西昇經

Xīshēng jīng 西昇經

Scripture of the Westward Ascent

commentary by 徽宗 (Sòng Huīzōng, 1082–1135), c. 1117

Edition of the Xīshēng jīng 西昇經 — an anonymous early-Daoist scripture composed probably in the late 5th or early 6th century CE setting out the teaching given by Lǎozǐ to the Passkeeper Yǐn Xǐ 關令尹喜 at the Hángǔ Pass 函谷關 before his westward departure — with a substantial line-by-line commentary by the Northern-Sòng emperor Huīzōng (Zhào Jí 趙佶, r. 1100–1126) dated to the Zhènghé 政和 period (1111–1118, probably c. 1117). The text, in three juàn of thirty-nine chapters, is preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 666 / CT 666, 洞神部本文類). Despite its formal placement in the 洞神部本文 (Dòngshén fundamental scriptures) section, the work is, as Schmidt remarks in his TC entry, in reality an edition-with-commentary: the underlying scripture is accompanied throughout by Huīzōng’s exegetical prose in smaller register, and is prefaced by a Zhènghé-era imperial preface from Huīzōng’s own hand.

About the work

The Xīshēng jīng proper — as represented in this recension — comprises thirty-nine chapters arranged in three juàn, opening with Xīshēng zhāng dì yī 西昇章第一 (“The Westward Ascent, Chapter 1”) and closing at chapter 39. The scripture’s opening tableau sets out the charter-scene:

Lǎojūn xī shēng, kāi dào Zhúqián; hào Gǔ xiānshēng, shàn rù wúwéi, bù zhōng bù shǐ, yǒng cún miánmián 老君西昇，開道竺乾。號古先生，善入無爲，不終不始，永存綿綿。

(Lord Lao ascends westward, opening the Way in Zhúqián [= India]; he is named Gǔ xiānshēng 古先生 [Elder of Antiquity]; well has he entered non-action, having no end and no beginning, eternally persisting, unbroken.)

Huīzōng’s commentary immediately follows, explaining:

道無乎不在，雖蠻貊之邦、殊方異域，何莫由斯道也。以先覺覺後覺，惟聖人爲可以開明。故雖竺乾遠夷，亦善救之而不棄也。昔仲尼欲居九夷，亦是意爾。

(The Dào is everywhere; even among barbarian peoples, in foreign lands and alien regions, there is nowhere that does not proceed from it. The earlier-awakened awaken the later-awakened; only the sage can open it and make it clear. Thus even in distant Zhúqián he saves them and does not abandon them. Long ago Confucius, too, wished to dwell among the Nine Barbarians — this is the same intention.)

The scripture unfolds across the 39 chapters the classical topics of Daoist scriptural teaching: the unnameable dào and its self-arising character; zìrán 自然 (spontaneity) as the essence of the Way; the Daoist rejection of kuáng biàn 狂辯 (wild argument, exemplified by Huìshī’s five-cart library and Gōngsūn Lóng’s ten-thousand-character paradoxes); the inseparability of dào and dé; the method of cultivation (xíng 行 preferred to yán 言, practice to discourse); the somatic bases of realisation; the necessity of ritual propriety; the relationship of the ruler to the Way. Huīzōng’s commentary is systematically sentence-by-sentence, drawing heavily on Dàodé jīng and Zhuāngzǐ cross-references and occasionally citing the Yì jīng.

Prefaces

The DZ 666 edition is preceded by Huīzōng’s own imperial preface (Zhènghé yù zhì xù 政和御製序) translated here from the text (1a–1b):

