Tàishàng dòngxuán língbǎo wǎngshēng jiùkǔ miàojīng 太上洞玄靈寶往生救苦妙經
Marvelous Scripture on Salvation from Distress in Subsequent Lives, of the Most High Cavern-Mystery Numinous Treasure
About the work
A fourteen-folio Táng mortuary scripture on the salvation of deceased parents, textually a Táng recension of DZ 371 Sāntú wǔkǔ bádù shēngsǐ miàojīng (KR5b0055), from which it takes its main themes, character, and in part even its title (2a, 7b). Transmitted in the Dàozàng in a composite juàn with DZ 371 and DZ 372 (KR5b0055, KR5b0056).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the Tiānzūn’s sermon in the Xiānglín 香林 (“Fragrant Grove”) park and carries no author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the Táng by Lagerwey (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 2: 548–549, DZ 373). The scripture is a development of the shorter DZ 371 with heightened emphasis on proselytism and on pastoral/institutional instruction. Its recipients are urged “to spread it to those who have not heard it” (10b) and to exhort others to perform the “five acts of philanthropy” (11b–13a). The Heavenly Worthy proceeds to calculate the return one may expect on each “charitable investment,” while warning that “if one’s wealth is not enough to redeem (bǔ 補) one’s sins, that wealth has no weight” (13a).
The ritual and institutional instructions are notably more precise than in DZ 371. To save one’s ancestors, one must ask a Daoist master (dàoshì 道士) to perform a seven-day Retreat (2a). If one wishes to use “the text of the Five Meditations,” one must “invite a master and receive it according to the code” (8a). Three of the five charitable acts consist in giving money to religious institutions and inciting others to do likewise (12a–b); frequent reference is made to the merit of those who “leave the family” (chūjiā 出家) for the religious life (6a, 9b, 12b). The ritual for deceased parents is to be performed on the forty-ninth day and on the hundredth day, “for within forty-nine days their sins are judged, and within one hundred days they enter one of the Five Paths” (7b).
The scripture is a key witness to the Táng integration of Daoist monastic institutions into the popular economy of mortuary merit, and to the stabilisation of the seven-times-seven qīqī funerary calendar within a specifically Daoist frame.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:548–549 (DZ 373).