Tàiwēi língshū zǐwén xiānjì zhēnjì shàngjīng 太微靈書紫文仙忌真記上經
True Record of the Interdictions of the Immortals — Superior Scripture from the Tàiwēi Numinous-Book Purple-Writ
a Shàngqīng 上清 ritual fragment of the Eastern Jìn 東晉, transmitted by the Green Lad Qīngtóng jūn 青童君
About the work
A four-folio ritual scripture in one juan, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0179 / CT 179 = TC 179), 洞真部 戒律類, where it heads a sequence of three short Língbǎo/Shàngqīng precept-texts bound together (the “three scriptures one juan” 三經同卷 colophon, with the present work followed by [[KR5a0181|DZ 180 Xūhuáng tiānzūn chūzhēn shíjiè wén]] and [[KR5a0182|DZ 181 Tàishàng jiǔzhēn miàojiè jīnlù dùmìng bázuì miàojīng]]). The text is a fragment of the early Shàngqīng 上清 Língshū zǐwén 靈書紫文 corpus and is among the rare Yáng-Xǔ-revelation scriptures expressly devoted to the formulation of ritual rules. A bibliographical gloss assigns its transmission to the Green Lad of Eastern Marchmount (Fāngzhū qīngtóng jūn 方諸青童君), who copied it down to Gǒng Zhòngyáng 龔仲楊 of Zhūhuǒ Dānlíng 朱火丹陵 and his younger brother Yòuyáng 幼陽 — both Shàngqīng xiānzhēn. The body of the text enumerates ten “marks of failed immortality” (bài xiānxiàng 敗仙相): each describes a way in which an aspirant possessed of the right xiānxiàng may yet fall short — sexual indulgence, malice, drunkenness, slovenliness, eating the meat of one’s own benming-animal or one’s parents’, eating the six domestic animals, eating the five pungent vegetables, killing of any kind, and a long final list of calendrical and directional taboos.
Prefaces
No preface in the source. The text opens directly with the Green Lad’s revelation: “Qīngtóng jūn 青童君 said: The difficulty of studying the immortals is not of one kind alone; the difficulty is not the difficulty of the common world. The hidden-immortal-affair has things that cannot be put into writing. Now: a man may have the marks of an immortal and so be able to ascend, yet there are also the marks that ruin those marks — ten in number; if, possessing the marks, he transgresses and ruins them, he will not get the immortal either. Now in secret I tell those who have the marks: keep this!”
Abstract
Isabelle Robinet, in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004) 1:152–153 (§1.B.2 Shàngqīng), identifies the work as a fragment of the Língshū zǐwén 靈書紫文 (one of the original YángXǔ Shàngqīng revelations of the years 364–370). The transmission-line through Qīngtóng jūn to the Gǒng brothers is independently attested in the Zǐyáng zhēnrén nèizhuàn 紫陽真人內傳 (YJQQ 106.13b) and in the Dēngzhēn yǐnjué 登真隱訣 of Táo Hóngjǐng 陶弘景 (cited in TPYL 660), so the text is securely dateable to the original Shàngqīng corpus. The ten interdictions are framed by the doctrine of xiānxiàng 仙相 (immortal-marks), as set out in [[KR5b0509|DZ 442 Shàngqīng hòushèng dàojūn lièjì 上清後聖道君列紀]]. Variant recensions of the present text survive in [[KR5b0494|DZ 427 Shàngqīng xiūxíng jīngjué 上清修行經訣]] 22b–25a and in the Dūnhuáng manuscript Pelliot 2751 (Zǐwén xíng shìjué 紫文行事訣), lines 182–195. The frontmatter follows TC in bracketing the work to the Eastern Jìn (317–420).
Translations and research
No full translation. Standard scholarly entry: Isabelle Robinet, “Taiwei lingshu ziwen xianji zhenji shangjing,” in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 §1.B.2, 152–153. Robinet’s larger study of the Zǐwén corpus: Isabelle Robinet, La révélation du Shangqing dans l’histoire du taoïsme (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1984), 2:31–60. On the xiānxiàng doctrine and the Yáng-Xǔ revelation generally: Michel Strickmann, Le taoïsme du Mao Chan: chronique d’une révélation (Paris: Collège de France, 1981).
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0180
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 1 §1.B.2, 152–153.