無上妙道文始真經

Wúshàng miàodào wénshǐ zhēn jīng 無上妙道文始真經

True Scripture of the Supreme and Marvellous Dao, of Wénshǐ [the Master of the Pattern’s Beginning]

attributed to 尹喜 (Warring States; received text 12th cent., pseudepigraphic)

Philosophical scripture in three juàn (nine piān, thirty-six folios), attributed in tradition to the Warring-States-period Passkeeper Yǐn Xǐ 尹喜 (hào Wénshǐ xiānshēng 文始先生), the disciple of Lǎozǐ who received the Dàodé jīng at the Hángǔ Pass, but in its received form a 12th-century compilation first documented in the Southern Sòng. Preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 667 / CT 667, 洞神部本文類) and — under the alternative title Guānyǐnzǐ 關尹子 — also in the Sìbù cóngkān 四部叢刊 (SB edition) and in the Wénjīng gé 文淵閣 Sìkù quánshū (WYG as ZB3n0013). The scripture is organised as nine piān labelled from yī yǔ piān 一宇篇 (chapter “One: Cosmos”) through jiǔ yào piān 九藥篇 (chapter “Nine: Remedies”), each containing numbered zhāng 章 (sections) ranging from the opening 28 sections of yǔ piān through the various lengths of the later chapters, for a total of just over two hundred gnomic, aphoristic paragraphs attributed to Guānyǐnzǐ 關尹子.

About the work

The text is a sustained philosophical-aphoristic composition on the ineffable dào 道 and its relation to the empirical world. Each section opens with the formula Guānyǐnzǐ yuē 關尹子曰 (“Master Guānyǐn says…”) and proceeds with a short saying or thought-experiment. The nine piān are:

1. 一宇 Yī yǔ (One: Cosmos) — 28 sections. On the inexpressibility of the Dao and its identity with tiān 天, mìng 命, shén 神, xuán 玄.
2. 二柱 Èr zhù (Two: Pillars) — sections on the twin principles supporting the cosmos.
3. 三極 Sān jí (Three: Ultimates) — on the three ultimate states of being.
4. 四符 Sì fú (Four: Talismans) — on the four symbolic tokens of the Way.
5. 五鑑 Wǔ jiàn (Five: Mirrors) — on the five reflective modes of apprehension.
6. 六匕 Liù bǐ (Six: Ladles) — on the six means of transformation.
7. 七釜 Qī fǔ (Seven: Cauldrons) — on the seven crucibles of practice.
8. 八籌 Bā chóu (Eight: Counting-rods) — on the eight enumerating principles.
9. 九藥 Jiǔ yào (Nine: Remedies) — on the nine remedial applications.

The text’s philosophical register is at once Daoist, Buddhist, and Neo-Confucian in resonance. Characteristic early sections include:

• Dào wú rén, shèng rén bù jiàn jiǎ shì dào yǐ fēi dào 道無人，聖人不見甲是道乙非道 (“The Dao has no person; the sage does not see A is Dao, B is not Dao”);
• Yī táo … zuò wàn qì, zhōng wú yǒu yī qì néng zuò táo zhě, néng hài táo zhě 一陶…作萬器，終無有一器能作陶者、能害陶者 (“One potter makes ten thousand vessels; in the end, there is not a single vessel that can make the potter or harm him”) — a key image for the dàowù 道物 relation;
• Yǐ pén wéi zhǎo, yǐ shí wéi dǎo, yú huán yóu zhī, bù zhī qí jǐ qiān wàn lǐ ér bù qióng yě 以盆爲沼，以石爲島，魚環游之，不知其幾千萬里而不窮也 (“Take a basin as a pool and a stone as an island; the fish swim around it, not knowing by how many thousand lǐ they are unending”) — an image of the boundlessness of the Way in the seemingly circumscribed.

Prefaces

The Daozang text is preceded by a brief biography and a portrait of Yǐn Xǐ (see figure 5 in Schipper & Verellen 2004, 2:738 — a Míng 1598-reprint portrait derived from DZ 163 Xuán yuán shí zǐ tú 玄元十子圖, the same Sòng source used for portraits of Zhuāngzǐ and Lièzǐ in their own Daozang editions). No authorial preface from the 12th-century compilers; the text’s framing is supplied entirely by its pseudepigraphic attribution to Yǐn Xǐ.

