Xǔ zhēnjūn xiānzhuàn 許真君仙傳
Hagiography of the Perfected Xǔ
About the work
A one-juàn Yuán-dynasty recension of the biography of the Jìngmíng 淨明 patriarch Xǔ Xùn 許遜 — a direct rewriting of Bái Yùchán’s 白玉蟾 Yùlóng jí 玉隆集 biography of 1224 (preserved at DZ 263.31 Xiūzhēn shíshū).
Prefaces
No prefaces in the source. The text opens directly with the honorific titles of Xǔ Xùn as “Jiǔzhōu dūxiān tàishǐ gāomíng dàshǐ zhìdào xuányìng shéngōng miàojì zhēnjūn 九州都仙太史高明大使至道玄應神功妙濟真君” and carries no author preface or transmission colophon.
Abstract
Dated to the Yuán (1279–1368) by Schipper (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 2: 899–900, DZ 447). Xǔ Xùn’s biography here: surname Xǔ, given name Xùn 遜, zì Jìngzhī 敬之; his great-grandfather was Yǎn 琰, grandfather Wǔ 五, father Sù 肅, all natives of Xǔchāng 許昌; they were of the gentry and traced descent from Yóu 由 of Yǐngyáng 潁陽. Xǔ’s father, at the end of the Hàn, fled south to avoid warfare, settling at Nánchāng 南昌 in Yùzhāng 豫章, where Xǔ was born. His mother conceived him by dreaming that a golden phoenix let fall a pearl into her palm, which she played with and swallowed.
The account then follows the standard Xǔ Xùn / Jìngmíng hagiographic sequence: ordination under Wú Měng 吳猛, iron-pillar exorcism at Nánchāng, family group ascension to Heaven in 291 CE, and the subsequent formation of the cult. Textually, this is a Yuán-period condensation of Bái Yùchán’s much fuller Yùlóng jí — one of several medieval and late-imperial hagiographical rewritings of the Xǔ Xùn corpus, all contributing to the literary foundation of the late-Sòng and Yuán Jìngmíng dào 淨明道 order.
Translations and research
- Akizuki Kan’ei 秋月觀暎. Chūgoku kinsei dōkyō no keisei: Jōmyōdō no kisoteki kenkyū 中國近世道教の形成：淨明道の基礎的研究. Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1978.
- Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature, Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987, 70–78.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:899–900 (DZ 447).