Qīnghé nèizhuàn 清河內傳
Secret Biography of Qīnghé
Ming compilation of Wénchāng 文昌 cult materials around the Zǐtóng dìjūn 梓潼帝君 Qīnghé 清河 (“Clear River”) revelation-autobiography, eighteen folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0169 / CT 169 = TC 168), 洞真部 譜錄類.
About the work
A composite Ming dossier organized around a short first-person autobiography of one of the prior incarnations of Zǐtóng dìjūn 梓潼帝君 (the deity of the Wénchāng 文昌 cult, patron of examinations). In the narrative, the god is born during the Western Jìn to the “Old Man of Qīnghé” (清河叟 — identified in the Wénchāng cycle with Zhāng Dàolíng 張道陵; see [[KR5a1463|DZ 1463 Hàn tiānshī shìjiā]] 2.5b), astonishes the neighbours with his prodigious memory and clear speech, scorns popular tree-and-stone cults, and receives dreams foretelling his appointment to administer a river-office; after a cloud-and-thunder summons, a celestial clerk conveys him on a white donkey to the “Leixen Peak“‘s grotto-heaven, where he recollects seventy-three prior incarnations and receives the mandate to manifest in the world. The autobiography is followed by (i) a full enumeration of his Heaven-conferred sacral titles (up through the late Sòng); (ii) Sòng ennoblement rescripts of 1264 and 1269 covering the god and his parents; (iii) a Yuán enfeoffment and a 1316 temple-placard rescript; (iv) an Exhortation to the Twenty-One Officers 告諭二十一司文 of Yuán date (dateable by its reference to Dàdū 大都); (v) a Record of a Subsidiary Shrine 行祠記 commemorating the erection of a new Chéngdū shrine in 1341; and (vi) two moral essays of early Ming date, a Tract Encouraging Reverence for Paper Bearing Characters 勸敬字紙文 and a Tract Cautioning Scholars 戒士子文.
Prefaces
The opening autobiography begins: “I am originally a man of the WúHuì region, born at the beginning of the Zhōu. After seventy-three transformations, I have repeatedly been an official, and never once acted cruelly toward the people or oppressed the clerks; in nature I was fierce, and in conduct upright as the autumn frost and bright sun, inviolable. Later, at the end of the Western Jìn, I was born among the people at the western edge of Yuè and the southern edge of Xī, between the two commanderies. At that time, in a dīngwèi year, on the third day of the second month of the jiǎzǐ xīnhài period, with numinous light covering the door and yellow clouds filling the fields; the dwelling was low and near the sea. The villagers said to the Old Man of Qīnghé: ‘You at sixty are now blessed with a noble heir.’ As a child I did not enjoy play; I often yearned for the mountains and marshes, and spoke as if with hidden sight. By day I recited many books, by night I avoided the other children — I laughed to myself and was content. My body gave off light: the villagers came to offer prayers.” The autobiography continues with the dream-summons and the underworld audience that ends in the god’s ascent.
Abstract
Terry Kleeman, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 2:1205–1206 (§3.B.11, The Wénchāng Cult), identifies the “Secret Biography” itself as revealed by planchette between 1168 and 1177, and inscribed on a stele in the god’s temple in the capital Lín’ān (Hángzhōu) in 1177 (Liǎng Zhè jīnshí zhì 9.55b–57a); the same autobiography supplied the nucleus for the first seventy-three chapters of the Huàshū 化書, which stands as the predecessor of [[KR5a0170|DZ 170 Zǐtóng dìjūn huàshū]]. The preface to [[KR5c1299|DZ 1299 Xuánzhēn língyìng bǎoqiān]] places the revelation at a site called Shuāngsōng 雙松, probably identifiable with Bǎopíng shān 寶屏山 where most of the Wénchāng revelations were given. The compilation as preserved in the Canon, however, incorporates material down to the early Ming (the two closing moral tracts). The frontmatter therefore brackets the received recension notBefore 1368 / notAfter 1600.
Translations and research
No full translation. Standard scholarly entry: Terry Kleeman, “Qinghe neizhuan,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.11, 1205–1206. On the Wénchāng cult see Terry Kleeman, A God’s Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0170
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.B.11, 1205–1206.