太上老君外日用妙經

Tàishàng Lǎojūn wài rìyòng miàojīng 太上老君外日用妙經

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

anonymous Quánzhēn 全真 moral mnemonic in one juàn of one folio, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 646 / CT 646, 洞神部本文類) and in the Dàozàng jíyào (JY061); sixth of the seven scriptures bundled together as “Qī jīng tóng juàn shāng bā” 七經同卷傷八 and paired with its companion KR5c0026 Nèi rìyòng miàojīng 內日用妙經 (DZ 645) as the “outer” member of the inner/outer rìyòng diptych. A stele of the combined text was engraved in 1352 at the Lóuguān 樓觀 temple on Zhōngnánshān 終南山.

About the work

The text is a short mnemonic poem of roughly forty-seven trisyllabic lines — compact enough to be read aloud in a minute and clearly designed for recitation and memorisation. It enumerates the conduct-rules of the wài rìyòng 外日用 (“outer daily practice”) that complement the meditational discipline of the companion Nèi rìyòng miàojīng. The lines can be grouped as follows:

• respect toward the superior powers: “revere heaven and earth, weigh sun and moon, fear the laws of the realm, follow the Way of the king” (敬天地，重日月，懼國法，依王道);
• family and community: “be filial to father and mother, yield to those above, be harmonious with those below, do what is good” (孝父母，上謙讓，下和睦，好事行);
• virtuous restraint: “stop evil deeds; learn from the accomplished; cease where the lame stop; at heights know danger; at fullness know overflow; in stillness find constant peace; in thrift find constant sufficiency; in caution have no grief; in forbearance have no shame” (惡事止，成人學，跛人斷，髙知危，滿知溢，靜常安，儉常足，慎無憂，忍無辱);
• renunciation: “cast off the extravagant and the ornamented, attend to the true and substantial, conceal others’ faults, proclaim others’ virtues, act with fāngbiàn 方便 (skilful means), harmonise with neighbours, keep close to the worthy and the good, keep distance from sound and sight” (去奢華，務真實，掩人非，揚人徳，行方便，和隣里，親賢善，逺聲色);
• economic virtue: “poor, preserve your share; rich, dispense benefit; act with equal measure; do not lean on power; long master the self; do not envy; cut down on covetousness; root out slyness; when wronged, dissolve it; accumulate the performance of good; make promises and keep them” (貧守分，富施惠，行平等，休倚勢，長克己，莫嫉妬，少慳貪，除狡猾，逢寃解，積人行，許不違);
• speech, charity, and compassion: “in speech maintain trust, keep the orphaned and widowed in mind, relieve the poor and harassed, rescue those in peril, accumulate hidden virtue, practise compassion and kindness, cease killing living beings, heed loyal words” (話有信，念孤寡，濟貧困，救危難，積隂德，行慈惠，休殺生，聽忠言);
• and the programmatic closing couplet: “do not deceive your own heart — practise by this and you may transcend” (莫欺心，依此行，可超昇).

Prefaces

No preface. The text is a direct versified instruction without any narrative frame.

Abstract

Ursula-Angelika Cedzich’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:1187-88, DZ 646, under “3.B.9 The Quánzhēn Order”) observes that “the title of this short work suggests that the compilers of the Dàozàng saw a direct relation between it and DZ 645 Tàishàng Lǎojūn nèi rìyòng miàojīng — the scripture for the inner daily practice.” Cedzich reads the text as a “mnemonic poem of forty-seven trisyllabic lines” whose “recommendations for the moral conduct of life are obviously meant to round off externally the spiritual exercises described in the preceding Nèi rìyòng miàojīng.” She attaches the text firmly to the Quánzhēn tradition on two grounds: the doctrinal pairing with its inner companion (itself affiliated to Quánzhēn), and the 1352 stele — “engraved in stone in 1352 under the title Tàishàng Lǎojūn rìyòng miàojīng and erected by the Mongolian governor of Zhōuzhì 盩厔 (Shǎnxī), Dīng Ān 丁安, at the ancient Lóuguān temple at Zhōngnánshān” (text preserved in Jīnshí cuìbiān wèikè gǎo 金石萃編未刻稿 3.37a-b). Cedzich notes that the Lóuguān stele differs from the Dàozàng recension only “by one omission (verse 4) and three minor textual variants” — which is to say, the Yuán stone and the Míng printed canon transmit essentially the same text.

The 1352 stele gives a firm terminus ante quem. The Quánzhēn 全真 order, founded by Wáng Chóngyáng 王重陽 in the 1160s and consolidated under the Seven Masters Qī zhēn 七真 after his death in 1170, is the only context in which both the form (short recitable conduct-poem) and the specific moral register (with its emphasis on jié 儉 “thrift,” rěn 忍 “forbearance,” yǐnxiū concealment of others’ faults, and mò qī xīn 莫欺心 “do not deceive your own heart”) are historically attested. The catalog meta gives neither author nor dynasty; the frontmatter accordingly brackets notBefore 1170 (Wáng Chóngyáng’s death, after which Quánzhēn crystallised) and notAfter 1352 (the Lóuguān stele), matching the companion KR5c0026 Nèi rìyòng miàojīng. The absence of an author is consistent with the text’s retrospective ascription to Tàishàng Lǎojūn 太上老君, a standard Daoist revelation-frame fiction.

The text is one of the most widely circulated Quánzhēn moral primers. Its stele at Lóuguān — the very site traditionally identified as the place where Lǎozǐ was said to have transmitted the Dàodé jīng to Yǐn Xǐ 尹喜 — represents a deliberate appropriation by the Quánzhēn community of Lóuguān’s mythic prestige under Mongol patronage, a process documented extensively for the Yuán period (see Marsone and Katz below).

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:1187-88 (DZ 646, U.-A. Cedzich).
• Eskildsen, Stephen. The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004 — for the moral and meditative programme of the rìyòng texts in early Quánzhēn pedagogy.
• Marsone, Pierre. Wang Chongyang (1113-1170) et la fondation du Quanzhen: Ascètes taoïstes et alchimie intérieure. Paris: Collège de France, 2010 — for the Lóuguān-Quánzhēn link.
• Katz, Paul R. Images of the Immortal: The Cult of Lü Dongbin at the Palace of Eternal Joy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999 — for Yuán-period Quánzhēn patronage at northern sacred sites.
• Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge, 2008 — entries “Quanzhen,” “Louguan,” and “Riyong.”
• Jīnshí cuìbiān wèikè gǎo 金石萃編未刻稿 3.37a-b — the 1352 stele inscription.

Other points of interest

The Lóuguān stele of 1352 is itself of historiographical interest. Its engraver Dīng Ān 丁安, a Mongol serving as governor of Zhōuzhì 盩厔 (modern Zhōuzhì 周至 county, Shǎnxī), is otherwise poorly documented; the stele is one of the few material traces of his tenure. That a Mongol official chose to erect at Lóuguān a Quánzhēn mnemonic in forty-seven trisyllabic lines — addressed directly to lay practice, yet carrying the prestige of Tàishàng Lǎojūn’s putative revelation — illustrates the Yuán court’s accommodation of Quánzhēn as a moral-social order integrated into state ritual culture, a stance that would be curtailed sharply at the Buddhist-Daoist debates of 1281 but that persisted regionally under local Mongol administrators well into the late Yuán.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0027
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:1187-88 — DZ 646 entry (U.-A. Cedzich).