元始大洞玉經

Yuán shǐ dà dòng yù jīng 元始大洞玉經

Yuánshǐ’s Great-Cavern Jade Scripture

prefaces attributed to 呂洞賓 (Lǚ Dòngbīn, as 純陽帝君) and 魏華存 (Wèi Huácún, as 紫虛元君)

A Qīng spirit-written redaction of the Shàng qīng Dà dòng yù jīng in two juàn, opening the Dào zàng jí yào sequence on Daoist scripture exegesis. The text proper carries thirty-nine stanzas of the cavern liturgy; juàn 2 is occupied by a glossary-cum-meditation manual entitled Dà dòng yù jīng shū yào shí èr yì 大洞玉經疏要十二義 (“Twelve Cardinal Meanings of the Commentarial Essentials of the Dà dòng yù jīng”), keyed to the Quánzhēn / Lóngmén meditation curriculum that flourished at the Chéngdū Èr xiān ān 二仙菴 where the DZJY was assembled.

Prefaces

Preface (純陽帝君). “The Lord of Pure Yang [Lǚ Dòng-bīn] said: My Way prizes long life, and what it values is life-mandate; it is spirit alone that distinguishes the Way’s life-mandate from that of common men. Common men take form as their life-mandate; form once born must die. The Way takes spirit as its life-mandate; spirit neither dies nor is born. The Yuán-shǐ Heavenly King 元始天王 expounded this scripture of the immortals in order, by the unfading primal spirit of long life, to ferry his chosen folk out of the bitter sea of transmigration and raise them to the heaven of Pure Subtlety and Great Existence (淸微大有). Thus what is here called spirit does not fall into the void-quietism of the Buddhists’ nirvāṇa, nor into the dead-ash dust-emptiness of the heterodox: it has the real substance of spirit and the real function of spirit, by which it transforms its psychophysical stuff, polishes its wisdom into translucency, rescues from the wreckage of ten thousand ages, and lengthens the life of the immortals for a thousand kalpas. Now the world’s discoursers on spirit fail to penetrate to this point. Some take the hún soul to be spirit, not knowing that spirit is not the hún; some take cognition (識) to be spirit, not knowing that spirit is not cognition. The true substance of spirit lies in the primal essence (元精); the true function of spirit lies in upright luminosity (貞明)…” The preface continues with an analogy from the heavenly luminaries (sun, moon, stars), expounds the threefold relation 帝一-元命-貞明, and ends as a postface (跋) endorsing the text as a manual for those who would “petition to be a minister of the Lord-on-High” (祈為帝臣). No date is appended to this preface.

Preface (紫虛元君). “Reverently considering: the Yuán-shǐ Heavenly King is none other than Vairocana 毘盧遮那, the holy lord who is ancestor to the births of buddhas and immortals; and this scripture was preached for the salvation of the immortals. Its title ‘Great Cavern’ refers to the highest Way of the Great Void, whose substance is round, luminous, and constantly abiding, undefiled and unmoved through the kalpas, transcending the sphere of the heavens and human beings, not falling into the realm of sound and form — it cannot even be named, much less expounded. But because human beings, having been born by drawing their portion of light from the Yuán-shǐ to govern this bubble-and-shadow body, mistake the bubble-and-shadow for the real, dim the endowment of the single numen, and so circulate through the four modes of birth and sink in the six destinies, ever further from the Way of the Great Cavern of the Great Void, the Heavenly King in compassion preached this scripture, hoping to save them from drowning and to bring them home again to the Great Cavern. The Way of this scripture takes the Lord-One (帝一) as its substance: the Lord is the spirit of the Great Cavern, the One is the primordial of the Great Cavern. To name ‘Lord’ is to honour the unifying nature; to name ‘One’ is to bring to its term the meritorious life-mandate. When Lord and One are cultivated together, one may return to the Great Void without falling back into the topsy-turvy of saṃsāra…” The preface explicates the Three Methods (三法 — 有, 無, 玄) which generate the Nine Methods (九法), discusses the relation of the Great Cavern to its thirty-nine emanated heavens, ends with the famous parable of the Chǔ pearl and the Zhèng buyer (the man who bought the box and returned the pearl) as a warning against losing the kernel for the husk, and is signed: 康熙己丑歲五月望日，南嶽紫虛元君魏華存謹敘 (“on the fifteenth day of the fifth month of the jǐ-chǒu year of the Kāngxī era [4 Jul 1709], Wèi Huá-cún the Primal Lady of Purple Tenuity of the Southern Marchmount respectfully prefaces”).

