Xiàodào Wú Xǔ èr zhēnjūn zhuàn 孝道吳許二真君傳
Biographies of the Two Perfected Lords Wú and Xǔ of the Way of Filial Devotion
About the work
A thirteen-folio Táng biography of the two paired Jìngmíng saints — Xǔ Xùn 許遜 and his elder companion Wú Měng 吳猛 — as the founding figures of the Way of Filial Piety (Xiàodào 孝道). Among the earliest surviving Daoist accounts of Xǔ Xùn’s hagiographic cycle.
Prefaces
No preface per se. The text carries an internal reference (9b) to the year 819, noting that “five hundred and sixty years” have passed since Xǔ Xùn’s apotheosis in 292 CE — a computational discrepancy (292 + 560 = 852, not 819) that is one of the classic cruxes of the Xǔ Xùn hagiographic tradition.
Abstract
Dated to the Táng by Levi (Schipper & Verellen, Taoist Canon 1: 449, DZ 449), with the most likely date the early ninth century on the basis of the 819 marker — though the 560-year / 819 discrepancy complicates the calculation. The text is one of the earliest preserved accounts of Xǔ Xùn and his eleven disciples; it contains — with major variants — all the material found in Bái Yùchán’s 白玉蟾 Yùlóng jí (preserved at DZ 263.31 Xiūzhēn shíshū 33–36), together with a valuable lineage of masters of the tradition running up to the year 683 (13a–b).
Xǔ Xùn is described as a Jìn-period fāngwài zhī shì 方外之士, profoundly versed in the arts of the immortals and the subtle teaching of filial piety; with his friend Wú Měng he becomes a court favourite of sorts — “the Sage [Jìn emperor] honoured him; Wáng Dūn 王敦 took him as teacher; Guō Pú 郭璞 benefited from him” — while pursuing an occult mastery of the material and spirit worlds. The account is central to the Táng Jìngmíng and the later Southern-Sòng Zhōngxiào hagiographic traditions.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer. “Taoist Ritual and Local Cults of the T’ang Dynasty.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, vol. 3, 812–834. Brussels: 1985.
- 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.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:449 (DZ 449).