無上三元鎮宅靈籙

Wú shàng sān yuán zhèn zhái líng lù 無上三元鎮宅靈籙

Divine Register of the Supreme Three Origins for Securing the House

attributed to 金明七真 (Jīnmíng Qīzhēn; early-Táng Daoist revealer — possibly a legendary/pseudonymous figure)

A Daoist domestic-protection register (líng lù 靈籙) of 23 folios in one juàn, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng as DZ 674 / CT 674 (Dòngshén bù, Shénfú lèi 洞神部神符類). The scripture frames itself as a revelation by the Supreme Jade Emperor (Wú shàng shàng shàng Yuánshǐ Tài shàng Yù huáng Wú jí Dà dào jūn 無上上上元始太上玉皇無極大道君) to Jīnmíng Qīzhēn 金明七真 on Mount Kūnlún 崐崙 at the Céng chéng shàng gōng 層城上宮, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of a rén shēn 壬申 year at the yín hour.

About the work

The text belongs to a small and distinctive corpus of four closely-related Daoist registers all attributed to Jīnmíng Qīzhēn: DZ 164 Shàngqīng sān zūn pǔ lù 上清三尊譜籙, DZ 674 Wúshàng sān yuán zhèn zhái líng lù (the present text), DZ 1388 Shàngqīng jīn zhēn yù huáng shàng yuán jiǔ tiān zhēn líng sān bǎi liù shí wǔ bù yuán lù 上清金真玉皇上元九天真靈三百六十五部元籙, and DZ 1390 Shàngqīng dòng tiān sān wǔ jīn gāng xuán lù yí jīng 上清洞天三五金剛玄籙儀經. These form a coordinated programme of early-Táng Daoist register-revelations that complement — and may slightly postdate — Jīnmíng Qīzhēn’s most famous work, DZ 1125 Dòng xuán líng bǎo sān dòng fèng dào kē jiè yíng shǐ 洞玄靈寶三洞奉道科戒營始, the comprehensive Táng Daoist regulatory code.

The scripture is structured in three main parts:

Part 1 — The revelation narrative

Opens with the descent of the Wúshàng Dà dào jūn to Kūnlún in a rén shēn year, his command to Jīnmíng Qīzhēn to become the Zhèng fǎ zhōng shī 正法中師 (“Master of the Orthodox Teaching of the Ten Directions”) for the coming age, and the Qīzhēn’s lament at the suffering of the three realms in the mò jié 末劫 (“end-kalpa”) age. The Dà dào jūn responds with the gift of the Wú shàng sān yuán ān zhèn zhái lù 無上三元安鎮宅籙 — a household-protection register which, when inscribed with the seal of the Three Origins (tài shàng sān yuán zhī zhāng 太上三元之章) and installed above the doors of the house, guards the household against the demonic hordes of the five directions, the rising of epidemics, and the violent upheavals of the end-time.

Part 2 — The register proper

The text of the register itself, beginning Wú shàng shàng shàng Yuánshǐ Tài shàng Yù huáng Wú jí Dà dào jūn jīn jiàng Jīn míng Qī zhēn wú shàng sān yuán ān zhèn mǒu zhái líng lù… 無上上上元始太上玉皇無極大道君今降金明七真無上三元安鎮某宅靈籙…. The register enumerates — in a formal legal-liturgical style — the celestial administrations, star officials, cardinal-direction protectors, Twelve Branches, Nine Grottoes, Eight Trigrams, Six Jiǎ spirits, Five Peaks, and so on, that are summoned to witness the covenant between the Daoist teacher, the head of the household, and the divine protectors. The covenant places the household under the surveillance of three times three divine protectors (nine total) drawn from the three Daoist heavens — the Qīngwéi tiān 清微天, Yǔ yú tiān 禹餘天, and Dà chì tiān 大赤天 — and commits the household to annual tributes (rice and other offerings) to the Daoist master in charge, and to the keeping of accurate registers of living and deceased family members.

Part 3 — Regulations and the Qīzhēn’s postface

Following the register proper, rules are set out concerning the religious life of the registered household, the transmission and proper use of the register, and the penalties for violation — presented as a Yù sī zhèng fǎ lù 玉司正法律 (“Penal Code of the Jade Administration of the Orthodox Teaching”). The text closes with a short postface attributed to Jīnmíng Qīzhēn.

Prefaces

No separate preface; the text opens with the revelation narrative frame that functions as a de facto preface. A short postface signed by Jīnmíng Qīzhēn closes the text.