Abstract

This is a Qīng-era recension of the Shàngqīng Dà dòng yù jīng — one of the foundational Shàng qīng meditation scriptures originally compiled in the Sòng (cf. DZ 7 Dà dòng yù jīng, edited by the thirty-eighth Máoshān patriarch Jiǎng Zōngyīng 蔣宗瑛 and circulated with a preface by the twenty-third patriarch Zhū Zǐyīng 朱自英; on which see Schipper-Verellen, The Taoist Canon II, 1044–46). The DZJY recension presented here is substantially expanded over the Sòng text: a wholly new pair of prefaces is added, the 39 stanzas are abbreviated/paraphrased in places, and a new juàn-2 commentary, Shū yào shí èr yì, has been welded on to make the text serviceable as an inner-alchemical curriculum within the Quánzhēn / Lóngmén tradition that produced the Dào zàng jí yào in early-19th-century Chéngdū.

The two prefaces are explicit examples of fújī 扶乩 / fùluán 扶鸞 spirit-writing: their attributed authors — Lǚ Dòngbīn (Táng) and Lady Wèi Huácún (Jìn) — were dead more than a millennium when the prefaces were composed, and the dating Kāngxī jǐchǒu (1709) given on Lady Wèi’s preface corresponds to a period of intense planchette activity in late-Míng / early-Qīng Daoist circles. The 1709 date should be treated as the date of composition of the present recension, not of the underlying Shàngqīng material. The text was carried into the DZJY by Jiǎng Yǔpǔ 蔣予蒲 (1755–1819) when he assembled the original jí yào in 1809 and was retained in Hé Lóngxiāng’s 1906 expansion (cf. Mori Yuria, “Daozang jiyao and Quanzhen Daoism in the Qing Dynasty”). Thus the catalog meta gives only “DZJY” as edition; the terminus a quo of 1709 is fixed by the preface signature.

The two-juàn structure (scripture + 12-yì commentary) is paralleled by KR5i0001 (which transmits an alternate, anonymous version of the same scripture) and is conceptually descended from Sòng-era exegesis (cf. Chen Jingyuan 陳景元, Shàng qīng dà dòng zhēn jīng yù jué yīn yì DZ 104).

Translations and research

• Robinet, Isabelle. “Le Tà-tòng tchen-king: son authenticité et sa place dans les textes du Chang-tch’ing king.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein II (1983), 394–433. — fundamental on the Shàng qīng Dà dòng tradition; covers the Sòng Yù jīng but not the DZJY recension.
• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Vol. II, 1044–46 (DZ 7 Dà dòng yù jīng, by Robinet).
• Mori Yuria 森由利亞. “Daozang jiyao and Quanzhen Daoism in the Qing Dynasty: Spirit-Writing Cults and Canonical Imperatives.” In Daoism in History: Essays in Honour of Liu Ts’un-yan, ed. B. Penny (Routledge 2006), 165–84. — context for the spirit-writing milieu in which the present recension was produced.

Other points of interest

The opening line of Lady Wèi’s preface — “the Yuánshǐ Heavenly King is none other than Vairocana” — is a striking instance of the late-imperial Daoist accommodation of Buddhist cosmology, treating 元始天王 and 毘盧遮那 (Vairocana) as a single transcendent figure. Compare KR5i0004 Yuán shǐ shàng dì Pí lú zhē yē shuō dà dòng jiù jié zūn jīng 元始上帝毘盧遮耶說大洞救劫尊經, in which the syncretism is built into the title.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5i0003
• Prefaces by 呂洞賓 (託名) and 魏華存 (託名).