Dòngzhēn tàijí Běidì zǐwēi shénzhòu miàojīng 洞真太極北帝紫微神咒妙經
Marvellous Book of the Spells of the God of the Pole Star, Emperor of the North of the Supreme Ultimate, a Dòngzhēn Canon
surviving juan of a lost six-juan Eastern-Jìn eschatological Shénzhòu 神咒 scripture, twelve folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0049 / CT 49), 洞真部 本文類
About the work
A twelve-folio scripture formally titled “A Dòngzhēn Canon” but in fact preserving a fragment of a lost Eastern-Jìn eschatological Shénzhòu 神咒 scripture-work — one juan of what was once, almost certainly, a six-juan Běidì shénzhòu jīng 北帝神咒經 covering the sixty years of a full sexagesimal cycle. The text opens with a pǐn 品 (“section”) subtitle that applies to the entire juan, signaling that the work is a section of a larger whole. Paragraphs 2–12 (2a–10b) contain revelations concerning the calamities to come during the final ten years of the sexagesimal cycle, running from jiǎyín 甲寅 to guǐhài 癸亥. Presumably, the complete work covered all sixty years and was therefore composed of six juan (one per ten-year jiǎ cycle). The Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目 10.6b lists a Běidì shénzhòu jīng in ten juan, which may well correspond to the present parent work; the [[KR5a1430|DZ 1430 Dàozàng quèjīng mùlù 道藏闕經目錄]] 1.14a lists this Běidì shénzhòu jīng as lost.
The revelations are presented as spoken by Yuánshǐ tiānzūn 元始天尊; a reference at 6b mentions the cult of the Three Heavenly Worthies. The text refers to itself as Sānmèi jīng 三昧經 (3a), in the same manner as the related [[KR5a0335|DZ 335 Tàishàng dòngyuán shénzhòu jīng 太上洞淵神咒經]] 8.9a and passim. Stylistically — the short paragraphs introduced as revelations, the vocabulary, and the phraseology — the present text is closely similar to the early parts of DZ 335 Shénzhòu jīng. The text speaks of the current period as the Great Jìn 大晉 (9b) and mentions invasions by barbarians (10a), placing the composition unambiguously within the Eastern Jìn.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens with the section-subtitle and proceeds through the ten decennial revelation-paragraphs.
Abstract
Kristofer Schipper, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 1:273–274 (§1.B.5, “Other Revealed Scriptures”), dates the scripture to the Eastern Jìn. The mention of the “Great Jìn” (Dà Jìn 大晉) and of húlǔ invasions (húlǔ qīn 胡虜侵) places the text in the political context of the 4th century, when the Jìn court faced northern invasions. Though the scripture’s title attaches it to the Dòngzhēn (Shàngqīng) division of the canon, Schipper notes that it has no actual links with the Shàngqīng scriptures and is instead close to the apocalyptic Shénzhòu 神咒 corpus centred on DZ 335. The present text is not included in Lù Xiūjìng’s 陸修靜 list of canonical Língbǎo scriptures, but may nevertheless be contemporary with them. The frontmatter brackets composition notBefore 317 (opening of Eastern Jìn) / notAfter 420 (close of Eastern Jìn), with dynasty 東晉. No author is attributed.
Translations and research
No translation. Standard scholarly entry: Kristofer Schipper, “Dongzhen taiji beidi ziwei shenzhou miaojing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 §1.B.5, 273–274. For the apocalyptic Shénzhòu 神咒 corpus to which the text belongs: Christine Mollier, Une apocalypse taoïste du Ve siècle: Le Livre des Incantations divines des Grottes abyssales (De Boccard, 1990), on DZ 335; Peter Nickerson, “The Taoist Incantations of the Abyss” (PhD thesis, Berkeley, 1996); Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (California, 1997), on the wider early Daoist eschatological literature.
Other points of interest
The scripture is one of the rare direct witnesses to the Eastern-Jìn Daoist eschatological literature that circulated under apocalyptic Běidì 北帝 and Shénzhòu 神咒 titles. Its survival as a single juan of a lost six-juan work is itself a signal documentation of the partial loss and fragment-preservation mechanism by which apocalyptic Daoist literature entered the Daozang.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0049
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 §1.B.5, 273–274 — DZ 49 entry (Kristofer Schipper).