Tàishàng Tàiqīng Huánglǎo Dìjūn yùnléi Tiāntóng yǐnfàn xiānjīng 太上泰清皇老帝君運雷天童隱梵仙經
Immortal Scripture of the Heavenly Lad in the Secret Language of Brahman, of Directing Thunder, of the Emperor Lord HuángLǎo of the Great Clarity, of the Most High
anonymous Northern-Sòng late / Southern-Sòng early thunder-rite scripture (xiān jīng 仙經) in one juàn of three folios, the “jiājù [with added phrases]” pseudo-Sanskrit recension of KR5c0013 / DZ 632 revealed (per Daoist tradition) to Liáng Wùzhēn 梁悟真 on Máo Shān in 1109. Preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 633 / CT 633, 洞神部本文類); fourth in the bundle “Qī jīng tóng juàn shāng sì” 七經同卷傷四.
About the work
The scripture interpolates the core Tiāntóng hùmìng incantation (KR5c0013 / DZ 632) with a dense layer of pseudo-Sanskrit dhāraṇī formulae (oṃ… hūṃ 唵…吽, zhà 吒, lū 嚧, etc.) and with extensive thunder-deity invocations proper to the Shénxiāo 神霄 /Tiānxīn zhèngfǎ 天心正法 traditions: the Tiānpéng yuánshuài 天蓬元帥, Tiānyóu yuánshuài 天猷元帥, Yìshèng zhēnjūn 翊聖眞君, Xuántiān zhēnwǔ 玄天真武, and an extended list of thirty-six Thunder-Dukes (Léigōng 雷公) classified by function — jiǎ-dīng cyclical, eight-trigram, six-hòu 候, great-rivers, five-sacred-mountains, rain-summoning, snow-scattering, plague-striking, demon-expelling, and so on. The closing jí jí rú Tàishàng Huánglǎo Dìjūn lǜlìng 急急如太上皇老帝君律令 replaces the generic rú lǜlìng of the base scripture, signalling the text’s explicit incorporation into the Sòng thunder-rite pantheon under the Huánglǎo Dìjūn 皇老帝君 (the Yellow-Old Emperor Lord, a Shénxiāo-adjacent hypostasis of Lǎojūn).
Prefaces
No independent preface; the scripture is part of the same LiángWùzhēn revelation-cycle narrated in the postface to KR5c0013.
Abstract
Paul Andersen, in his joint notice for DZ 632 and DZ 633 in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:1215–1216, under 3.B.4 Shàngqīng), identifies the present DZ 633 as the “version with added phrases” (jiājù běn 加句本) mentioned in Fù Xiāo’s 1144 postface to DZ 632 and in Hùnyuán shèngjì 9.45b–46a. Such interpolated pseudo-Sanskrit is characteristic of the vogue for Tantric-Buddhist-inflected Daoist scripture-making under the Sòng Huīzōng emperor (r. 1100–1125) and the first generation of Southern-Sòng thunder-ritualists. The scripture’s integration of Tiānpéng, Tiānyóu, Zhēnwǔ, and Yìshèng alongside an elaborated thunder-duke pantheon places it in the same stratum as the Tiānxīn zhèngfǎ and early Shénxiāo liturgies. Frontmatter notBefore/notAfter 1100/1162 (from the beginning of Huīzōng’s reign through the early Shàoxīng era, the plausible window for the scripture’s formation).
The pseudo-Sanskrit is not parseable as Sanskrit; the dhāraṇī are constructed from Chinese transliteration-characters borrowed from Tantric-Buddhist translations and rearranged. Andersen observes that the “yǐnfàn 隱梵 [hidden-Brahman]” of the title — referring to this pseudo-Sanskrit stratum — is itself a Chinese neologism that advertises rather than conceals the Buddhist-Tantric adornment of the Daoist text.
Translations and research
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:1215–1216 (DZ 632 / DZ 633, Paul Andersen).
- Davis, Edward L. Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001 — on the Sòng thunder-rite milieu.
- Skar, Lowell. “Administering Thunder: A Thirteenth-Century Memorial Deliberating the Thunder Rites.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 9 (1996): 159–202.
Other points of interest
The pairing DZ 632 + DZ 633 is a classic instance of the Daoist “doubled scripture” phenomenon in which a core short incantation circulates in both a plain and an esoterically adorned form simultaneously, the two sharing patrons and liturgical settings while appealing to different aesthetic-devotional sensibilities. The same pattern is visible in the pair KR5c0006 / KR5c0007 (Eastern and Western Dipper) and in the pair KR5c0015 / KR5c0016 (the two Bāyáng 八陽 scriptures, below).
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5c0014
- Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:1215–1216 — DZ 632/633 entry (P. Andersen).