Luótiān dàjiào wǔcháo kē 羅天大醮午朝科
Midday-Audience Procedural Code for the Great Offering Spanning the Heavens
About the work
The midday audience of the four-text Luótiān dàjiào 羅天大醮 cycle (KR5b0161–KR5b0164). The opening hymn Dānlíng zhūhuǒ 丹靈朱火 (“Cinnabar numen, vermilion fire; flaming clouds whip the wind; the red wheel-rim turning, the heavenly light eight-fold piercing”) is a south-direction fire-element chant appropriate to the midday-meridian. The structure parallels the matin and vesper audiences in KR5b0161 and KR5b0163: twenty-four drum-rolls, call-down of the Sānwǔ gōngcáo, zhōngzhāng memorials presented to the celestial bureau, xuánzòu 玄奏 (announcement of the mid-day petition).
Abstract
Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 2: 1023–1024) treat the midday audience as the structural pivot of the Luótiān cycle. The Daoist liturgical theory of the three audiences — articulated in KR5b0150 and the Wúshàng huánglù dàzhāi lìchéng yí tradition — assigns each cháo to one of the sānjiè (three-realm) bureaus: tiānguān 天官 in the morning, dìguān 地官 at midday, shuǐguān 水官 at vesper. The midday audience here is therefore the petition to the Earth Bureau, who weighs and registers the patron’s meritorious works on behalf of the rite’s beneficiaries.
The rite is anonymous; the diction is closely parallel to Dù Guāngtíng’s Jīnlù cycle (cf. KR5b0167–KR5b0181) and may represent a parallel-school adaptation of the same template.
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: 1023–1024 (DZ 478, entry by John Lagerwey).
- Lagerwey, John. Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History. New York: Macmillan, 1987.