Tàishàng língbǎo yuányáng miàojīng 太上靈寶元陽妙經
Marvelous Scripture of the Primordial Yang, of the Most High Numinous Treasure
About the work
A long ten-juàn Six-Dynasties Língbǎo scripture — one of the most substantial of the Buddho-Daoist hybrid sūtras of the period. The expression yuányáng 元陽 in the title refers simultaneously to the text itself, to the world and palace in which it is revealed, and to the zhēnrén and “youths” (童子) who use it (cf. 5.1a, 1.3b, 16b, 6.4a, 7.1a). The work defines itself as “the secret reservoir of that which the venerable scriptures in thirty-six sections do not explain” (6.24a) and as the book that “causes to be heard that which has heretofore never been heard” (9.2a, 16b).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The scripture opens directly with its revelation scene and carries no author preface, postface, or transmission colophon; the closing at 10.23a is clearly truncated in the transmitted text.
Abstract
A Yuányáng jīng was already being polemicized against by the Buddhist Dào Ān 道安 (not the more famous fourth-century translator but a sixth-century Buddhist apologist) at the end of the sixth century in the Èrjiào lùn 二教論 14.1b. Of the five Dūnhuáng manuscript fragments that contain the term yuányáng in their title, only one — undated — corresponds to the received text, and Ōfuchi (Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 104) shows that this fragment in fact belongs to juàn 4 of DZ 336 Dòngxuán língbǎo shàngshī shuō jiǔhù shénmíng jīng rather than to DZ 334. A Sixth-Dynasties date is therefore firm.
The received text is thematically coherent throughout: it is devoted entirely to the conduct of those who “leave the family” (chūjiā 出家, esp. 1.3a, 10.13b), beginning with religious commandments and vows and ending with the Heavenly Worthy’s “ascension to the Heaven of the Great Net” (Dàluó tiān 大羅天). The ten juàn, divided into seven sections, are structured largely by Buddhist-style comparisons, parables, and dialectics; Fǎlín 法琳 in Biànzhèng lùn 辯正論 8.534b accuses the Yuányáng and cognate scriptures of plagiarizing the Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng 妙法蓮華經 (Saddharma-puṇḍarīka) and the Wúliàng shòu jīng 無量壽經. The text deploys Buddhist rhetoric and vocabulary to urge Buddhist practices — compassion, charity, preaching, recitation (5.13b, 7.6a, 8.4b) — and even uses the Buddhist term jīngshè fāngzhàng shì 精舍方丈室 for the adept’s private chapel (9.21a).
The text is most directly indebted to the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra. The author, using the dialectic of double negation, aims at resolving doubt and attaining the four virtues of the Mahāyāna nirvāṇa: “permanence, joy, selfhood, and purity” (cháng lè wǒ jìng 常樂我淨, 6.3a, 9.16b), i.e. the “plenitude of words and meaning” (yǒu zì yǒu yì 有字有義, 10.18a). The adept must not mistake the standard formulae of impermanence, no-self, and impurity as ultimate truths — these are only expedient teachings for dispelling doubt (10.19b–20a).
Yet Lagerwey (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 1: 242–245, DZ 334) stresses that Buddhist borrowings are preliminary, not ultimate, in the Yuányáng jīng: recitation of the text is intended to prepare the adept for a properly Daoist path, as confirmed by the closing: the Heavenly Worthy, preparing at dawn on the seventh day of the seventh month to ascend to the Great Net Heaven and “enter trance” (rùdìng 入定) — a development based on the Heavenly Worthy’s preaching-frame in the Běnjì jīng 本際經 (cf. DZ 59 Yuánshǐ dòngzhēn juéyí jīng 1b) — alarms his disciples, monks and nuns, the “men and women of pure faith,” and even the “male and female officers of the Twenty-four Dioceses” (10.1b–2b), where the text writes 治 for the Celestial Master parishes (a small but telling lexical retention of specifically Daoist institutional terminology).
Translations and research
- Zürcher, Erik. “Buddhist Influence on Early Taoism.” T’oung Pao 66 (1980): 84–147 — foundational on the Buddho-Daoist hybrid sūtra genre to which the Yuányáng jīng belongs.
- Kamata Shigeo 鎌田茂雄. Chūgoku bukkyōshi 中國佛教史, vol. 3 (on the Èrjiào lùn debate).
- Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾. Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 敦煌道經：目錄編, 104.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:242–245 (DZ 334).
Other points of interest
The Yuányáng jīng is one of the most important witnesses to the way in which sixth-century Daoist authors appropriated specifically Mahāyāna soteriological categories — cháng lè wǒ jìng, two-truths dialectics, expedient-means (fāngbiàn 方便) — while subordinating them to a distinctively Daoist eschatology of bodily transcendence in the Great Net Heaven.