太上無極大道自然真一五稱符上經

Tài shàng wú jí dà dào zì rán zhēn yī wǔ chēng fú shàng jīng 太上無極大道自然真一五稱符上經

Supreme Scripture of the Most High Boundless Great Tao and the Spontaneously [Created] True-and-One Symbols of the Five Correspondences

Anonymous (revealed scripture of the original Língbǎo 靈寶 corpus, c. 395–410 CE)

One of the core revealed scriptures of the Ancient Língbǎo 古靈寶 canon — the corpus of c. 395–410 CE Daoist scriptures traditionally ascribed to Gé Cháofǔ 葛巢甫 (fl. c. 395–405), great-grandnephew of Gé Hóng 葛洪 — here transmitted in two juàn in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 671 / CT 671, Dòngshén bù, Shénfú lèi 洞神部神符類), and also included in the Qīng-era Dàozàng jíyào 道藏輯要 as JY070 Tài shàng wú jí dà dào zì rán zhēn yī wǔ chēng fú jīng 太上無極大道自然真一五稱符經.

The text is number 6 of the traditional numbering of the original Língbǎo corpus as reconstructed by Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾 on the basis of the Língbǎo jīngmù 靈寶經目 (the bibliographic notice preserved in Wúshàng bìyào 無上祕要 and in the Dūnhuáng manuscript Pelliot 2861/Stein 1614).

About the work

The scripture transmits five cardinal Língbǎo talismans (靈寶五稱符, wǔ chēng fú), one for each of the five directions, correlated by the standard wǔ xíng 五行 correspondences to the Five Planets (wǔ xīng 五星), the Five Peaks (wǔ yuè 五嶽), the Five Viscera (wǔ zàng 五藏), the five musical tones, the five colours, the five days of the sexagenary cycle, and a host of other five-fold schemata. Each talisman is attended by a zhí fú yù nǚ 直符玉女 (“Talisman-Attendant Jade Maiden”), an official corps of several hundred or several thousand celestial clerks, and an Animal of the Quadrant (青龍, 朱雀, 白虎, 玄武, and at the centre the Yellow Dragon).

Juàn 1

Opens with a sustained revelation by Lǎojūn 老君 on the pre-cosmic origin of the Língbǎo 靈寶 (“Numinous Treasure”) and the derivation of the five talismans from the primordial líng bǎo zì rán zhēn wén 靈寶自然真文 (“Spontaneously [Created] True Writings of the Numinous Treasure”). The scripture then gives each of the five talismans (東稱符, 南稱符, 西稱符, 北稱符, 中稱符) with its full ritual-practical protocol:

• Materials: coloured silk for the ground of the talisman (青 east, 赤 south, 白 west, 黑 north, 黃 centre) and a complementary-coloured ink for the character (朱 on east, 黃 on south, 黑 on west, 青 on north, 朱 on centre); coloured stone substrates for engraving; coloured silk pouches for wear on a specified part of the body.
• Domestic applications: healing of regionally-coded illnesses (eastern-distress read from greenness of the tongue, etc.); petitions for wealth, love, legal success, official advancement; protection against tigers, weapons, epidemics, curses, witchcraft.
• Imperial / hierarchical applications: the talismans promise the Son of Heaven the auspicious flight of the phoenix, the conjunction of the Five Planets, cosmic peace; to the feudal lords, expanded fiefs and longevity; to the nobility, rich office and descendants; to the common people, direct perception of the spirits, long life, and wealth.

Juàn 2

Elaborates the advanced ritual-therapeutic procedures. The central practice is the carving of male and female figurines from the roots of the zhāng jù 章拒 plant (a zhī cǎo 芝草 of Daoist pharmacopoeia). These figurines — twelve of them, arrayed in the house on the twelve earthly-branch stations — function as helpers (bā shǐ 八史, “Eight Archivists”) who enable direct communication with the gods. The adept plants and harvests the zhāng jù according to a detailed calendar tied to the spring equinox and the yínmǎo 寅卯 days, performs sacrifices with wine and dried meat, carves the figurines, and installs them with a precise spoken oath (zhòu 咒). After 120 days of regular offerings, the bā shǐ manifest in visible or audible form, and the adept may through them learn his name in the celestial registers of immortality, obtain the xiān lù 仙錄, and acquire the powers of flight, bilocation, invisibility, transformation, commanding rain and thunder, and causing the sun and moon to dim.

