Tàishàng bìfǎ zhèn zhái língfú 太上祕法鎮宅靈符
Powerful Talismans for Stabilising the Home
Míng Daoist popular-ritual talisman-book for domestic apotropaic use, twenty-one folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0086 / CT 86), 洞真部 本文類
About the work
A twenty-one-folio popular Daoist talisman-book containing charms (língfú 靈符) for domestic apotropaic use. The charms address specific household calamities — pigs eating their litter, money fleeing the house, poltergeists, neighborly slander, baleful-star conjunctions, huōguǐ 貉鬼 hobgoblins, and so on. No accompanying spells or explanatory documents are given.
Prefaces
Short narrative at the head of the book — an anecdote about Emperor Wén of the Hàn dynasty (r. 180–157 BCE), who while walking in the district of Hóngnóng 弘農 (present-day Língbǎo xiàn 靈寶縣, Hénán) discovered an ill-sited house that should have brought great distress upon its inhabitants. The inhabitants, however, were prosperous — thanks to the present book, given to them by two young boys who were, in fact, the gods of the Northern and Southern Dippers.
Abstract
Kristofer Schipper, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:1236–1237 (§3.B.14, “Other Popular Cults”), dates the text to the Míng on the strength of its popular-ritual content and its style. The Hàn-emperor origin-anecdote is a standard Daoist legitimation device and confers no real historical-documentary value on the text. The frontmatter brackets composition notBefore 1368 / notAfter 1644, with dynasty 明. No author is attributed.
Translations and research
No translation. Standard scholarly entry: Kristofer Schipper, “Taishang bifa zhenzhai lingfu,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.14, 1236–1237.
Other points of interest
The scripture is one of a small cluster of Míng popular Daoist fú 符 charm-books preserved in the Daozang that document the late-Míng vernacular-Daoist domestic-apotropaic practice at the boundary between canonical Daoist ritual and popular domestic religion. The specificity of the charms — addressing concrete household concerns like pigs eating litters or money fleeing — gives the text unusual sociological interest.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0086
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.14, 1236–1237 — DZ 86 entry (Kristofer Schipper).