992), includes a partial treatment. Livia Kohn, Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), treats the wider tāixī corpus. Ute Engelhardt, Die klassische Tradition der Qi-Übungen (Qigong) (Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987), is the standard German-language monograph on tāixī and allied breath-cultivation texts. No dedicated scholarly study of DZ 14 as a discrete text is known.
Other points of interest
The Tāixī jīng of the Jade Emperor is one of the most frequently-reproduced short Daoist devotional-health texts of the late imperial period; together with the Xīnyìn jīng (DZ 13) and the Qīngjìng jīng 清靜經, it forms a standard triad of short meditation-and-breathing scriptures used in modern Daoist monastic and lay practice. The scripture’s attachment of the tāixī doctrine to the Jade Emperor authority-figure is typical of the late-Sòng reshuffling of earlier Daoist breath-cultivation material under the popular-cult deities.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0014
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.7 — DZ 14 entry (Kristofer Schipper).