The text also recommends — as a simplified method for lay practitioners who cannot undertake the figurine ritual — the engraving of the five talismans on heavy stones, from the emperor down to the common people. The closing portion of juàn 2 (2.11b–12b) introduces the Twenty-Four Língbǎo Diagrams (èr shí sì tú 二十四圖) that the adept is to receive after the wǔ chēng fú; these come from DZ 1407 Dòng xuán líng bǎo èr shí sì shēng tú jīng 洞玄靈寶二十四生圖經, another Ancient Língbǎo text.

Prefaces

There is no authorial preface: the text is a revealed scripture, opening in medias res with Lǎojūn’s own discourse on the pre-cosmic origin of the Língbǎo. A brief parenthetical remark attributed to Gé Xuán 葛玄 (Xiān gōng 仙公, 164–244) — “dào xíng wú qióng shí yě 道行無窮時也” (“of the time of the inexhaustible movement of the Way”) — follows the opening revelation (juàn 1.1a), as does a further remark ascribing the possession of the scripture in antiquity to the Yellow Emperor Huángdì 黃帝, who received it and “ascended as Tài yī dì jūn 太乙帝君, together with the Five Emperors, to the heavens” (juàn 1.2a). These parenthetical glosses — set off in double-column interlinear notes — embed the scripture within the Gé-clan Língbǎo lineage claim: that the revelation came down to Gé Xuán, was transmitted through the Gé family, and was disseminated in its Daozang form by Gé Cháofǔ at the end of the fourth century.

Abstract

Hans-Hermann Schmidt’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 1:221–22, DZ 671) is the definitive modern framing. Schmidt places the text among the original Língbǎo scriptures — specifically number 6 of the Língbǎo corpus — as listed in the first part of the Língbǎo jīngmù 靈寶經目, where it appears in one juàn; the division into two juàn found in the present Daozang text was probably not introduced before the late Táng. Citations in Wúshàng bìyào 無上祕要 (WSBY) and Sāndòng zhūnáng 三洞珠囊 (SDZN), as well as the Dūnhuáng manuscript Pelliot 2440, attest the one-juàn version and confirm the text’s mid-Táng stability (Ōfuchi Ninji, Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 20–26; Zurokuhen 10–22).

The scripture’s five-element symbolic system is closely integrated with the classical wǔ xíng correlations of the Huáng dì nèi jīng 黃帝內經 and the Lǐ jì, Yuè lìng 禮記月令, but systematically re-read through the Language Game of talisman-magic: each chēng fú 稱符 (“Commensurate Talisman”) corresponds — by name, colour, direction, season, element, tone, day, viscera, and deity — to one quadrant of the cosmos, and the adept who posses all five talismans together has therefore “assembled the cosmos in himself.” This identification of the adept’s body with the cosmic system — underwriting the later nèi dān 內丹 tradition — is one of the Ancient Língbǎo corpus’s most important legacies.

The text’s date of composition (c. 395–410, per the consensus dating of the Ancient Língbǎo corpus established by Ōfuchi, Robinet, and Bokenkamp) places it squarely in the Eastern Jìn 東晉 Daoist ferment that produced, in the same generation, the Shàngqīng 上清 scriptures (revealed to Yáng Xī 楊羲, 330–386) and that was to be codified by Lù Xiūjìng 陸修靜 (406–477) a half-century later in his Língbǎo jīng mù and his Sāndòng 三洞 bibliographical system. As a Shénfú 神符 (sacred-talisman) text, it belongs formally to the Dòngshén bù 洞神部 of the Daozang and participates in the Ancient Língbǎo corpus’s distinctive synthesis of Tiānshī 天師 talismanic tradition, Yellow-Emperor medical cosmology, and emerging Mahāyāna Buddhist soteriology.

