Tàishàng dòngxuán língbǎo chūjiā yīnyuán jīng 太上洞玄靈寶出家因緣經
Scripture on the Karmic Causality of Leaving the Family, of the Most High Cavern-Mystery Numinous Treasure
About the work
A one-juàn seventh-century Daoist sūtra on the monastic vocation (chūjiā 出家, “leaving the family / home”). In the narrative frame, two hundred kings, with their queens and great ministers and their peoples, appear before the Most High Heavenly Worthy at the San-ming precious altar of Zhūyáng shànggūan 朱陽上觀 in the Chìmíng 赤明 realm, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the first year of Kāihuáng 開皇, and declare their wish to abandon their kingdoms, wives, and children to take up the religious life.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the dated revelation scene and carries no author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the seventh century by Schmidt (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 2: 536–537, DZ 339). About 20 per cent of the present text is quoted — sometimes abridged — in DZ 1123 Yīqiè dàojīng yīnyì miàomén yóuqǐ 一切道經音義妙門由起, which is demonstrably of the early eighth century; the Chūjiā yīnyuán jīng must therefore have existed by no later than the opening of the eighth century at the latest, and the Kāihuáng (581–600) dating-frame in the narrative suggests a Suí or very early-Táng composition.
The scripture’s structure: (i) the two hundred monarchs, having received a nine-coloured beam of blessing-light from the Heavenly Worthy, learn from him the inventory of the good deeds and pious works they performed in prior lives that account for their present elevated birth; (ii) they receive the “Precepts for the Initial Stage of Perfection” (chūzhēn jiè 初真戒) and make the corresponding vows; (iii) the text expounds the threefold meaning of chūjiā — to leave the family, to enter religious practice (rù dào 入道), and to forsake all that is profane — the three together defining a fully-formed Daoist master; (iv) numerous exemplary narratives illustrate the social importance of Daoists, the dignity of their institutional position, and the catastrophic karmic results of hostility toward them.
The scripture is a major early source for the institutional self-understanding of Táng Daoist monasticism — its vocabulary of vocation, its bureaucratic integration into imperial state-ritual, and its polemical self-defence against Confucian objections to the renunciation of kin-ties.
Translations and research
- Kohn, Livia. Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:536–537 (DZ 339).