Hùnyuán yángfú jīng 混元陽符經
Scripture of the Yáng-Contract of the Undifferentiated Beginning
anonymous short companion scripture to [[KR5a0031|DZ 31 Huángdì yīnfú jīng]], one folio (140 characters), preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0032 / CT 32), 洞真部 本文類
About the work
A very short one-folio scripture of 140 characters, designed as the yángfú 陽符 (“Yáng-Contract”) counterpart to the yīnfú 陰符 (“Yīn-Contract”) of [[KR5a0031|DZ 31 Huángdì yīnfú jīng]]. Its cryptic rhetoric — “In the obscurity of the huìkài 晦昧, shadow and response are not real; the pristinely-pure qì is plain and misty, its contract in flowing shadows” (晦𦣱之功、影響不眞、清清之炁、朴朴昏濛、滾符流影) — deploys a dense compressed allusive style analogous to the Yīnfú jīng but oriented toward the positive, generative, yáng pole. The text concludes with the formula yángfú wéi xīn, wàn tài biàn yè, jié jié chángcún 陽符爲心、萬泰變業、劫劫長存 (“The Yáng-Contract is the heart; the myriad great transformations perform their work; kalpa after kalpa it abides”). Its content refers to the flow of inner-body energies (nèiqì 内炁) and is oriented toward use as an aid for concentration during meditation.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text consists of 140 characters between opening and closing titles.
Abstract
Kristofer Schipper, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:— (§2.A.4 or §3.A.4), identifies the scripture as a counterpart, and possible appendix, to the Huángdì yīnfú jīng (DZ 31). Attribution to Hùnyuán 混元 — “The Undifferentiated Beginning,” a common Daoist title for Lǎozǐ and, more abstractly, for the pre-cosmic source — positions the text alongside the Huángdì-attributed Yīnfú jīng as its pseudepigraphic pair under the conventional Huángdì–Lǎozǐ (HuángLǎo 黃老) rubric. The text can be no earlier than the Yīnfú jīng to which it is paired (Táng), and is unlikely to be later than the mid-Sòng, when the pairing became fixed. The frontmatter accordingly brackets composition notBefore 713 (stabilisation of the Yīnfú jīng) / notAfter 1000 (early Sòng), with dynasty 唐—宋.
No author is attributed; no persons are listed in the catalog meta.
Translations and research
No translation exists; the text’s extreme compression and allusive vocabulary make it exceptionally difficult to render. Standard scholarly entry: Kristofer Schipper, “Hunyuan yangfu jing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 or 2 — DZ 32 entry (adjacent to DZ 31 Yīnfú jīng). For the Yīnfú / Yángfú doctrinal pairing see Florian C. Reiter, “The ‘Scripture of the Hidden Contracts’ (Yin-fu ching),” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 136 (1984), 75–83.
Other points of interest
The scripture is one of only a handful of short Daoist scriptures in the Daozang composed deliberately as paired counterparts to existing canonical texts; its pairing with DZ 31 under the yīn/yáng rubric supplies a minor but neat example of the Daoist editorial penchant for balance and pairing within the canon structure. Its extreme brevity (140 characters) and cryptic vocabulary have limited its commentarial uptake relative to the Yīnfú jīng itself — no major Daozang commentary is devoted to it.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0032
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 or 2 — DZ 32 entry (Kristofer Schipper).