“All things proceed from it — this is what is called the Way; the Way as it resides in me — this is what is called Virtue. Way and Virtue are what men inherently possess; the benighted constantly lose them. At the end of the Zhōu decline, the people were long benighted, and the Way of the age was brought to a joint ruin. Then there was the Broadly-Vast Perfected Man [Lǎozǐ], who took the root as essence and things as coarse, and composed a book in two piān, speaking of the meaning of Way and Virtue, to awaken those who would later learn under Heaven, so that they might again see the primordial purity of Heaven and Earth, the great substance of the men of old — truly, the power of Hùnyuán 混元. The sage’s love for men is unending; still concerned that this was not enough to exhaust the subtleties, he also spoke to Guān Yǐn [Xǐ] of the essentials of the Way, arraying them in thirty-nine chapters, titled the Xīshēng jīng. Observing the language and meaning, they are earnest in exhorting and warning, redundant [only] in the name of obtaining the One, which they take as the subtle essential, while [bodily] ascension and flight they take as a secondary matter. Their intention, indeed, is to cause men of the world and later ages to take the direct path to the subtle root, and to find themselves at ease in its free-roaming field. Thus the achievement of ‘good salvation’ may here be seen. In my leisure from the ten-thousand affairs [of state], I let my spirit roam in the Great Purity; for the purport of Way and Virtue my mind is ever engaged. Having taken the two piān [of the Dàodé jīng] and written for them training-expositions, the present book [too] cannot be without a written [commentary]. Using my intention to meet his will, I offer these remarks by way of a modest say. Long ago Wú Jūn 吳筠 [Táng-dyn Daoist, d. 778] remarked: ‘For depth in the Way, nothing surpasses the five-thousand-character [Dàodé jīng]; the rest is merely wasted paper.’ This book, indeed, is complementary (biǎolǐ 表裏 — front and back) to the five thousand words. One cannot but exhaust one’s heart upon it. Zhènghé Imperially-Composed Preface.”

The preface is a key document for the history of Sòng imperial Daoist exegesis: it affirms Huīzōng’s identification of himself as a committed expositor of the Daoist canon alongside his governance; it canonises Wú Jūn’s Tang judgement on the Dàodé jīng’s pre-eminence; and it programmatically claims the Xīshēng jīng as biǎolǐ to the Dàodé jīng — a relation of mutual complementarity that justifies Huīzōng’s commentarial engagement with both scriptures.

Abstract

Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:866, DZ 666) classifies the text in section 3.A.1 Neidan and Yangsheng and reads:

“Scripture of the Ascent to the West. Contrary to its title and its placement in the division entitled běnwén 本文 (fundamental scriptures), this work is an edition with a commentary by Sòng Huīzōng. It is preceded by an imperial preface from the Zhènghé period (1111–1118) in which the Xīshēng jīng is said to be complementary to the Dàodé jīng. Compared to DZ 726 Xīshēng jīng jízhù 西昇經集註, which is also divided into thirty-nine sections, our main text shows numerous textual differences, especially at the end of section 22.”

The terminus post quem is 1111 CE and the terminus ante quem is 1118 CE, the inclusive dates of the Zhènghé 政和 era during which the preface was composed. The received scholarly convention is to date Huīzōng’s Xīshēng jīng commentary to c. 1117, on the model of his parallel Daoist exegetical project at that date (the 1117 Jiàozhǔ Dàojūn huángdì canonisation, the contemporaneous Dàodé jīng commentary, and the preparations for the Zhènghé wànshòu dàozàng that followed in 1119). The frontmatter accordingly uses 1115–1118 as the tightest defensible bracket, with dynasty 宋.

On the underlying Xīshēng jīng itself — the scripture antedates Huīzōng’s edition by six hundred years or more. Modern scholarship (Livia Kohn’s Taoist Mystical Philosophy: The “Scripture of Western Ascension”, Albany: SUNY, 1991; Maeda Shigeki’s “Rōshi Seisho kyō kō” 老子西昇經考) places the scripture’s composition in the Northern Wèi 北魏 period (c. late 5th to early 6th century) on the evidence of its doctrinal register (which incorporates specific KòuQiānzhī 寇謙之-reform terminology), its narrative frame (the mature huàhú 化胡 motif with the Lǎozǐ-as-Buddha identification), and its textual history (first attested in the late 6th-century Dàojiào yìshū 道教義樞 and the early-Táng Wú shàng bì yào 無上祕要, with substantial citations in the Yúnjí qīqiān 雲笈七籤 and Dūnhuáng manuscripts).

