Tàishàng Lǎojūn shuō jiùshēng zhēnjīng 太上老君說救生真經
True Scripture on Saving Life, Preached by the Most High Lord Lǎo
anonymous Sòng short lay-revelational scripture in one juàn of two folios, first in a bundle of seven short scriptures (“Qī jīng tóng juàn shāng sì 七經同卷傷四”) preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 630 / CT 630, 洞神部本文類).
About the work
The scripture is staged as a discourse of Tàishàng Lǎojūn before an assembly of eight thousand disciples in the Zǐwēi 紫微 Palace, upon a platform of seven-jewelled liúlí 瑠璃. Lǎojūn praises the men and women of the Middle Kingdom who maintain abstinence and recite the scripture, decrees that disaster will be averted from them, and charges the Six Jiǎ and Six Dīng 六甲六丁 cyclical deities to guard its reciters. Seven, twenty-one, or thirty-seven recitations per reading are prescribed, with hand-copying of the scripture as a supplementary merit. The whole is a compact apotropaic lay-devotional.
Prefaces
No preface.
Abstract
Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:983, DZ 630) describes the text as “a brief scripture the provenance of which is unknown, but which was probably intended for lay-believers, [in which] Tàishàng Lǎojūn orders the divinities of the six cyclical jiǎ and dīng combinations (liùjiǎ 六甲, liùdīng 六丁) to keep devotees from harm.” The scripture’s doctrinal simplicity and recitation-only pragmatism place it in the same Sòng-era lay-Daoist stratum as the bundled KR5c0012–KR5c0017, with which it travels in the Sānjiā edition. Frontmatter notBefore/notAfter 960/1279 (Sòng).
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:983 (DZ 630, Hans-Hermann Schmidt).
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5c0011
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:983.