Tài shàng lǎo jūn shuō cháng qīng jìng zhēn jīng 太上老君說常清靜真經
The Most-High Lord Lǎo’s Spoken Scripture of Constant Purity-and-Stillness
attributed traditionally as transmitted by 葛玄 (Gě Xuán, Eastern Wú) from a chain Wángmǔ → Jīnquè dìjūn → Dōnghuá dìjūn → Gě Xuán; here printed with the Bā dòng xiān zǔ hé zhù 八洞仙祖合註 (Eight-Cavern Immortal Patriarchs joint commentary, mid-Qīng spirit-writing) edited within the 柳守元 circle
The most influential short scripture of the post-Táng Daoist tradition, transmitting in approximately 600 characters the Daoist analytic of qīng 清 / zhuó 濁, dòng 動 / jìng 靜 (“clarity / turbidity, motion / rest”) and the path of cháng qīng cháng jìng 常清常靜. The base scripture is canonically dated to the Táng (cf. DZ 620 Tài shàng lǎo jūn shuō cháng qīng jìng miào jīng, with no preface) and is among the daily-recitation texts of the Quánzhēn liturgy. The DZJY recension reprinted here pairs the canonical text with a new line-by-line commentary attributed to the Eight-Cavern Patriarchs — i.e., the Liǔ Shǒuyuán fújī circle that produced the parallel Dào dé jīng commentary KR5i0005 — and adds two terminal zàn by 仙翁葛祖 (i.e., Gě Xuán under his cult-title) and 左元眞人, plus a closing zhèng yī zhēn rén spell-formula.
Prefaces
The text proper carries no preface. The transmission paragraph at the end (preserved in all recensions) is a self-attribution: “The Immortal Patriarch Gě said: ‘I obtained the True Way and recited this scripture ten thousand times. This scripture is what is studied in the heavens and not transmitted to the lower scholars. Of old I received it from Dōnghuá dìjūn; Dōnghuá dìjūn received it from Jīnquè dìjūn; Jīnquè dìjūn received it from Xīwángmǔ. The line of transmission was always mouth-to-mouth; nothing was committed to writing. Now I have, in the world, written it down and recorded it. The superior scholar who comprehends it ascends as a heavenly officer; the middling scholar who cultivates it is enrolled at the Southern Palace among the immortals; the lower scholar who obtains it lives long in the world and travels through the three realms, ascending into the golden gate.‘” — followed by parallel transmission attributions to Zuǒ yuán zhēn rén and Zhèng yī zhēn rén. These terminal attributions are the conventional Daoist transmission-paratext.
Abstract
The base scripture is the Cháng qīng jìng jīng itself — one of the foundational short scriptures of medieval Daoism, attested at least from the late Táng (the earliest secure dating is the citation in late-Táng / Five Dynasties materials) and standardly attributed in the canonical transmission account to a heavenly transmission ending with Gě Xuán 葛玄. The DZJY recension preserves the canonical text intact and overlays a much fuller mid-Qīng exegesis. Schipper-Verellen (The Taoist Canon II) note three commentaries on this scripture in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 755 Tài shàng lǎo jūn shuō cháng qīng jìng jīng zhù, anonymous; further gloss-volumes by Sòng commentators); the present DZJY commentary is independent of those, being the work of the early-eighteenth-century Lǚzǔ planchette milieu. Its hermeneutic frame is the standard xìngmìng doctrine of the Quánzhēn / Lóngmén school.
The dating bracket here records the wide span between the terminus a quo of the underlying scripture (Táng, c. 700) and the terminus ad quem of the present commentary (Qiánlóng era, c. 1750). The Eight-Cavern joint commentary is presumably contemporary with the parallel Dào dé jīng commentary at KR5i0005 in Liǔ Shǒuyuán’s editorial circle, and so dates from the Yōngzhèng to early-Qián-lóng era.
Translations and research
- Kohn, Livia. The Daoist Encyclopedia, s.v. “Qingjing jing,” with full English translation. — best one-stop English-language entry.
- Kohn, Livia. “The Date of the Qingjing jing.” In Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. M. LaFargue (SUNY 1998).
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon. — on DZ 620 (the base text) and DZ 755 / 758 / 759 (Sòng commentaries).
- French translation by Catherine Despeux: Le Traité de la Clarté et de la Sérénité (Paris: Les Deux Océans, 1997 — a different recension, but useful for the underlying text).
Other points of interest
The Eight-Cavern commentary’s running formulation qīng ér wú qīng 淸而無淸 jìng ér wú jìng 靜而無靜 (“clear yet without clarity, still yet without stillness”) is a deliberate echo of the Diamond Sūtra-style apophatic doubling that pervades late-Míng / Qīng Quánzhēn theology, signalling the Buddhist-influenced inflection of the commentary even as it remains formally Daoist.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5i0008
- Transmission: 葛玄 (託名). Commentary edited by 柳守元’s Eight-Cavern circle.