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宋徽宗御解道德真經

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Text ID
KR5c0063
Date
1111–1118
Dynasty
宋

Sòng Huī zōng yù jiě Dàodé zhēn jīng 宋徽宗御解道德真經

Imperial Explication of the True Scripture of the Way and Its Virtue by Sòng Huīzōng

by 徽宗 (Zhào Jí 趙佶; Sòng Huīzōng 宋徽宗, r. 1100–1125) — yù jiě 御解 (imperial explication), composed during the Zhènghé 政和 era (1111–1118)

The personal commentary on the Dàodé jīng ([[KR5c0045|Dàodé zhēn jīng]]) by Sòng Huīzōng 宋徽宗 (Zhào Jí 趙佶, r. 1100–1125) — the third of the three imperial-authored Dàodé jīng commentaries in the Daozang, between Xuánzōng’s (DZ 677/678, KR5c0059/KR5c0060, 732–756) and Míng Tàizǔ’s (DZ 676, KR5c0058, 1374–75). Composed during the Zhènghé 政和 era (1111–1118) of Huīzōng’s reign, engraved on stone, and incorporated into the imperial Daozang project (the Zhènghé wàn shòu Dàozàng 政和萬壽道藏, 1118–1119). Preserved in four juàn in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng as DZ 680 / CT 680 (Dòngshén bù, Yù jué lèi 洞神部玉訣類). A substantial subcommentary was composed by Zhāng Ān 章安 before 1125 and is preserved as DZ 681 Sòng Huīzōng Dàodé zhēn jīng jiě yì 宋徽宗道德真經解義 in 10 juàn.

About the work

Isabelle Robinet’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 2:647–48, DZ 680) gives the definitive modern framing. The commentary treats the 81 chapters of the Dàodé jīng in sequence across four juàn. Huīzōng’s interpretive method is marked by a distinctive combination of classical-philosophical influences:

  • The Yìjīng and the Zhuāngzǐ as principal intertexts. Huīzōng cites the Yìjīng and the Zhuāngzǐ at every turn; his approach is fundamentally philosophical and metaphysical rather than political.
  • The Chóngxuán 重玄 (“twofold mystery”) influence. Persistent Mādhyamika-Buddhist and Chóngxuán themes throughout: the reciprocal encompassment of wú 無 and yǒu 有; the terminology of cháng yǒu 常有 and cháng wú 常無 (absolute being / absolute non-being); zhì wú 至無 (supreme non-being); zhēn wú 真無 (true non-being); and miào yǒu 妙有 (transcendent being; 2.1a).
  • Sīmǎ Guāng’s 司馬光 (1019–1086) influence. Huīzōng punctuates the opening chapter’s dào kě dào fēi cháng dào after wú and yǒu rather than after shǐ 始 and mǔ 母 — that is, “cháng wú, yù yǐ guān qí miào; cháng yǒu, yù yǐ guān qí jiǎo” 常無，欲以觀其妙；常有，欲以觀其徼 — the innovative reading introduced by Sīmǎ Guāng and defended by later scholars. This punctuation choice signals Huīzōng’s alignment with the mature Northern Sòng textual-philosophical consensus.
  • Buddhist themes. Explicit Buddhist influences appear throughout: fù xìng 復性 (“return to one’s nature”, e.g. 1.19b, 3.3b); the “immobility of beings” (1.5a, 7a); jiān wàng 兼忘 (“total forgetfulness” or “forgetfulness of contradictions”, 3.17b–18b). The commentary extensively integrates xìng 性 (“nature”), lǐ 理 (“principle”), and shì 事 (“phenomena”-affair) in ways that mirror contemporary Huáyán 華嚴 Buddhist philosophical vocabulary.
  • Neo-Confucian integration. Huīzōng takes up a number of cardinal Neo-Confucian distinctions: the metaphysical vs. the physical (1.27a, 2.12b); the Yìjīng’s programme of “exhausting the lǐ of the world and the utmost of one’s xìng in order to arrive at the mìng of Heaven” (qióng lǐ jìn xìng yǐ zhì yú mìng 窮理盡性以至於命); the discussion of wú jí 無極 and yǒu jí 有極 (2.11b) — all hallmarks of the mature Northern Sòng Neo-Confucian vocabulary of Zhōu Dūnyí 周敦頤, Shào Yōng 邵雍, and the Chéng 程 brothers. Like Táng Xuánzōng before him, Huīzōng thereby establishes a synthesis of Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist thought on the basis of the Dàodé jīng — though his synthesis, reflecting the intellectual ferment of the Northern Sòng, is more elaborately integrated with Neo-Confucian categories than Xuánzōng’s.

The commentary binds the cosmological-metaphysical reading of the Lǎozǐ to the reigning philosophical apparatus of Huīzōng’s court, producing a distinctively Northern-Sòng imperial reading. It represents, together with Huīzōng’s patronage of the Zhèngtǒng Daoist court, his promotion of the Shén xiāo 神霄 ritual tradition under the Celestial Master-style title Jiàozhǔ Dào jūn Huáng dì 教主道君皇帝 (bestowed on himself by imperial decree in 1116), and the compilation of the Zhèng hé wàn shòu Dàozàng (1118–19), the high point of Sòng imperial Daoist self-fashioning.

