Tàishàng dòngxuán língbǎo sānyuán yùjīng xuándū dàxiàn jīng 太上洞玄靈寶三元玉京玄都大獻經
Scripture of the Great Offering in the Capital of Mystery on Jade Capital Mountain for the [Days of the] Three Primordials, of the Most High Cavern-Mystery Numinous Treasure
About the work
A substantial twenty-nine-folio ritual scripture for the Grand Offering (dàxiàn 大獻) performed in the Daoist Capital of Mystery (Xuándū 玄都) on Jade Capital Mountain, principally on the Day of the Median Primordial (zhōngyuán 中元, the fifteenth day of the seventh month), when the officers of the Earth examine the accounts of the dead. The scripture is the Daoist counterpart and complement of the Buddhist Yúlánpén 盂蘭盆 festival.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source by way of authorial preface; the work is transmitted with a running interlinear commentary that functions as an exegetical apparatus.
Abstract
Lagerwey (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 1: 251–252, DZ 370) places the received text in the Six Dynasties. The Dūnhuáng witness Stein 3061 (catalogued in Ōfuchi, Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen, 80) preserves a variant title corresponding better to the text’s content — Sānyuán yùjīng xuándū zhōngyuán dàxiàn jīng 三元玉京玄都中元大獻經 (“…for the Day of the Median Primordial”). DZ 1312 Tàishàng dàdào yùqīng jīng 3.9a further mentions the rite. The scripture’s core message: through the offering “to the saints, and the Daoists who during this day and this night recite this book,” the hungry ghosts of the underworld are delivered (20a–b).
The text has clearly been expanded from an earlier core. Pages 26a and following in the Dàozàng edition — material on the days of the Three Primordials more generally — and, probably, pages 21a–22b (as signalled by the commentator at 5b–6a) are later additions. A tradition preserved by Xuán Yǐ 玄嶷 (fl. 684–704) in the Buddhist Zhēnzhèng lùn 甄正論 569c identifies the author as a Daoist named Liú Wǔdài 劉無待, who is said to have composed the work in the seventh century in imitation of the Buddhist Yúlánpén jīng 盂蘭盆經; but the work is already cited in Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚 4.80 (compiled 624), and Yoshioka suggests (Dōkyō to Bukkyō 2: 238) that if Liú Wǔdài is indeed involved, it must be as compiler of the expanded Dàozàng recension rather than of the original text. The Yìwén lèijù citation is in any case closer to the Dàozàng form than to the Dūnhuáng manuscript; both the expanded text and its commentary appear to date from the sixth century. The first of the ten commandments in one of the added sections — “banning the killing of living beings for the purpose of offering illicit sacrifices to the deities and demons of the Six Heavens” (26b) — and the allusion to the myth of the Conversion of the Barbarians (huàhú 化胡) in the commentary (21b–22a) are characteristic sixth-century material. The commentator locates Lǎojūn’s birthplace at the Commandery of Chén 陳郡 (21b), a designation current only in the LiúSòng and Northern Wèi periods.
The scripture is a foundational source for the Daoist Zhōngyuán ghost-festival rite, and provides crucial evidence for the sixth-century formation of the triple-Principal (sānyuán) calendar and its ritual instantiation.
Translations and research
- Yoshioka Yoshitoyo 吉岡義豐. Dōkyō to Bukkyō 道教と佛教. Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1959, 2:238.
- Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988 — for the Buddhist Yúlánpén festival and its Daoist counterparts.
- Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾. Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 敦煌道經：目錄編, 80–81 (Stein 3061).
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:251–252 (DZ 370).