Shàngqīng huáchén sānbēn yùjué 上清華晨三奔玉訣
Precious Formulas for the Threefold Flight to the Glistening Dawn, of the Upper Clarity
About the work
A five-folio late-sixth- / seventh-century stellar-meditation manual, deploying Shàngqīng vocabulary but not part of the Shàngqīng revelation proper. Transmitted in the Dàozàng in a composite juàn with DZ 408 (KR5b0092).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the Tàishàng dàojūn’s instruction to Zǐ (child — the addressee) and carries no author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the Táng by Schipper (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 2: 600–601, DZ 409). Although the text uses much of the vocabulary of the Shàngqīng corpus, it is not itself a Shàngqīng scripture; it concerns meditation on the seven stars of the Northern Dipper together with the two invisible stars Fǔ 輔 and Bì 弼. These invisible stars entered Chinese astrology in the late Six Dynasties and early Táng, and are presented in this text as a novelty. They are identified with the deities Tàipíng jīnjué hòushèng dìjūn 太平金闕後聖帝君 and Tàiwēi tiāndì 太微天帝; these two stars together with the Pole Star form the three stars of the Huágài 華蓋 constellation, which in the scripture’s cosmography dominates even the Dipper.
The meditation prescribes the visualisation of the deities of the three Huágài stars: their light floods the inner landscape so that the spirit may freely roam within. The imagery of the Yellow Court (Huángtíng 黃庭) and the Shàngqīng scriptures recurs throughout, accompanied by rhymed formulae and detailed procedural instructions.
A sānbēn 三奔 method (“threefold flight”) was practiced in the late sixth century by a Daoist named Hòu Kǎi 侯楷 (d. 573), whose biography in DZ 296 Lìshì zhēnxiān tǐdào tōngjiàn 30.12b contains a note explaining that the term sānbēn had originally designated the Yellow Emperor’s sexual techniques (huángdì sānbēn yùnǚ zhī 黃帝三奔玉女之) — an original meaning evidently displaced in the present text, where the three stars and the interior visualisations have replaced the erotic original.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:600–601 (DZ 409).