Prefaces

The commentary carries an imperial preface by Huīzōng himself (the Yù zhì xù 御製序) that opens the work, in which he articulates the rationale for the commentary and situates it in the imperial-exegetical tradition descending from Xuánzōng. (The preface survives both in DZ 680 and independently in various Sòng collectanea.)

Abstract

The commentary is a foundational document of mature Northern-Sòng imperial Daoism. Composed during the Zhènghé 政和 era (1111–1118) — the most intensely Daoist-inflected years of Huīzōng’s reign — it is precisely contemporaneous with the imperial project of the Zhèng hé wàn shòu Dàozàng (Zhèng hé era Daozang, 1118–19), the first printed edition of the complete Daoist Canon, compiled under imperial auspices and engraved on stone. Huīzōng’s commentary was itself engraved on stone and incorporated into the imperial project after 1118 (VDL 44 note, 105).

The commentary’s influence extended throughout the remaining SòngYuánMíng Dàodé jīng commentarial tradition. Zhāng Ān’s DZ 681 subcommentary — probably addressed personally to the emperor before 1125 — represents its first major critical reception. The SòngYuán interpretive tradition descending through Lín Xīyì 林希逸 (1193–1271) and beyond engages extensively with Huīzōng’s positions.

The composition window of 1111–1118 is precisely attested by the VDL bibliography and the inclusion of the text in the Zhèng hé Dàozàng of 1118–19. Dynasty 宋. The catalog’s “date: ca. 1111–1118” is preserved.

The political context of the commentary is essential to its interpretation. Huīzōng (Zhào Jí, 1082–1135, r. 1100–1125) — famously known as the aesthete-emperor whose lavish cultural patronage and religious investments bankrupted the Northern Sòng state — composed the commentary at the peak of his Daoist-ritual self-fashioning. His self-assumed title Jiàozhǔ Dào jūn Huáng dì 教主道君皇帝 (“Teacher-Sovereign Dao-Lord Emperor”) claimed for the emperor the spiritual authority of a Celestial Master; his promotion of the Shén xiāo 神霄 ritual tradition under Lín Língsù 林靈素 aimed to integrate the imperial institution with the Daoist ritual order; and his Dàodé jīng commentary is an integral part of this programme. Within eight years of the commentary’s completion, Huīzōng would lose the north to the Jurchen Jīn (1126) and die in captivity (1135) — an end that powerfully contextualises the commentary’s Daoist themes of wú wéi 無為, róu ruò 柔弱, and the paradoxes of imperial power.

Translations and research

  • Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2:647–48 (DZ 680, I. Robinet) and 2:648–49 (DZ 681 Jiě yì, Zhāng Ān).
  • Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Emperor Huizong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Definitive modern biography; substantial discussion of Huīzōng’s Daoist commitments including the commentary.
  • Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Peter N. Gregory, eds. Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993. For the wider Sòng imperial-religious context.
  • Liu Tsʻun-yan (Liú Cúnrén) 劉存仁. “Taoist Self-Cultivation in Ming Thought.” In Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, 291–330. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. (For context on imperial commentaries.)
  • Strickmann, Michel. “The Longest Taoist Scripture.” History of Religions 17, no. 3–4 (1978): 331–54. For the Shén xiāo context that frames Huīzōng’s Daoist activity.
  • Boltz, Judith Magee. A Survey of Taoist Literature, Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1987.
  • Wén Qìng 聞慶. Sòng Huīzōng Dàodé zhēn jīng yù jiě yán jiū 宋徽宗道德真經御解研究. Běijīng: Zhōngguó shèhuì kēxué, 2008. Modern Chinese monograph.

Other points of interest

The commentary stands in a distinctive triad with Táng Xuánzōng’s (KR5c0059) and Míng Tàizǔ’s (KR5c0058): each imperial commentator reads the Dàodé jīng in a way that reveals the signature philosophical preoccupations of his era. Xuánzōng’s reading is fundamentally xuánxué / Chóngxuán with a classical Confucian overlay; Huīzōng’s is Chóngxuán and Mādhyamika-Buddhist with an emergent Neo-Confucian apparatus; Míng Tàizǔ’s is pragmatic-political with peasant-Buddhist overtones. The three together constitute a remarkable index of shifting imperial-Daoist intellectual culture across eight centuries.

Zhāng Ān’s subcommentary (DZ 681, Sòng Huīzōng Dàodé zhēn jīng jiě yì, 10 juan, composed before 1125) was probably presented personally to Huīzōng as the scholarly reception of the imperial text. Robinet (Schipper & Verellen 2004, 2:648–49) describes the subcommentary as following the “classical” pattern with echoes of Guō Xiàng’s Zhuāngzǐ commentary, and notes Zhāng Ān’s distinctive emphasis on the Chóngxuán doctrine of fēi yǒu fēi wú 非有非無 (“neither being nor non-being”). Together DZ 680 and DZ 681 constitute the Northern-Sòng imperial-Daoist commentarial corpus, paralleling DZ 677+678 of Xuánzōng a half-century earlier.

Huīzōng’s preface to the commentary is separately transmitted in several SòngMíng anthologies, and has been studied for its articulation of the imperial-Daoist self-understanding.

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