Xuánzhū xīnjìng zhù 玄珠心鏡註
Annotated Mind-Mirror of the Mysterious Pearl (Wáng Sǔn-zhī recension) transmitted by 長孫滋 (傳), with chapter-and-verse annotation by 王損之 (棲真子, 章句)
About the work
A single-juǎn Táng-period commentary on the Xuánzhū xīnjìng 玄珠心鏡, transmitted by Wángwūshānqiáo Chángsūn Zī 王屋山樵長孫滋 (the Woodcutter of Mt. Wángwū) and annotated chapter-by-chapter by Qīzhēnzǐ Wáng Sǔnzhī 棲真子王損之. The work is the parallel Táng commentary to the Five-Dynasties recension KR5b0279 (by 衡嶽真子).
Abstract
The text opens with the strange-biographical frame: Cuī Shàoxuán 崔少玄, infant daughter of Cuī Gōng 崔恭, prefect of Fénzhōu 汾州, married Lú Chuí 盧陲, a cóngshì 從事 of Fújiàn. Over a year into the marriage, she revealed to her husband that she had originally been a shìshū tiānnǚ 侍書天女 (Heavenly Maid attending on the Writing of the Jade Emperor); at each autumn-equinox she was sent to expunge the cinnabar register of the names of students whose excessive contact with worldly defilement had brought them down. Conferring in secret with three sister-maids of the same palace, she had felt sudden disgust at the world’s mire of carnal desire (an interlinear note explains: the deities of the realm of form and the realm of desire still have face-to-face mating; the Maid attending on the Jade Emperor’s writing belongs to the realm of wúsè 無色 — pure-yáng essential-qì beings, without lust, without knowledge that mortal world has marriage; when the three of them sighed in indignation, the very motion of yùxīn 慾心 (lust-mind) caused their celestial fall as mortal women). She is now in her twenty-third year — the foretold span — and announces her departure-by-non-cohabitation; she requests Lú to release her with magnanimity.
This frame supports the commentary’s main doctrinal cargo: the Daoist cúnyī discipline that, by preserving inner integrity, allows the practitioner to ascend back to the wúsè heavens. The work is among the earliest of the Xuánzhū commentary tradition; the strange-biographical framing makes it a curious cross-genre piece between Táng zhìguài 志怪 and inner-alchemical instruction.
Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 2: 770–771, John Lagerwey) treat the work as a Táng commentary that survives in the Daozang independently of the Five-Dynasties recension at KR5b0279.
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: 770–771 (DZ 575, John Lagerwey).
- Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge, 2008.
Other points of interest
The Kanripo catalog meta records the transmitter’s name as 長孫紫, but the source text of KR5b0280 itself reads 長孫滋 — the 滋 form is the correct one, and the catalog’s 紫 is treated here as a copyist’s slip.