Yuánshǐ bāwēi lóngwén jīng 元始八威龍文經
Dragon-Writ Scripture of the Eight Powers of the Primordial Beginning
anonymous Sòng-era nèidān 内丹 (“inner-alchemy”) Daoist scripture in eight paragraphs of irregular rhymed verse, borrowing its title from a lost Six-Dynasties Língbǎo scripture; preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0030 / CT 30), 洞真部 本文類
About the work
A short three-folio Daoist scripture consisting of eight paragraphs (八節 bā jié) of irregular rhyming verse. Using elaborate cosmological allusions, the text summarises the dialectic of fire and water, movement and rest, and of the emergent union of these polarities that underlies the inner-alchemical creation of the Zhìrén 至人 (“Superior Man” / “Perfected Person”). The scripture’s title borrows from the lost Six-Dynasties Língbǎo scripture Tàishàng dòngxuán língbǎo bāwēi zhàolóng miàojīng 太上洞玄靈寶八威召龍妙經 (DZ 361), but the content is a Sòng-era nèidān composition rather than a Six-Dynasties zhàolóng (“dragon-summoning”) ritual text.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text consists of the eight rhymed paragraphs alone, bracketed by opening and closing title-lines.
Abstract
John Lagerwey, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:792–793 (§3.A.4, “Neidan and Yangsheng”), identifies the scripture as a Sòng-era inner-alchemy text borrowing an older Bāwēi lóngwén title. The vocabulary — fire-water dialectic, zhìrén emergence, the bā jié structural device — is characteristic of the Northern and Southern Sòng inner-alchemy movement. No external citation fixes the terminus ante quem narrowly. The text is famously supplied in the Zhāng Shànyuān recension of [[KR5a0003|DZ 3 Yuánshǐ shuō xiāntiān dàodé jīng zhùjiě]] c. 1280–1294, as a companion scripture said to “issue from the [teaching of the] Anterior Heaven (先天)” (Zhāng’s preface to DZ 3), placing its Southern-Sòng circulation as securely attested. The frontmatter accordingly brackets composition notBefore 1100 (early Sòng nèidān horizon) / notAfter 1300 (consistent with the Zhāng Shànyuān recension’s pairing), with dynasty 宋.
No author is attributed; no persons are listed in the catalog meta.
Translations and research
No translation or dedicated scholarly study is known. Standard scholarly entry: John Lagerwey, “Yuanshi bawei longwen jing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.4, 792–793. For the Six-Dynasties Língbǎo Bāwēi zhàolóng scripture from which the title is borrowed, see DZ 361 entry in the same volume. For the Sòng nèidān context: Fabrizio Pregadio and Lowell Skar, “Inner Alchemy (Neidan),” in Livia Kohn ed., Daoism Handbook (Brill, 2000), 464–497.
Other points of interest
The scripture is a useful specimen of the Sòng-dynasty practice of reissuing inner-alchemical compositions under borrowed Six-Dynasties titles — giving the inner-alchemy tradition an ancient-revelation pedigree it could not claim directly. The pairing of DZ 30 with DZ 3 in the Zhāng Shànyuān recension c. 1280 makes them twin witnesses to a single editorial conception that sought to exhibit Sòng inner-alchemy doctrine under titles inherited from the Six-Dynasties Língbǎo revelations.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0030
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.4, 792–793 — DZ 30 entry (John Lagerwey).