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
The Honoured Scripture of the Great Cavern’s Salvation from Calamities, Spoken by the Yuánshǐ Supreme Deity Vairocana
Anonymous; Qīng spirit-writing scripture (Dào zàng jí yào)
A single-juàn revelation-scripture in sixteen chapters, the title alone betraying its provenance: 元始天王 (“Yuán-shǐ Heavenly King,” the supreme deity of high Daoist cosmology) is identified with Vairocana 毘盧遮耶 (Pí lú zhē yē, the cosmic Buddha of the Huá-yán / Mahāvairocana scriptures), thereby fusing Daoist and Buddhist supreme beings into a single speaker. The scripture’s narrative armature is identical chapter-to-chapter: the deity, seated in the Yù-luó Xiāo-tái 鬱羅蕘臺, illumines a particular calamity for the Jade Maiden Yè-guāng 夜光玉女, identifies it, expounds it in a five-character “Cavern stanza” (大洞章), and finally pronounces a transliterated dhāraṇī mantra (e.g., 嘟嚕嘟嚕 / 吽吽唎 / 婆祖 / 唵 / 吽吽唎). The sixteen calamities are: (1) saṃsāra 輪迴; (2) infant mortality 旃檀; (3) slaughter 殺; (4) flood 水; (5) fire 火; (6) plague 瘟; (7) thunder 雷; (8) wind 風; (9) hail 雹; (10) subsidence 䧟; (11) pit-burial 坑; (12) precipice-collapse 傾; (13) collapse-burial 覆; (14) explosion 轟; (15) wild beasts 獸; (16) noxious creatures 蟲. Each calamity is paired with a deputed delivering deity (e.g., 太一慈尊 against slaughter; 玉虛真武 against hail; 文昌帝君 against wind; 真武 against hail; 圓通自在 against pit-burial — i.e., Guān yīn).
Prefaces
The text carries no preface, postface, or attributed transmitter; it is presented as direct revelation 元始天王 → 夜光玉女 with the Heavenly King’s discourse occupying the entire single juàn. This format and the deliberate pairing of Daoist and Buddhist divine epithets are diagnostic of Qīng fújī 扶乩 spirit-writing scripture-production.
Abstract
This is a Qīng spirit-written calamity-deliverance scripture, generically related to the long lineage of Daoist jiùjié / dùrén 救劫度人 texts (cf. Língbǎo wú liàng dù rén shàng pǐn miào jīng 靈寶無量度人上品妙經, DZ 1) but framed in the syncretic Daoist-Buddhist register typical of late-Míng / Qīng planchette communities. The text is not attested in the Zhèng tǒng Dào zàng and entered the Daoist canonical record only through the Dào zàng jí yào (1809), which means its terminus a quo is loose: any time after the wide diffusion of Vairocana cult terminology in vernacular Daoism (i.e., from the late Míng) is plausible, and the terminus ad quem is set by Jiǎng Yǔpǔ’s 1809 compilation of the original jí yào.
The chapter on infant mortality (旃檀) names 長生大帝 with his “peach-pollen dew” as the deliverer; the chapter on hail names 玉虛真武 with the Seven-Star Banner; the chapter on noxious creatures names the Four Heavenly Kings (四天門王) — the latter a borrowing direct from the Buddhist iconographic repertoire. The transliterated mantras (containing “om”, “hūṃ”, “sā-hā”-style endings, etc.) are clearly imitations of Tantric Buddhist dhāraṇī, but their syllabic content is mostly free invention rather than recognisable Sanskrit transliteration. The whole stands as a representative example of the Qīng “all-things-saving” 救苦 scripture genre, intended for liturgical recitation in apotropaic ritual against the catalogued list of disasters.
The scripture’s catalogue of calamities is ordered to move from cosmically generic (saṃsāra; mass slaughter), through the four classical natural disasters (water, fire, plague, thunder, wind), to specifically post-classical hazards (the gunpowder-bombardment chapter, 轟劫 §14, “from the Qín–Hàn onward those who discuss warfare have stressed fire-attack: hence cannons, muskets, and gunpowder…”). The latter is a useful internal dating clue: it is consistent with a late-Míng or Qīng date of composition, when firearms had become a familiar cultural fact.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The text is briefly mentioned in surveys of Dào zàng jí yào but has not been the subject of a dedicated study; for the surrounding genre see Maeda Shigeki 前田繁樹 on Daoist apotropaic scripture, and Mori Yuria’s work on DZJY (cited under KR5i0003).
Other points of interest
The opening identification 元始天王 = 毘盧遮耶 is theologically the same move that Lady Wèi makes in her preface to KR5i0003 — these two texts adjacent in the catalog were almost certainly compiled in the same milieu.