The Xīshēng jīng has a long commentarial history. The two main transmitted commentarial traditions are: (1) the five-commentaries collection DZ 726 Xīshēng jīng jízhù 西昇經集註 (a Sòng compilation assembling commentaries by Wěi Jiéxuān 韋節玄, Xú Miǎo 徐邈, Chōng Xuánzǐ 沖玄子, Liú Rénhuì 劉仁會, and others), and (2) the Huīzōng imperial edition of DZ 666. The two differ substantively in many places (most notably at the end of section 22, as Schmidt notes); Huīzōng’s text should be treated as one of the two major witnesses to the pre-modern received form of the scripture, and its readings should be collated against DZ 726 and against the Dūnhuáng manuscripts (P. 2456, P. 2734, S. 2295, etc.; cf. Ōfuchi Ninji’s Tonkō Dōkyō: Mokurokuhen).

The catalog meta’s author-ascription “author: 徽宗” with function 注 is accurate for the Daozang form of the work; the frontmatter preserves this, since what is catalogued here is specifically Huīzōng’s annotated edition rather than the underlying anonymous Xīshēng jīng. The underlying scripture’s anonymous authorship and its c. 500 CE composition are noted in the Abstract rather than the frontmatter.

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:866 (DZ 666, H.-H. Schmidt). Primary reference.
• Kohn, Livia. Taoist Mystical Philosophy: The “Scripture of Western Ascension”. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. The definitive English-language translation and study of the Xīshēng jīng, with treatment of all major commentarial traditions including Huīzōng’s.
• Maeda Shigeki 前田繁樹. “Rōshi Seisho kyō kō” 老子西昇經考. Tōyō no shisō to shūkyō 東洋の思想と宗教 4 (1987): 65–81. Foundational philological study of the scripture.
• Ebrey, Patricia B. Emperor Huizong. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. The definitive biography of Huīzōng, including comprehensive treatment of his Daoist commentarial projects.
• Strickmann, Michel. “The Longest Taoist Scripture.” History of Religions 17, no. 3–4 (1978): 331–54. For the context of the Zhènghé wànshòu dàozàng project.
• Ebrey, Patricia B., and Maggie Bickford, eds. Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
• Kohn, Livia. God of the Dao: Lord Lao in History and Myth. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998. For the huàhú tradition foundational to the Xīshēng jīng.
• Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾. Tonkō Dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 敦煌道經: 目錄篇. Tōkyō: Fukutake Shoten, 1978. Catalogue of Dūnhuáng Xīshēng jīng witnesses.

Other points of interest

The edition’s signal significance lies in its authorial identity. Sòng emperors were not in the habit of composing commentaries on Daoist scriptures personally; Huīzōng is the great exception, and DZ 666 is one of two complete Daoist-scriptural commentaries that survive from his imperial brush (the other being his Dàodé zhēn jīng yù zhù 道德真經御註). The commentary is thus an extraordinary document of Sòng imperial theological engagement and of the full-throated embrace of Daoism as a state religion in the late Northern Sòng.

The preface’s programmatic claim that the Xīshēng jīng is biǎolǐ (complementary) to the Dàodé jīng — that the two must be read together — is an important intervention in Daoist scriptural hermeneutics. Traditional Daoist canonical ordering had placed the Xīshēng jīng as a late and derivative work; Huīzōng elevates it to a co-equal position as the second hand of a unified Lǎozǐ revelation, where the Dàodé jīng is the public teaching given to the world and the Xīshēng jīng is the esoteric supplementary teaching given to Yǐn Xǐ at the pass. This reframing reflects Huīzōng’s broader strategy of systematic Daoist canonical consolidation that culminated in the 1119 Zhènghé wànshòu dàozàng.

Huīzōng’s citation of Wú Jūn 吳筠 (d. 778) — the Táng Daoist poet and court-intellectual under Xuánzōng — aligns the Sòng emperor’s scriptural project with the Táng imperial Daoist tradition. Táng Xuánzōng’s 玄宗 commentary on the Dàodé jīng had been a major Táng state-Daoist canonical act; Huīzōng’s commentaries on both the Dàodé jīng and the Xīshēng jīng deliberately claim this Tang precedent.

The commentary’s textual differences from DZ 726 — especially the divergences at the end of section 22 that Schmidt flags — make DZ 666 one of two principal witnesses to the pre-modern Xīshēng jīng text, and any serious philological reconstruction of the scripture must collate both recensions. The Kohn (1991) translation-and-study provides the standard collation.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0047
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:866 — DZ 666 entry (H.-H. Schmidt).
• Wikipedia: Emperor Huizong of Song — the commentator’s biography.
• Wikipedia: Xishengjing — the underlying scripture.