Kuígāng liùsuǒ mìfǎ 魁罡六鎖祕法
Secret Method of the Six Locks of the Dipper-Ladle and the Dipper-Pivot
About the work
An anonymous single-juǎn Daoist manual of cataclysmic-summoning magic, structured around the Kuígāng 魁罡 — the Kuí 魁 (the bowl of the Big Dipper) and the Gāng 罡 (the gāng star at the Dipper-tip, the ritual “pivot”) — as the celestial pivot through which the practitioner can summon natural cataclysms.
Abstract
The opening section, Tiāndì biànyì dìyī 天地變易第一 (“First: Transformation of Heaven and Earth”), reads: “Yù yào zhī tiāndì biànyì, zhòuyè bùfēn, hūnhuì piāohēi, fēnghuángshā tuīshān báshù, rìyuè bùjiàn, xīngxiù wúguāng…” 欲要知天地變易，晝夜不分，暈晦飄黑，風黃沙推山拔樹，日月不見，星宿無光 (“If you would summon the transformation of heaven and earth, with day and night fused, with darkness drifting black, with a sandstorm uprooting mountains and pulling out trees, with sun and moon invisible, with the constellations darkened…”). The procedure: take three chǐ of white silk, write upon it the Xiàntiān fú 陷天符 (Sky-Drowning talisman), recite the Hùntiān zhòu 混天呪 (Cosmos-Confounding Incantation), place it on a mountain at a quiet uninhabited spot, stand upright on the highest north-western peak, recite the talisman-and-incantation one hundred times, throw the talisman to the ground, point one hand at the sky, call “sù” three times, descend the mountain immediately without looking back, “in a moment a wild wind will rise on all sides, the human face will not be distinguishable; only the sound of thunder-drums will be heard; mountains will be levelled, rivers and seas levelled”. The author warns: “this technique can be used once but cannot be used again — for fear of harming sentient beings”.
The text continues with the Hùntiān zhòu incantation: “Shètiān dūshǐ tàiyī léijūn, fēngbó yǔshī léidiàn zhǎngjí sīguān, sùshǐ liùdīng liùjiǎ dàlì tiānshén qūshè dúlóng bìng qǐfǎmén…” Subsequent sections give the parallel rites for the other five Locks. The whole forms a piece of high-Daoist apocalyptic fǎshù (Daoist magic-technique).
Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 2: 771, John Lagerwey) treat the work as a SòngYuán Daoist magic manual, witness to the late-medieval Kuígāng tradition that fed into the later Ming thunder-magic (雷法 léifǎ) corpus.
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: 771 (DZ 582, John Lagerwey).
- Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987.
Other points of interest
The warning that “this technique can be used once but cannot be used again — for fear of harming sentient beings” gives the work an unusually self-conscious moral cast for the fǎshù genre.