The 1598 Míng reprint woodcut of the talisman of the Western direction (DZ 671 1.6b–7a) is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France under shelfmark Chinois 9546/666 (reproduced as figure 16 in Schipper & Verellen 2004, 1:221).

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:221–22 (DZ 671, H.-H. Schmidt). Primary reference.
• Bokenkamp, Stephen R. Early Daoist Scriptures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. For the intellectual context of the Ancient Língbǎo corpus.
• Bokenkamp, Stephen R. “Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures.” In Michel Strickmann, ed., Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, vol. 2, 434–86. Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 21. Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1983. Foundational study of the corpus.
• Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾. “On Ku Ling-pao-ching 古靈寶經.” Acta Asiatica 27 (1974): 33–56. Canonical reconstruction of the corpus.
• Ōfuchi Ninji. Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 敦煌道經・目錄編 and Zurokuhen 圖錄編. Tōkyō: Fukutake, 1978–79. For the Dūnhuáng manuscript witnesses (Pelliot 2440).
• Yamada Toshiaki 山田利明. “The Lingbao School.” In Livia Kohn, ed., Daoism Handbook, 225–55. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
• Wang Chengwen 王承文. Dūnhuáng gǔ Língbǎo jīng yǔ Jìn Táng dàojiào 敦煌古靈寶經與晉唐道教. Běijīng: Zhōnghuá, 2002. Major modern Chinese reference on the Ancient Língbǎo.
• Robinet, Isabelle. Taoism: Growth of a Religion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Ch. 6 on Língbǎo.

Other points of interest

The text’s core — the five chēng fú 稱符 talismans themselves — is reproduced as a framed pictographic image at DZ 671 1.3a–11b, one talisman per direction. The Míng 1598 reprint preserves these as woodblock-printed diagrams (figure 16 in Schipper & Verellen 2004, 1:221 shows the Western talisman). The talismans are among the most ancient surviving specimens of Daoist talismanic script and their graphic form — with its jagged, celestial-script aesthetic — is cited throughout the later Daoist ritual tradition.

The relation to the bā shǐ 八史 (Eight Archivists) — the celestial scribes who record the xiān lù 仙錄 of candidates for immortality — makes this scripture a key ritual source for the institution of celestial bureaucracy in medieval Daoism. The detailed protocol for inviting the bā shǐ through the zhāng jù figurines (DZ 671 juàn 2.1a–8a) is one of the earliest fully worked-out procedures for direct spirit-summoning in the Daoist corpus, anticipating (and in many respects founding) the later fǎ shù 法術 ritual tradition of the Sòng–Yuán Thunder Rites (léi fǎ 雷法).

The five talismans are also cited and reused in several later scriptures: the Tài shàng zhèn yī bào fù sì chù jīng 太上真一報復伺處經 (DZ 332) draws directly on DZ 671 for its framing (Schipper & Verellen 2004, 1:222 n.); the Zhēn gào 真誥 (DZ 1016) quotes the wǔ chēng fú in its Shàngqīng context (see Schipper & Verellen 2004, 2:1016); and the Dòngxuán língbǎo èr shí sì shēng tú jīng (DZ 1407) is cited within DZ 671 as its sequel.

The ritual sequence described in juàn 2 — spring equinox sacrifice, carving of the figurines, installation of the domestic altar, 120-day cultivation — is one of the most elaborate early Daoist household rituals on record, and has been compared (Robinet 1997, 164) to the jiā zhāi 家齋 (“household fasts”) of the early Tiānshī 天師 communities. The detail of the oral-formula invocations (zhòu 咒), including named addressing of each Earthly Branch’s deity, anticipates the mature later-medieval Daoist prayer-formula tradition.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0052
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 1:221–22 — DZ 671 entry (H.-H. Schmidt).
• ctext.org: 太上無極大道自然真一五稱符上經