Tàijí jìliàn nèifǎ 太極祭鍊內法
Inner Method of the Supreme Ultimate’s Sacrifice-and-Refinement by 鄭思肖 (述)
About the work
A three-juǎn manual of jìliàn 祭鍊 — the Daoist rite by which an officiant simultaneously feeds (祭 jì, “sacrifice” — relieving hunger and thirst) and refines (鍊 liàn, “refining” — kindling spiritual awareness) the souls of the dead so that they may emerge from the long darkness and rise. The compilation is attributed in its prefaces and in the Daozang to the Sòng-loyalist 鄭思肖 (1241–1318), known under his hào Suǒnán 所南. The text occupies a pivotal position in the SòngYuán reception of the Língbǎo tradition because it presents the inner-cultivation (nèiliàn 內鍊) reinterpretation of an originally external-and-public liturgical genre.
Abstract
The work transmits a Dānyáng 丹陽 sub-tradition of the Língbǎo jìliàn descending from the eponymous SòngSòu founder Xiāngōng Gézhēnjūn 仙公葛眞君 (i.e. Gě Xuán 葛玄 as Daoist patriarch). The three juǎn cover the doctrinal grounding of the rite (the cosmology of yīnyáng and the convertibility of qì and shén); the technical fúlù 符籙 (talisman-and-register) lore by which the officiant summons, restrains and refines the wandering souls; and the nèiliàn visualisations through which the officiant’s own body becomes the alchemical furnace in which the dead are recompounded.
The opening preface, dated Yǒnglè 4 (1406) by Zhāng Zhèngcháng 張正常 (43rd Heavenly Master, zìchū 字初), explains that the Língbǎo zhāifǎ originated with the three early-medieval masters XúGěZhèng (徐、葛、鄭) and proliferated thereafter into many divergent schools; Zhèng Sīxiào’s recension, the preface argues, returns the practice to its essentials by binding it to chéng 誠 (sincerity), the Confucian-style metaphysical foundation that subordinates every talisman, breath-technique and visualisation to inner moral integrity. A second preface, dated 1407 (Zhìzhèng dīnghài 至正丁亥, Duānyáng jié) and signed by Zhìlèdàorén Xú Shànzhèng 至樂道人徐善政, narrates the work’s near-loss in a printing-block fire and its rescue by the patron Wáng Dàoguī 王道珪.
The Daozang text bears DZ 548 (Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon 2: 1024–1025, entry by Judith M. Boltz). The text is closely connected to its companion work KR5b0252 (太極祭煉內法議略), an appended exposition that the catalog meta gives to “鄭思肯” — almost certainly a copyist’s error for 鄭思肖, since the Yìlüè 議略 is the same author’s own discursive supplement to his ritual manual. Both pieces circulated under the Daozang shelfmark CT 548.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Vol. 2: 1024–1025 (entry on DZ 548 by Judith M. Boltz).
- Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987 — registers the Tàijí jì-liàn nèi-fǎ as the principal Sòng-Yuán manual of inner jì-liàn.
- Mōri, Yoshinori 茂呂美耶 / Maruyama Hiroshi 丸山宏, “鄭思肖『太極祭鍊內法』譯註”, various papers in 道教文化研究 — Japanese partial translation and annotation.
Other points of interest
The work is intellectually striking because Zhèng Sīxiào — the most uncompromising of Sòng yímín 遺民 (the loyalist who painted orchids without earth because “the soil has been seized”) — chose to inscribe his political-cultural grief into the most public of the Daoist mortuary rites: a manual for refining the dead. The opening doctrine of chéng 誠 reads simultaneously as a Daoist ritual-cosmological foundation and as a Confucian rebuke of the contemporary moral order.
Links
- Daozang — DZ 548
- Zhèng Sīxiào — Wikipedia