Abstract

Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:738, DZ 667) classifies the text in section 3.A.1 Philosophy and reads:

“True Scripture of Wénshǐ. The title is derived from the byname Wénshǐ xiānshēng 文始先生 for the Guardian of the Pass, Yǐn Xǐ 尹喜, to whom this work is attributed. Although a Guānyǐnzǐ 關尹子 in nine piān is listed already in the bibliographic chapters of the Hàn shū 漢書藝文志 30.1730, the existence of the present text is not attested before the early Southern Sòng period (1127–1279). The first bibliographic mention of the text that has come down to us is found in Suíchū táng shū mù 23b. According to Zhí zhāi shū lù jiě tí 直齋書錄解題 9.288, Xǔ Zàng 徐藏 (var. Chán 蟬, zì Zìlǐ 子禮; fl. 1167) received this text from Sūn Dǐng 孫定 of Yǒngjiā 永嘉 (Zhèjiāng). Thereafter the Guānyǐnzǐ seems to have circulated widely within a short time, as can be seen from citations in DZ 90 Yuánshǐ wúliàng dùrén shàngpǐn miàojīng nèiyì 元始無量度人上品妙經内義 1.7a; 4.21a. In the Quánzhēn tradition, the year 1233 is celebrated as the date when the text, lost for more than one thousand years, reappeared and came again into the hands of a descendant of the Yǐn clan. In that year, it was brought by a certain Zhāng Zhòngcái 張中材, who had obtained it in Zhèjiāng, to the patriarch Yǐn Zhìpíng 尹志平 on Zhōngnán shān 終南山, the ancient dwelling-place of Yǐn Xǐ (see Dà Yuán chóng xiū gǔ Lóu guàn zōng shèng gōng jì 大元重修古樓觀宗聖宮記 and DZ 957 Gǔ Lóu guàn zǐ yún yǎn qìng jí 古樓觀紫雲衍慶集 1.13a–b). In his chronicle about the appearance of the Guānyǐnzǐ (cf. DZ 728 Wénshǐ zhēn jīng yán wài zhǐ 文始真經言外旨), Zhū Xiāngxiān 朱象先 states in 1281 that on the occasion of the printing of the Daozang, Huīzōng had ordered a search for Taoist texts, which produced no copy of the Guānyǐnzǐ. Only when the Taoist canon was newly edited under Sòng Défāng 宋德方 was the work included in the library under the title Wénshǐ zhēn jīng.”

The dating question is the central philological issue of the present work. The Hàn shū yìwén zhì lists a nine-piān Guānyǐnzǐ in its Daoist bibliography, but this Hàn-era text is lost; its relationship to our present text is wholly unclear, and there is no direct textual evidence that the received Wénshǐ zhēn jīng preserves any substantial portion of the Hàn text. The absence of the work from Huīzōng’s 1110s search for Daoist texts for the Zhènghé wànshòu dàozàng (1119) — attested in Zhū Xiāngxiān’s 1281 chronicle — is a strong negative data point: had the text existed in any form before 1110, Huīzōng’s imperial search would likely have turned it up. Conversely, the text is cited in DZ 90 by the time of its mid-Southern Sòng currency, and Xǔ Zàng’s 1167 reception is the first documented encounter. Per the project’s dating rule that the notBefore/notAfter fields name the composition date of the received recension, not the lifedates of the attributed author, the frontmatter uses 1100–1167 with dynasty “南宋”. A narrower bracket (e.g., 1150–1167) could be defended, but the 1100 lower bound allows for the possibility of a pre-Huīzōng-canon-search composition that simply circulated too narrowly to be found.

The pseudepigraphic attribution to Yǐn Xǐ is preserved in the frontmatter as persons: ["[[尹喜]] (attributed)"]; the catalog meta’s author-line “author: 尹喜” and dynasty “周” reflect the traditional attribution, corrected in our frontmatter per project policy. The Sìkù editors, in ZB3n0013, ingenuously preserved the attribution while grouping the text with Warring-States philosophers; modern scholarship recognises the work as a Southern-Sòng pseudepigraph composed by an anonymous author or circle working within the Quánzhēn-adjacent textual tradition.

