太上老君內日用妙經

Tàishàng Lǎojūn nèi rìyòng miàojīng 太上老君內日用妙經

Wonderful Scripture of Daily Inner Practice, by the Most High Lord Lǎo

anonymous short Quánzhēn 全真 meditation manual in one juàn of two folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 645 / CT 645, 洞神部本文類) and in the Dàozàng jíyào (JY060); fifth of the seven scriptures bundled together as “Qī jīng tóng juàn shāng bā” 七經同卷傷八 and paired with its companion KR5c0027 Wài rìyòng miàojīng 外日用妙經 (DZ 646) as the “inner” member of the inner/outer rìyòng diptych.

About the work

The text is a compressed prose instruction running uninterrupted for roughly fifty lines. It opens by defining rìyòng 日用 (“daily practice”) as the discipline of meditation sustained across the ordinary activities of life: “For the daily practice: in eating and drinking, then stilling and restraining the mouth; sit alone, let not a single thought arise, let the myriad affairs be altogether forgotten — preserve the spirit, fix the mind, lips sealing lips, teeth laid against teeth, eyes not regarding things, ears not heeding sound, the single heart guarding inwardly, the breath tuned, fine and unbroken, exhaled lightly as if there and as if not — let it brook no interruption.” The procedure leads, by its own internal dynamic, to the classical nèidān 內丹 convergence: heart-fire descends (xīnhuǒ xiàjiàng 心火下降), kidney-water ascends (shènshuǐ shàngshēng 腎水上昇), saliva rises spontaneously in the mouth (kǒunèi gāinjīn zìshēng 口內泔津自生), and the practitioner comes to know the route of long-life from within (zìzhī chángshēng zhī lù 自知長生之路). The text then sets out its core doctrinal equations:

• “The body is the lodging of the qì 炁; the heart-mind is the dwelling of the spirit” (身是炁之宅，心是神之舍);
• “When the intention moves, the spirit moves; when the spirit moves, the qì scatters. When the intention rests, the spirit rests; when the spirit rests, the qì gathers” (意行則神行，神行則氣散；意住則神住，神住則氣聚);
• “The five phases’ true qì coalesce into the dāoguī 刀圭” — i.e. the inner-alchemical elixir — ;
• “the qì is the mother of the spirit, the spirit is the child of the qì: as a hen broods her egg, hold fast to preserving the spirit and nourishing the qì, and do not let them part — wondrous, dark, and dark again.”

The second half describes the experiential fruit: walking, sitting, or lying, the body feels as wind in motion, the belly rumbles like thunder, the harmonious chōnghé qì 冲和氣 pierces the crown like tíhú 醍醐 anointed from above, one hears immortal music from “stringless strings, undrummed drums.” The spirit and qì unite “as a man carrying a child in pregnancy,” and under the ninefold cyclical transformation (jiǔzhuǎn 九轉) the Great Elixir (dàdān 大丹) is formed; the practitioner at last passes freely between heaven and earth, “years in step with heaven and earth, brilliance in step with sun and moon, loosed from birth-and-extinction.” The closing passage recasts the human body as a treasury of the qībǎo 七寶 (“seven jewels”): essence (jīng 精) as quicksilver, blood as yellow gold, qì as beautiful jade, body as crystal, brain as numinous cinnabar, kidneys as qú 𤥭璖 (tridacna shell), heart as coral.

Prefaces

No preface. The text is a direct instructional address, with no revelation-frame, no preface, and no colophon.

Abstract

Ursula-Angelika Cedzich’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:1186, DZ 645, under “3.B.9 The Quánzhēn Order”) identifies the text as “probably affiliated with the Quánzhēn school” on the strength of its doctrinal vocabulary, its pairing with the demonstrably Quánzhēn DZ 646 Wài rìyòng miàojīng (the companion KR5c0027, a mnemonic poem of forty-seven trisyllabic lines engraved in stone in 1352 and “clearly influenced by the Quánzhēn tradition”), and its twenty-four-hour rìyòng programme of cúnshén 存神 (“preserving the spirit”) and dìngyì 定意 (“concentrating the thought”) — hallmarks of Quánzhēn nèidān 內丹 pedagogy. Cedzich further notes that an abridged and slightly different recension of the text, entitled Rìyòng jué 日用訣, is incorporated into Dǒng Jīnchūn’s 董瑾淳 Qúnxiān yàoyǔ zuǎnjí 群仙要語纂集 (DZ 1257) at 1.1a-b, demonstrating the text’s early circulation in Quánzhēn compendia.

The catalog meta of the present work gives neither author nor dynasty. The frontmatter accordingly brackets notBefore 1170 (Wáng Chóngyáng’s 王重陽 death, after which the Quánzhēn order consolidated under the Seven Masters Qī zhēn 七真) and notAfter 1352 (the stele-engraving of the companion Wài rìyòng), reflecting TC’s placement of the text in the Quánzhēn chapter and the textual terminus established by the paired scripture’s stone witness. The text belongs to the tradition of short, recitable Quánzhēn meditation manuals alongside KR5c0020 Qīngjìng jīng and KR5c0024 Nèidān jīng, but is distinctive in its address to the conditions of ordinary daily life rather than to a specialised ritual or retreat setting — a signature Quánzhēn emphasis traceable to the founders’ stress on practice amid engagement with the world.

Translations and research

• Legge, James, trans. The Texts of Taoism. Sacred Books of the East 39–40. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891. Vol. 2:269–72. The standard early English rendering, still the most widely cited.
• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:1186 (DZ 645, U.-A. Cedzich).
• Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge, 2008 — entries “Neidan,” “Quanzhen,” and “Riyong” for the doctrinal and cult-historical context.
• Kohn, Livia. The Taoist Experience: An Anthology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993 — includes translations of comparable short Quánzhēn meditation texts.
• Eskildsen, Stephen. The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004 — on the rìyòng emphasis within early Quánzhēn pedagogy.

Other points of interest

The text’s inclusion in Legge’s Sacred Books of the East series (1891) gave it an outsized afterlife in Western comparative religion, where it was long read, misleadingly, as a Daoist classic of great antiquity. It is in fact a compact JīnYuán Quánzhēn product of the 12th–14th centuries; the retrospective pseudonymous ascription to Tàishàng Lǎojūn is editorial in the DZ. The text-internal vocabulary (dāoguī 刀圭 for the elixir, the jiǔzhuǎn dàdān 九轉大丹, tíhú guàndǐng 醍醐灌頂 — the last a Buddhist loan for the crown-anointment of consecration) situates it squarely in the Quánzhēn synthesis of nèidān, Chán introspection, and cún sī 存思.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0026
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:1186 — DZ 645 entry (U.-A. Cedzich).
• Legge, Sacred Books of the East vol. 40, 269–72: Internet Sacred Text Archive mirror.