Tàishàng língbǎo wǔfú xù 太上靈寶五符序
The Five Talismans, Powerful Treasure of the Most High
About the work
A three-juàn early Daoist compilation centred on the Five Talismans (wǔfú 五符) of the Língbǎo tradition. The word xù 序 in the title — normally “preface” — here refers to the text itself, on the analogy of the Hàn apocrypha (wěishū 緯書); the received work is in fact not a preface but a comprehensive Tàiqīng-Daoist anthology.
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source proper. The text opens with the mythological narrative of the Yǔ 禹 transmission and carries no separate author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the Eastern Jìn (317–420) by Lagerwey (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 1: 236–237, DZ 388), following Kaltenmark’s foundational studies. The text’s formal and ideological affinities — its oracular, weft-commentary-style vocabulary; its quotation of Gě Hóng 葛洪 (283–343) at 2.22b and 3.5a; its close connection, demonstrated by Robinet, with the Sānhuáng wén 三皇文 and the Tàishàng lǎojūn zhōngjīng (DZ 1168) — place it in the penumbra of Hàn and Three-Kingdoms Tàiqīng Daoism, reworked in its surviving form in the early fourth century. It was only later that the Wǔfú xù was retrospectively attached to the “new” Língbǎo textual family — probably to lend the latter additional antiquity (Lagerwey, Wu-shang pi-yao, 234). The text corresponds to number 20 of the canonical Língbǎo corpus list.
Despite its title, the received work does not deal exclusively with the Five Talismans but constitutes a thematic anthology of Tàiqīng 太清 Daoism — i.e. the Daoism of the Hàn and Three Kingdoms (206 BCE – 265 CE). Its contents include:
- The mythological transmission of the Five Talismans by the sage-ruler Yǔ 禹 (1.1a–11a, 3.1a–3a);
- The Yellow Emperor’s quest for the explanation of the Book of the True One (3.16b–22a);
- Juàn 2: formularies — especially for mountain retreats;
- Lord Lǎo’s revelations (3.13a);
- The Offering rite, including meat and wine (3.3a–7b);
- An unsystematic body-pantheon (1.19b–25a) of multiple souls, “made in the image of nature”;
- The hermits who enter the mountains to gather medicinal plants (1.15b–16a);
- A table of auspicious days for “entering the mountains” (3.3b–9a, paralleled in Bàopǔzǐ 17), preceding the Five Talismans themselves — which seem to have been used primarily for the protection of the adept in the mountains.
Translations and research
- Kaltenmark, Max. “Ling-pao 靈寶: Note sur un terme du taoïsme religieux.” In Mélanges publiés par l’Institut des hautes études chinoises, 2:559–588. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1960.
- Kaltenmark, Max. “Quelques remarques sur le ‘T’ai-chang Ling-pao wou-fu siu’.” Zinbun 18 (1982): 1–10.
- Kobayashi Masayoshi 小林正美. “Taijō reihō gofu jo 《太上靈寶五符序》.” In Rikuchō dōkyōshi kenkyū 六朝道教史研究.
- Bokenkamp, Stephen R. “Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, vol. 2, 434–486, esp. 450–458, 483–484. Brussels: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 1983.
- Robinet, Isabelle. La révélation du Shangqing dans l’histoire du taoïsme, 1:26–34.
- Lagerwey, John. Wu-shang pi-yao: Somme taoïste du VIe siècle. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1981, 234.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:236–237 (DZ 388).
Other points of interest
The Wǔfú xù is one of the principal repositories of pre-Língbǎo Tàiqīng Daoist material and of the early alchemical-hermetic fú-complex of the Hàn–Three-Kingdoms transition. Its structural incoherence — an anthology, not a treatise — reflects the circumstances of its transmission as a gathered deposit of earlier materials rather than a single-authored composition.