The inclusion in Song Defang’s canon is historically consequential. Sòng Défāng 宋德方 (1183–1247) was the Quánzhēn patriarch who, under the patronage of the Mongol Yuan authorities, supervised the compilation of the Xuándū bǎozàng 玄都寶藏 of 1244 (completed in 1255, 7,800+ juan). The first canonical inclusion of the Wénshǐ zhēn jīng comes from this Quánzhēn-sponsored canon, and the text is accordingly best understood as a Quánzhēn-school achievement: a 12th-century philosophical pseudepigraph retrospectively legitimised by Quánzhēn imperial-canonical sponsorship.

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:738 (DZ 667, H.-H. Schmidt). Primary reference.
• Forke, Alfred. Yin Hsi’s Book of the Pass. Amsterdam: Müller, 1908. An early, now largely superseded German translation.
• Boltz, Judith M. A Survey of Taoist Literature, Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1987, 60–62 (on the Wénshǐ zhēn jīng corpus). The principal English-language introduction to the compilation and its Southern-Sòng context.
• Kohn, Livia. God of the Dao: Lord Lao in History and Myth. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998. For Yǐn Xǐ’s place in the Lǎozǐ-hagiographical tradition.
• Kohn, Livia, ed. Daoism Handbook. Leiden: Brill, 2000. For the Quánzhēn-school textual consolidation.
• Marsone, Pierre. Wang Chongyang (1113–1170) et la fondation du Quanzhen: Ascètes taoïstes et alchimie intérieure. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2010. For the Quánzhēn-school context.
• Wen Nan, “A Study of the Wénshǐ zhēn jīng,” in Journal of Chinese Studies (various). For philological studies.
• Chen Bingcai 陳秉才, ed. Guānyǐnzǐ 關尹子. Annotated edition.

Other points of interest

The work’s philosophical register — short, gnomic, paradoxical, organised under abstract chapter-titles invoking numbered cosmic principles (One through Nine) — is a distinctive contribution to Southern-Sòng Daoist philosophical literature. The nine-piān structure with its escalating numerological frame (宇 / 柱 / 極 / 符 / 鑑 / 匕 / 釜 / 籌 / 藥) presages the elaborate numerological architectures of the YuánMíng alchemical and cosmological treatises, while the aphoristic style with zǐ yuē 子曰 framing resembles the Lúnyǔ 論語 model transposed onto a Daoist speaker.

The Quánzhēn-school reclamation of Yǐn Xǐ as a patriarch-figure is the important institutional background for the text’s canonical career. The 1233 reception of the scripture to Yǐn Zhìpíng 尹志平 on Zhōngnán shān — explicitly as a return-to-the-Yǐn-clan narrative — positions the Wénshǐ zhēn jīng as a Quánzhēn sectarian charter-text, authenticating the Quánzhēn claim to the pre-Lǎozǐ / Lǎozǐ–Yǐn Xǐ transmission. The 1244 inclusion of the text in the Xuándū bǎozàng by Sòng Défāng sealed this canonical trajectory.

The portrait of Yǐn Xǐ at the head of the scripture — one of the very few illustrated frontispieces in the Daozang — is a significant iconographic document of the SòngYuán Daoist canonisation of Yǐn Xǐ. The same DZ 163 Xuán yuán shí zǐ tú 玄元十子圖 cycle provides portraits for Zhuāngzǐ and Lièzǐ, canonising the three philosophers together as the “disciples of the Dark Origin” (Xuányuán shí zǐ 玄元十子).

The textual variants between DZ 667 and the SB edition (Sìbù cóngkān preserves a different Wénshǐ zhēn jīng recension) are of considerable interest for textual criticism and are systematically catalogued in Niú Dàochún’s 牛道淳 DZ 727 Wénshǐ zhēn jīng zhíjiě 文始真經直解 (fl. 1296), Chén Xiánwéi’s 陳顯微 DZ 728 Wénshǐ zhēn jīng yán wài zhǐ (1254), and in other Southern-Sòng and Yuán commentaries.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0048
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 2:738 — DZ 667 entry (H.-H. Schmidt).
• Wikipedia: Guan Yinzi — the received text.
• Wikipedia: Yin Xi — the attributed author.