太上化道度世仙經

Tàishàng huàdào dùshì xiānjīng 太上化道度世仙經

Scripture of the Immortals on Transformation into the Way and Salvation from the World, by the Most High

anonymous nèidān 內丹 treatise of the ZhōngLǚ 鍾呂 tradition in one juàn of fourteen folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 648 / CT 648, 洞神部本文類); first of the nine scriptures bundled together as “Jiǔ jīng tóng juàn shāng jiǔ” 九經同卷傷九. The text is unusual for a short nèidān digest in presenting itself in full Lingbao jīng-form, with an opening revelation-frame, three doctrinal pǐn 品 chapters in verse-plus-commentary layout, and a closing ritual formula (jué 訣) for daily practice.

About the work

The text opens with a revelatory setting: “At that time the Tàishàng 太上, in the first year of Wújí 無極 (Wújí yuán nián) — the year in which guǐchǒu 癸丑 falls, on the seventh day of the tenth month — went to the Tàiqīng gōng 太清宫 and, in the Seven-Jewel Hall (Qībǎo diàn 七寳殿), expounded the utmost and true wondrous Way.” (Wújí yuán nián is a fictive mythological era; guǐchǒu is one of the sixty sexagenary years and in this context a mythic rather than a historical marker.) The Tàishàng addresses Zuǒxuán zhēnrén 左玄眞人 — the same auditor-figure as in the preceding KR5c0028 — and the three doctrinal chapters that follow are given in the standard nèidān rubric: verse lemmata in the base register, commentary (zhù 註) indented in a half-size prose register. The three chapters are:

• Huàdào pǐn dì yī 化道品第一 (“Transformation into the Way”): the theoretical base. The Way is identified with the tàichū 太初 primordial condition that precedes the differentiation of heaven-earth and yīnyáng; it is héng hū 恍惚 (“indeterminate”) in image, xū wú 虛無 (“voidal”) in body. The text rehearses the “body is not the Way, but through the Way the body becomes true” (身非道因道成眞) equation, likens the Way within the body to fire latent in stone (rú shí zhōng zhī huǒ 如石中之火), and lays out a discipline of chíjiē fèngjiè 持齋奉戒 (fasting and precept-keeping), dànbó wéi mén 淡泊爲門 (simplicity as the doorway), shēnxīn qīngjìng 身心清靜, extirpation of the liù yù 六慾 (“six desires” — eye, ear, nose, tongue, heart, intention — a Buddhist loan), and the cultivation of the 36,000 body-spirits (萬神遵伏) through xiū xīn liàn xìng 修心錬性 (“cultivating the heart-mind, refining the nature”).

• Wǔháng pǐn dì èr 五行品第二 (“The Five Phases”): the cosmological bridge. The four symbolic directionals (sì xiàng 四象) — qīng lóng 青龍 (east, wood, liver), bái hǔ 白虎 (west, metal, lung), zhū què 朱雀 (south, fire, heart), xuán wǔ 玄武 (north, water, kidney) — are bound to the human wǔ zàng 五臟 in direct parallel with the cosmological wǔ yuè 五嶽 (Five Sacred Marchmounts) and wǔ xīng 五星 (five planets): “earth has the Five Marchmounts, heaven answers with the Five Planets, man has the Five Organs — a single body separately divided.” The chapter develops the qīshí’èr hòu 七十二候 seasonal (“seventy-two pentads”) division — each phase “ruling” 72 days per year, with central tǔ 土 (centre, earth, spleen) “alone supreme” for 18 days of each quarter-change — and closes with a state-scaled application: “ruling the state” (治國), “ruling the household” (治家), and “cultivating the body” (修身) are three scales of the same cosmological discipline.

• Xuánlǐ pǐn dì sān 玄理品第三 (“The Principle of the Mystery”): the operative core. This chapter elaborates the technical machinery: the huǒ lóng 火龍 (fire-dragon = tongue, chì lóng 赤龍, which plays in the yù quán 玉泉 jade spring at the tongue’s root, source of the qióng jiāng yù yè 瓊漿玉液, the “jasper fluid and jade broth”); the jīn hǔ 金虎 (metal-tiger = lung-qì); the wǔ háng diāndǎo 五行顛倒 (“five-phases inversion”); the reciprocal “fluid irrigates, qì fills” (jīn zhù ér qì yíng 津注而氣盈) cycle; and the nine-year ripening (jiǔ nián gōng mǎn 九年功滿) in which shén biàn 神變 (“spirit transforms”), xíng zhù 形住 (“form abides”), qì zhù 氣住 (“qì abides”), and the practitioner ascends to immortality.

