Xuánbǎo rénniǎo shān jīngtú 玄寶人鳥山經圖
Scriptural Chart of the Man-Bird Mountain, of the Mysterious Treasure
(The catalog gives the title as 玄寶; the source file reads 玄覽 Xuánlǎn. The Taoist Canon uses the source-file reading Xuánlǎn rénniǎo shān jīngtú. Preserving the catalog reading in the frontmatter title per the CLAUDE.md source-slip rule.)
About the work
A short illustrated Language Treasure scripture on the Man-Bird Mountain (Rénniǎo shān 人鳥山) — a mythical axis mundi from which the zhēnwén of the Language Treasure issue. Transmitted in the Dàozàng in a composite juàn with DZ 433 (KR5b0117).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the Tàishàng yuē revelation and carries no author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the original Língbǎo corpus by Schipper (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 1: 231, DZ 434) — within the Gě Cháofǔ stratum of ca. 397–430. The scripture identifies the innumerable heavens as each having their own Man-Bird Mountain — so called because its peak takes a human shape while its lower slopes take the form of a bird. On these mountains the zhēnshén 真神 dwell in jade pavilions and treasure halls, amid groves of immortal birds and beasts, sacred herbs and waters of long life. The present text is explicitly cited as the scene of the revelation of DZ 321 Dòngxuán língbǎo zhūtiān shìjiè zàohuà jīng (KR5b0005), which opens at Língniǎo shān 靈鳥山 = the Rénniǎo shān.
The scripture’s twenty-four talismanic diagrams (fú 符) are each drawn from a Shénxiān tú 神仙圖, which Bokenkamp (“Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures,” 458–460) has shown to originate in different books kept in Gě Hóng’s 葛洪 library. The work is one of the principal witnesses to the early-fifth-century Daoist iconography of the sacred mountain as the source of scriptural revelation.
Translations and research
- Bokenkamp, Stephen R. “Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, vol. 2, 434–486. Brussels: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 1983, at 458–460.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:231 (DZ 434).