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太上老君說報父母恩重經

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Text ID
KR5c0043
Date
695–907
Dynasty
唐

Tàishàng lǎojūn shuō bào fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng 太上老君說報父母恩重經

Scripture, Spoken by the Most High Lord Lǎo, on Requiting the Grave Kindness of Father and Mother

Anonymous Táng-dynasty Daoist scripture in one juàn (eight folios), preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 662 / CT 662, 洞神部本文類) as the first of two scriptures bundled in the “èr jīng tóng juàn nǚ shí wǔ” 二經同卷女十五 female-series volume 15 (paired with [[KR5c0044|DZ 663 Xuántiān shàngdì shuō bào fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng]]). The text is a Daoist elaboration of the apocryphal Buddhist Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng 父母恩重經 (first catalogued in the Dà Zhōu kāndìng zhòngjīng mùlù 大周刊定衆經目錄 of 695), transposed into a Daoist revelatory frame: the revelation is given by Tàishàng lǎojūn 太上老君 (Most High Lord Lǎo) in the Yùlì shān 鬱利山 of Xī hán yù guó 西邯玉國, before an audience of fifty thousand, to the interlocutor Hǎikōng zhìzàng zhēnrén 海空智藏真人 (Perfected of the Storehouse-of-Wisdom of the Ocean-of-Emptiness — a scriptural persona already canonised in the 7th-century Tàishàng yī chéng hǎikōng zhìzàng jīng 太上一乘海空智藏經, DZ 9).

About the work

The scripture’s core content — the classical “parental-grace” narrative of the Buddhist Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng — is preserved virtually verbatim in its most vivid passages, while the apparatus is Daoistically retuned:

  • Framing tableau (1a–1b): Tàishàng lǎojūn 太上老君 in the Yùlì-mountain sermon; the interlocutor Hǎikōng zhìzàng zhēnrén 海空智藏真人 rises from the assembly, kneels, and asks how to requite the grace of father and mother from whom one’s own hair and skin derive.

  • Treatise on xiào 孝 (filial piety) (1b–2a): Lǎozǐ replies with the classical Confucian analogy of form-and-shadow, sound-and-echo; the filial household flourishes in mutual care, the unfilial household degenerates into factional concealment (“hiding delicacies and eating as if stealing”); the filial attract filial progeny, the unfilial attract the “five-counter-currents” (wǔ nì 五逆, another Buddhist loan) in their own descendants; and the post-mortem retribution for unfiliality is reincarnation as the bǎi láo niǎo 百勞鳥 (hundred-toil bird — the shrike) whose young, upon fledging, eat their own mother.

  • The mother’s labour (2b–4a): the scripture’s most vivid passage is a sustained, minutely observed account of the mother-child relationship from conception through infancy:

    • Ten months of pregnancy, with its discomforts and fears;
    • The terrors of parturition — “her voice breaks into a cry, she undergoes great travail, she trembles and is astonished” (shī shēng háo jiào, shòu dà kǔ nǎo, pú fú zhàn jù, hài è jīng jiē 失聲號呌，受大苦惱，匍匐戰懼，駭愕驚嗟);
    • The postpartum months: the infant placed on the mattress, swaddled, turned on its side for three months, continuously watched for evil spirits (xié mó 邪魔);
    • The numerology of nursing: jì yǐn mǔ rǔ bā hú sì shēng, qiān rì tí xié 計飲母乳八斛四升，千日提携 (reckoning the mother’s milk drunk by the infant: 8 hú 4 shēng, a thousand days of carrying and sheltering);
    • The classical phrase tuī gān jiù shī, yàn kǔ tǔ gān 推乾就濕，嚥苦吐甘 (pushing the dry onto the child and taking the wet for herself, swallowing the bitter and spitting out the sweet) — a canonical formula for maternal sacrifice;
    • The toddler phase: the child’s first speech, crawl, walk; the mother’s intuitive sense when the child at home cries out in her absence, her milk flowing spontaneously and hurrying home to answer.

  • The unfilial son (4a–5a): in parallel contrast, the adult son who neglects his aged parents — preferring wife and peers, trimming his own hair while leaving his mother’s unkempt, eating while leaving his parents hungry, travelling south and north as his wife dictates while his parents sit alone in a cold room, their hands calloused, eyes dim, ears deaf, “passing each day as if it were a year.”

  • Hell-torments and heavenly blessings (5a–6b): the unfilial son is consigned to the shí fāng dì yù 十方地獄 (ten-direction hells) — the same hell-topography found in DZ 661 — with each form of torment matched to a specific unfilial act. The filial son, by contrast, attracts the favour of Heaven, the protection of the shén míng 神明, and auspicious rebirth.

  • Prescribed practices (7a–8a): the text closes with liturgical instructions: recitation of the scripture for one’s parents (dú wèi fùmǔ 讀爲父母), copying and recitation (chāo xiě dú sòng 抄寫讀誦), and offerings at the zhōng yuán 中元 (mid-Seventh-Month) festival — the Daoist analogue of the Buddhist Ullambana (yú lán pén 盂蘭盆). The scripture is to be expounded on the first day of each month by a gāoshàng jīng dé fǎshī 高上經德法師 (Master of Superior Scriptural Virtue).

Prefaces

No preface. The scripture opens directly with the revelatory ěr shí 爾時 formula.

