Tàishàng dòngxuán língbǎo shàngpǐn jiè jīng 太上洞玄靈寶上品戒經
Scripture of the Upper-Grade Precepts of the Most-High Cavern-Mystery Numinous Treasure
About the work
A short Lingbào 靈寶 precept scripture in one juàn (six folios), preserved as the first of “two scriptures in one fascicle” (二經同卷, Táo 一) — the second being KR5b0139 Tàishàng xuányī zhēnrén shuō sāntú wǔkǔ quànjiè jīng, the two together filling DZ 454 (fasc. 202). The work opens with the standard Lingbao revelation frame: in the Kāihuáng 開皇 inception era, Yuánshǐ Tiānzūn 元始天尊 transmits the Zhìhuì shàngpǐn dàjiè fǎwén 智慧上品大戒法文 to Tàishàng Dàojūn 太上道君 in the kingdom of Xīnàyùguó 西那玉國 on Mt. Yùchá 鬱察山 in the realm of Fúluó 浮羅, in the “fragrant mulberry grove” 香桑林. The body comprises ten quànjiè 勸戒 (exhortations on the Three Treasures, copying scripture, building festivals, making offerings of lamp-oil and ritual robes, filial piety, healing the sick, almsgiving, suppressing jealousy, and casting images of the Tiānzūn), followed by liùqíng jiè 六情戒 (six-sense precepts), a list of the shí bìng 十病 and shí miàoyào 十妙藥 (ten diseases of the heart and their ten remedies), and a closing quànjiè sòng 勸戒頌 in five-syllable verse.
Abstract
The catalog gives “唐” as the dynastic placement but is silent on a tighter date. Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 1: 240) include this work in the Lingbao corpus and place its core in the early-medieval Lingbao corpus (4th–5th cent.) with possible Táng-period redaction; the use of Kāihuáng as a cosmological era (rather than a Suí 開皇 reign-period) and the diction of the revelation frame are consistent with the older Lingbao stratum. The vocabulary of liùgēn 六根 / liùqíng 六情 and the parallel pairing of “ten diseases / ten remedies” suggests Buddhist-borrowed reflective ethics, characteristic of the later Lingbao redaction. The work circulated independently and is cited under its title in Sòng Dàozàng catalogs.
The scripture is one of a cluster of mid-medieval Lingbao precept texts — also including KR5b0139, KR5b0140, KR5b0141, and KR5b0143 — that codified Daoist lay ethics on a model in dialogue with contemporaneous Buddhist śīla literature, and that fed forward into the Táng-Sòng zhāi and jiào liturgical traditions catalogued below.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 1: 240–241 (DZ 454, entry by Wang Chengwen 王承文 / Yamada Toshiaki 山田利明).
- Bokenkamp, Stephen R. “Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, ed. Michel Strickmann, vol. 2: 434–486. Brussels: Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques 21, 1983. — the foundational study of the Lingbao corpus and its redactional layers.
- Yamada, Toshiaki 山田利明. Rikuchō dōkyō girei no kenkyū 六朝道教儀禮の研究. Tōkyō: Tōhō shoten, 1999.