Yuánshǐ tiānzūn shuō shíyī yào dà xiāozāi shénzhòu jīng 元始天尊說十一曜大消災神咒經
Scripture of the Divine Incantations of the Eleven Great Luminaries for the Elimination of Calamities, Spoken by Yuánshǐ Tiānzūn
astral-ritual scripture of the Sòng Shíyī yào 十一曜 (“Eleven Luminaries”) cult, six folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0043 / CT 43), 洞真部 本文類
About the work
A six-folio astral-ritual scripture revealing divine incantations to the Eleven Luminaries — the sun, the moon, the five planets, and four stars (Luóhóu 羅睺, Jìdū 計都, Yuèbèi 月孛, Zǐqì 紫氣) — whose adverse conjunctions were held to provoke natural disasters. Yuánshǐ tiānzūn 元始天尊 reveals the incantations in response to a question from Qīngluó zhēnrén 青羅真人 on the cause of and appropriate response to calamities, giving a thoroughly mechanistic explanation: the calamities strike good and evil, rich and poor alike, irrespective of personal merit; the victims should fabricate earthen images of the eleven divinities and recite the incantations in the scripture, or have them recited by a Daoist for a period of seven to twenty-one days. In addition to the eleven astral-deity incantations, the scripture contains two general formulas — one for the nine stars of the Northern Dipper and one for the five planets (the latter is reused as a wéilíng zhòu 衛靈咒 in [[KR5a0466|DZ 466 Língbǎo lìngjiào jìdù jīnshū 靈寶令教濟度金書]] 11.5b).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the heavenly-audience revelation-scene.
Abstract
John Lagerwey, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:956–957 (§3.B.1, Zhèngyī), identifies the scripture as Sòng. The Eleven-Luminaries list — including the four “pseudo-planets” Luóhóu, Jìdū, Yuèbèi, Zǐqì — is also found in a Buddhist sūtra dated by Hou Ching-lang to the fourteenth century (Monnaies d’offrandes, 87). The scripture’s recitation is already mentioned at the end of the twelfth century in [[KR5a0219|DZ 219 Língbǎo wúliàng dùrén shàngjīng dàfǎ 靈寶無量度人上經大法]] 33.5b and in [[KR5a1224|DZ 1224 Dàomén dìngzhì 道門定制]] 5.5b, fixing a late-twelfth-century terminus ante quem. A cognate Hétú jiào 河圖醮 offering presided over by the same Eleven Luminaries is described in DZ 1224 6.2b, 3.11a, and 8.10b–14b. The Southern-Sòng Nánzōng master Bó Yùchán 白玉蟾 critiques the attribution of the scripture to Tàishàng (sic) in [[KR5a1307|DZ 1307 Hǎiqióng Bó zhēnrén yǔlù]] 1.13b. The frontmatter brackets composition notBefore 1150 / notAfter 1199, with dynasty 南宋.
No author is attributed; no persons are listed in the catalog meta. Qīngluó zhēnrén is the scripture’s fictional interlocutor.
Translations and research
No translation. Standard scholarly entry: John Lagerwey, “Yuanshi tianzun shuo shiyi yao da xiaozai shenzhou jing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.1, 956–957. On the Eleven Luminaries cult: Hou Ching-lang (Hóu Jīnlǎng 侯錦郎), Monnaies d’offrandes et la notion de trésorerie dans la religion chinoise (Collège de France, 1975), 87; and “The Chinese Belief in Baleful Stars,” in Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel eds., Facets of Taoism (Yale, 1979), 193–228, esp. 206. Edward H. Schafer, Pacing the Void (California, 1977), on Daoist astral symbolism more broadly.
Other points of interest
The scripture is a key primary witness to the mature Sòng Shíyī yào astral-ritual complex, and its integration of the four pseudo-planets (Luóhóu, Jìdū, Yuèbèi, Zǐqì) — derived from the Indian Rāhu and Ketu and the astrological “moon’s nodes” — documents the Daoist absorption of Indian-Buddhist astrological apparatus into the Sòng Daoist pantheon.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0043
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.1, 956–957 — DZ 43 entry (John Lagerwey).