• Jué 訣 (closing): a practical daily-practice formula: “Always between zǐ 子 (late night) and wǔ 午 (noon), face south, sit upright, preserve the spirit, clench the fists, strike the bell and drum thirty-six times each, then use the wàng qì 旺氣 (prevailing qì) of the current season as the head, circulate the wǔ qì 五氣, exhale the breath and swallow the saliva seventy-two mouthfuls per quarter plus the tǔ nine” — yielding a 360-mouthful annual cycle on the solar year, with five extra mouthfuls to accommodate the 360¼-day year and intercalary adjustments every three years (“three gōng make one rùn 閏”). Over nine years, shén biàn 神變 (“spirit-transformation”) is attained.

Prefaces

No preface. The text opens directly with the revelation-frame at Tàiqīng gōng. The title-line “傷九” (shāng jiǔ “ninth of the bundled-scriptures sequence”) is an editorial colophon of the DZ “jiǔ jīng tóng juàn” bundle, not a textual preface.

Abstract

John Lagerwey’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:1066, DZ 648, under the ZhōngLǚ nèidān chapter) identifies the text as “a summary of Inner Alchemy composed of three sections of verse and a commentary. The titles of the three sections are ‘Transformation into the Tao,’ ‘The Five Phases,’ and ‘The Principle of the Mystery.’ The commentary uses terminology from the Língbǎo bìfǎ 靈寳畢法 (cf. DZ 263.14 ZhōngLǚ chuándào jí 鍾呂傳道集 [Xiūzhēn shíshū 修真十書 14-16]). The whole text is preceded by an introduction in the manner of a Lingbao scripture, presenting the text as a sermon of the Most High. This work concludes with some practical ritual instructions.”

Lagerwey’s identification of the lexical dependence on the ZhōngLǚ corpus is decisive for dating. The ZhōngLǚ chuándào jí 鍾呂傳道集, Língbǎo bìfǎ 靈寳畢法, and Xīshān Xǔ zhēnjūn bāshíwǔ huà lù 西山許真君八十五化錄 took their received form in the late 10th and 11th centuries, and the ZhōngLǚ school’s distinctive vocabulary — the lónghǔ / qiāngǒng 龍虎/鉛汞 pair, yīng’érchànǚ 嬰兒姹女, jīn gōnghuáng pó 金公黃婆, héchē 河車 and shuǐhuǒ jì jì 水火既濟 — stabilised during the same period. All of these except héchē appear in the present text. The catalog meta gives neither author nor dynasty. The frontmatter accordingly brackets notBefore 960 (Northern Sòng founding, the earliest defensible terminus a quo for the crystallised ZhōngLǚ vocabulary) and notAfter 1445 (the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng), reflecting the broad Sòng-Yuán-early-Míng span within which short ZhōngLǚ nèidān digests of this kind were compiled. A narrower bracket of c. 1100-1300 (late Northern Sòng through Yuán) is likely on internal grounds but not firmly defensible without external citation evidence.

The text is of particular interest as a rare nèidān digest that retains the full Lingbao jīng revelation-frame — the Wújí yuán nián mythic dating, the Tàiqīng gōng / Qībǎo diàn stage-setting, the Zuǒxuán zhēnrén auditor — rather than dispensing with it in favor of direct instruction (as the Nèi rìyòng miàojīng of KR5c0026 does). The Lingbao-form framing is characteristic of the editorial stratum that assembled the “jiǔ jīng” bundle of the Dòngshénbù běnwén lèi; it is not a claim to high antiquity but a convention of short revelatory jīng under the Tàishàng signature.

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:1066 (DZ 648, J. Lagerwey).
• Baldrian-Hussein, Farzeen. Procédés secrets du Joyau magique: Traité d’alchimie taoïste du XI^e siècle. Paris: Les Deux Océans, 1984. The standard critical edition and translation of the Língbǎo bìfǎ, the principal lexical source of the present text.
• Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature, Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1987 — for the Sòng-Yuán nèidān literature as a genre.
• Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge, 2008 — entries “Neidan,” “Zhong-Lü chuandao ji,” and “Language of Taoism” (F. Baldrian-Hussein) for the technical vocabulary of the present text.
• Robinet, Isabelle. Introduction à l’alchimie intérieure taoïste: De l’unité et de la multiplicité. Paris: Cerf, 1995 — for the doctrinal-historical context.

Other points of interest

The text’s closing jué 訣 gives one of the most precise breath-count schemes preserved in a short Daoist scripture: the shí èr xī zhī shù 喘息之數 table equates 1 kè 刻 (one-hundredth of a day) with 135 breaths, 10 kè with 1,350, and 100 kè (a full day) with 13,500. The resulting annual arithmetic — 360 mouthfuls in a solar year plus 5 intercalary mouthfuls “in image of the 360-and-5-extra days” (象一年三百六十餘五日之約) plus 30 additional mouthfuls every three years “as one rùn 閏 intercalation in three” — is a compact specimen of the Song-Yuán Daoist effort to map the astronomical/calendrical year directly onto a daily meditational practice schedule. Cf. the related but more elaborate schemes in DZ 263 Xiūzhēn shíshū and DZ 1017 Dàoshū 道樞.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0029
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:1066 — DZ 648 entry (J. Lagerwey).