Abstract

Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 1:538–39, DZ 662) reads:

“This scripture is a Taoist elaboration of Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng 父母恩重經, an apocryphal Buddhist text mentioned in Dà Zhōu kāndìng zhòngjīng mùlù 大周刊定衆經目錄 15.474a (dated 695). That scripture gives an account of the manifold hardships and privations that parents undergo in order to bring up their progeny. Particularly noteworthy is the well-observed description of the mother-child relationship during pregnancy, birth, and the child’s growing up. Pious children can return the kindness they have received by copying and reciting the scripture for their parents and by making offerings during the ullambana festival on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. The present work contains all essential parts of that Buddhist scripture, partly verbatim, partly rearranged or expanded and, of course, given a Taoist veneer: in the place of Buddha, Ānanda, and ullambana, we find Tàishàng lǎojūn 太上老君, Hǎikōng zhìzàng zhēnrén 海空智藏真人 (see the seventh-century DZ 9 Tàishàng yī chéng hǎikōng zhìzàng jīng), and zhōng yuán 中元. A few noteworthy amplifications include the short treatise on filial piety (1b–2a), the enumeration of the torments of hell for impious children and of heavenly blessings for dutiful ones (5a–6b), and the instruction to have a gāoshàng jīng dé fǎshī 高上經德法師 preach on this scripture on the first day of each month (7b).”

The terminus post quem is 695 CE, the date of the Dà Zhōu kāndìng zhòngjīng mùlù that first catalogues the Buddhist Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng (of which our scripture is the Daoist rendering); the Daoist version must postdate the Buddhist original. The terminus ante quem is the Táng collapse (907 CE); the scripture’s position within the liturgical apparatus of Táng Daoism — the Hǎikōng zhìzàng zhēnrén derives from the 7th-century DZ 9, and the zhōng yuán festival reflects the mature Táng Three-Primes calendar — fixes its floruit within the later 7th to 9th centuries. The frontmatter accordingly uses 695–907 with dynasty “唐”. The catalog meta supplies the dynasty-marker 唐 without a narrower date.

The work is anonymous; the revelation is attributed to Tàishàng lǎojūn 太上老君, with no identifiable Daoist compiler.

The work’s signal significance lies in its wholesale Daoist appropriation of a classical Buddhist apocryphon — a striking case of the Táng-era sān jiào 三教 (Three Teachings) convergence, in which the most widely-circulated Buddhist scripture on filial piety is absorbed, theonym-for-theonym, into the Daoist canon. The ullambana ghost-festival becomes the Daoist zhōng yuán ghost festival; the Buddha’s Śākyamuni becomes Tàishàng lǎojūn; Ānanda becomes Hǎikōng zhìzàng zhēnrén; the qī qiān fó fú 七千佛符 (seven-thousand-Buddha talismans) of the Buddhist original become Tàishàng shén fú 太上神符 (Most High’s divine talismans). This is the second great Táng Daoist response to the Buddhist hegemony in popular filial-piety literature, alongside the Tàishàng jiùkǔ jīng 太上救苦經 tradition.

The scripture’s popular-religious resonance — the mother-child relationship is described with an attention to quotidian detail that does not appear in the older classical Daoist corpus (the calculation of 8 hú 4 shēng of nursing-milk, the thousand-day carrying, the mother’s dry-vs-wet self-sacrifice, her intuitive running-home when the child cries) — marks the text as a characteristically medieval (Táng) Chinese devotional scripture addressed to lay worshippers.

Translations and research

  • Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:538–39 (DZ 662, H.-H. Schmidt). Primary reference.
  • Akizuki Kan’ei 秋月観暎. “Dōkyō to bukkyō no fubo onchō kyō” 道教と仏教の父母恩重経. Principal comparative study of the Buddhist and Daoist recensions.
  • Mair, Victor H. “Notes on the Maudgalyāyana Legend in East Asia.” Monumenta Serica 37 (1986–87): 83–93. For the wider Táng filial-piety genre.
  • Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. On the Buddhist filial-piety literature of which the Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng is a central example.
  • Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. On the Buddhist Ullambana and its Daoist Zhōngyuán counterpart that underlies the scripture’s liturgical prescription.
  • Kohn, Livia. “The Mother of the Tao: Filial Piety in Medieval Daoism.” In Chinese Filial Piety, edited by A. K. L. Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, 87–112. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

Other points of interest

The scripture’s mother-child observation passage is perhaps the single most detailed account of early-childhood nurture in the medieval Chinese religious corpus. The ethnographic accuracy of its description — down to the detail that the mother, going out to perform grain-pounding or errands in the neighbourhood, intuitively senses when the infant left behind begins to cry (ér jì yì mǔ, mǔ jí xīn jīng, chí bù zǒu guī, liǎng rǔ yǒng chū 兒旣憶母，母即心驚，馳歩走歸，兩乳湧出 — “the child remembers the mother, the mother’s heart is startled, she hurries home in quick step, her two breasts welling up with milk”) — has made the scripture a recurrent reference for cultural-historical work on infant-care in medieval China.

The Daoist calque of the wǔ nì 五逆 (five counter-currents — a Buddhist term for the five cardinal sins, pañcānantarya) is worth noting: the text adopts the Buddhist category wholesale but re-indexes it to Daoist cosmology.

The instruction to a master of the rank of gāoshàng jīng dé fǎshī 高上經德法師 to preach the scripture on the first day of each month provides important evidence for the Táng Daoist clerical hierarchy and the monthly liturgical calendar of Táng Daoist guàn 觀 (observatories).

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