Abstract

Ursula-Angelika Cedzich’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 1:461–62, DZ 674) gives the definitive modern framing. Cedzich places the text in the cluster of early-Táng register-scriptures attributed to Jīnmíng Qīzhēn, and endorses a date around the middle or second half of the seventh century — slightly later than DZ 1125 Sān dòng fèng dào kē jiè yíng shǐ (which Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾 dates to the mid-seventh century on internal evidence). Yoshioka Yoshitoyo 吉岡義豐 had argued — on the basis of the rén shēn date in Jīnmíng’s DZ 1388 Sān bǎi liù shí wǔ bù lù — for an earlier dating of the corpus to c. 552 CE (the rén shēn year closest to the apocryphal dates embedded in the texts). Cedzich rejects this: the four Jīnmíng revelation-texts and DZ 1125 “originated around the same time from the same tradition,” and the early-Táng date is historically more plausible given the absence of evidence for the elaborate Daoist institutional apparatus presupposed by DZ 1125 Fèng dào kē jiè in the sixth century. The present scripture probably slightly postdates DZ 1125, placing it roughly 630–700 CE (early-to-mid Táng). Per the project’s dating rule, the frontmatter gives 630–700 as the conservative composition window; dynasty 唐.

The catalog’s “dynasty: 唐初期” (early Táng) is accordingly preserved and slightly refined.

The institutional-historical significance of the text is considerable. As a scripture for the integration of lay households into a formally-registered Daoist community, DZ 674 is a key witness to the early-Táng adaptation of the old Tiānshī 天師 (Celestial Master) household-covenant system (going back to the late Hàn Zhāng Dàolíng 張道陵 wǔ dǒu mǐ dào 五斗米道). The old Tiānshī system had featured three annual days of assembly (sān huì 三會, at the 7th of the 1st month, the 7th of the 7th month, and the 5th of the 10th month) during which the household registers were revised in the diocese and the tutelary gods promoted; here these are replaced by the days of the Three Principles (sān yuán 三元: 15th of the 1st month, 15th of the 7th month, 15th of the 10th month) — the mature Daoist calendrical system that would remain standard thereafter.

The influence of the Zhèngyī / Tiānshī tradition is especially visible in the register’s structural affinities with DZ 1127 Lù xiān shēng dào mén kē lüè 陸先生道門科略 (Lù Xiūjìng 陸修靜, 406–477) — an earlier Zhèngyī regulation text which provided many of the ceremonial models for the Jīnmíng corpus (Cedzich 2004, 1:461).

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:461–62 (DZ 674, U.-A. Cedzich) and 1:452–53 (DZ 1125, U.-A. Cedzich). Primary references.
• Yoshioka Yoshitoyo 吉岡義豐. “Sandō hōdō kakai gihan no seiritsu ni tsuite” 三洞奉道科戒儀範の成立について. In Dōkyō to Bukkyō 道教と仏教 3:75–219. Tokyo: Toyoshima Shobō, 1976. For the Jīnmíng Qīzhēn corpus and its dating.
• Ōfuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾. Tonkō dōkyō: Mokurokuhen 敦煌道經・目錄編. Tokyo: Fukutake, 1978, 115–16. On the Dūnhuáng parallels of the related DZ 1125.
• Kohn, Livia. The Daoist Monastic Manual: A Translation of the Fengdao Kejie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Translation of the cognate DZ 1125.
• Cedzich, Ursula-Angelika. “Ghosts and Demons, Law and Order: Grave Quelling Texts and Early Taoist Liturgy.” Taoist Resources 4, no. 2 (1993): 23–35. For the broader context of Daoist household-protection texts.

Other points of interest

The scripture is a valuable witness to the seventh-century transformation of Daoist lay-organisation: the old Tiānshī diocese-based communal system (zhì 治, with its 24 dioceses across Shǔ 蜀 and elsewhere) had largely collapsed by the Táng, and a new system of direct-revelation registers was needed to regularise the enrollment of lay households. DZ 674 and the coordinated Jīnmíng corpus (DZ 164, DZ 1388, DZ 1390) represent this new system, in which the rén shēn covenant-year and the sān yuán assembly-days replace the older dioceses’ sān huì cycle.

The apocalyptic framing of the scripture — with its repeated invocation of the mò jié 末劫 (“end-kalpa”), the sān zāi wǔ zhuó 三災五濁 (“three calamities and five pollutions”), and the violence of the present age — reflects the early-Táng Daoist adoption of Buddhist eschatological vocabulary. The language of the Qīzhēn’s lament (“the three realms collapse, the soldiers of men and ghosts clash day and night, the end-kalpa has come…”) is directly cognate with the Buddhist mò fǎ 末法 (“end-Dharma”) rhetoric of the same period, and is one of the clearest instances of the mature Táng Daoist-Buddhist eschatological synthesis in the Daozang.

The text cites the Wú shàng 無上 (“Supreme / None-Above”) hierarchy familiar from the early Language-Game of Táng Zhèngyī: Wú shàng shàng shàng 無上上上 (three-fold superlative), Wú jí Dà dào jūn 無極大道君, Yuán shǐ Tài shàng Yù huáng 元始太上玉皇, etc. — a hierarchical vocabulary that would be systematised shortly afterward in the comprehensive sān qīng 三清 (Three Purities) scheme of the mature Táng Daozang.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0055
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 1:461–62 — DZ 674 entry (U.-A. Cedzich).
• ctext.org: 無上三元鎮宅靈籙