Huándān jīnyè gē zhù 還丹金液歌註
Glosses on the Song of the Gold-Liquor Returned Elixir
with verses by 元陽子 (Yuányáng zǐ); commentary attributed (注) to 張果 (Tōngxuán xiānshēng 通玄先生)
About the work
A short Five-Dynasties alchemical commentary preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng 正統道藏 (DZ 0239 / CT 239 = TC 238), 洞真部 方法類, sharing a Dàozàng fascicle with [[KR5a0239|DZ 238 Yuányáng zǐ jīnyè jí]]. The work opens with a prose preface — “Yuányáng zǐ xiū Tōngxuán xiānshēng zhù 元陽子修通玄先生注” — which discusses the Daoist alchemical doctrine and explicitly invokes the authority of Zhāng Guǒ 張果 (whose Tiānbǎo-era honorific Tōngxuán xiānshēng the author claims) on the dangers of the wàidān-literalist mistake. The body of the work is a stanza-by-stanza glossed Huándān jīnyè gē 還丹金液歌 attributed to Yuányáng zǐ, with double-column interlinear notes parsing the alchemical metaphors of qiānhǒng 鉛汞, huángyá 黃芽, huāchí 華池, qīnglóng báihǔ 青龍白虎, yùhǔ jīnnáng 玉壺金囊, etc.
Prefaces
The prose preface (1a–6b): “On the Dragon and the Tiger: these are the alternative names for lead and mercury. The Cāntóng says: ‘The Gold Tiger is the basis of the Returned Elixir.’ ‘Gold Tiger’ is not the name of two substances; it speaks of lead. Lead is black and belongs to the north; the north is water; water is one. Therefore those who can know the One can complete every task. The Cāntóng says: ‘Within one substance there are five colours; eternally, the immortal man’s emolument’… [Goes on to expound the elixir doctrine, citing Wèi Bóyáng’s Cāntóng, Lǎojūn, the Yīnfú jīng, Bàopǔ zǐ, Zuǒ Cí, Liú Ān 劉安, and others — and explicitly invokes Zhāng Guǒ xiānshēng on the lethal dangers of misreading lead literally.]”
Abstract
The work belongs to the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties stratum of cantong-derived commentary. Its association with [[KR5a0239|DZ 238 Yuányáng zǐ jīnyè jí]] in the Daozang (the two share a single fascicle) shows that the editors of the canon read them as a complementary pair — jí (the song-collection) and zhù (the commentary). The attribution of the commentary to Zhāng Guǒ is best read in the same vein as other later-Táng / Five-Dynasties pseudepigrapha that traded on Zhāng Guǒ’s Tiānbǎo-era reputation as the author of authoritative Yīnfú and elixir works (cf. [[KR5a0113|DZ 113 Huángdì yīnfú jīng zhù]]); the genuine authorship is most likely a Five-Dynasties practitioner working within the same lineage as Yuányáng zǐ. The frontmatter brackets composition accordingly in the early tenth century. As the Tāizǔng assigns Yuányáng zǐ to the Five Dynasties (五代) and the catalog meta to “Wǔdài,” the present commentary has been so dated.
Translations and research
No full translation. On Zhāng Guǒ’s Yīnfú jīng zhù and its associated literature: Florian C. Reiter, “The ‘Scripture on the Hidden Contracts’ (Yin-fu ching): A Short Survey on Facts and Findings,” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 136 (1984): 75–83; Anna Seidel, “Eight Immortals,” in Mircea Eliade ed., Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 5:117–119. On the alchemical poetic exegetical tradition see Lowell Skar, “Golden Elixir Alchemy” (Ph.D. diss., 2003).
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5a0240
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), Vol. 2 §3.A.4.