Huáng tíng wài jǐng jīng 黃庭外景經
Scripture of the Outer Effulgence of the Yellow Court
base scripture: anonymous, c. 3rd c. CE; commentary by 蔣國祚 (Jiǎng Guózuò, zì Méizhōng), early Qīng
The earlier of the paired Huáng tíng meditation scriptures, treating the body’s outer effulgences (those described in inner terms in the Nèi jǐng; cf. KR5i0010 / KR5i0011) and traditionally divided into three pieces (上中下三篇) whose verses correspond chapter-by-chapter to the Nèi jǐng. The DZJY recension here is the second instalment of Jiǎng Guózuò’s paired commentary; pagination begins at sheet 21a, indicating a continuous foliation with the preceding Nèi jǐng in the woodblock printing.
Prefaces
The text carries no separate preface, the Huáng tíng paired commentary being prefaced as a unit at the head of KR5i0011. Jiǎng’s prefatory note here is a succinct introduction summarising the relation of Wài to Nèi: “The Wài jǐng jīng uniformly summarises the wording of the Nèi jǐng, but its passages are easier to grasp than the Nèi’s — for instance the lines xuán yīng qì guǎn shòu jīng fú 懸膺氣管受精符 and jí gù zǐ jīng yǐ zì chí 急固子精以自持; and again zǐ yù bù sǐ xiū Kūnlún qì juān yín yù zhuān shǒu jīng 子欲不死脩崑崙棄捐淫慾專守精; and wài běn sān yáng shén zì lái nèi yǎng sān yīn kě cháng shēng 外本三陽神自來內養三陰可長生 huán hún fǎn pò dào zì rán 還魂返魄道自然; and xuán jī xuán zhū huán wú duān zài dì xuán tiān zhōu qián kūn xiàng yǐ sì shí chì rú dān 璇璣懸珠環無端載地懸天周乾坤象以四時赤如丹 xiàng guī yǐn qì zhì líng gēn 象龜引氣至靈根 — and so on. Where the Nèi jǐng speaks of the heart-organ and reaches to the motion-and-stillness of the yì; where it speaks of the liver and reaches to the gallbladder’s emptiness-and-clarity; where it speaks of the lung and reaches to the heart; where it speaks of the spleen and reaches to the stomach; where it speaks of the kidney and reaches to the Yellow Court — these may all be taken as supplements to the Nèi jǐng’s slipped detail. The Wài jǐng of old was divided into three sections, with verses chapter-by-chapter corresponding to the Nèi jǐng and appended at the end. This is taken from Xǔ Yuánzhuāng’s preface, recorded here for like-minded students to verify.”
Abstract
The Huáng tíng wài jǐng jīng is one of the foundational meditation scriptures of medieval Daoism, generally taken to be slightly earlier than the Nèi jǐng (c. 250–350 CE) and to derive from a pre-Shàng-qīng cultic substratum. It survives in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng as DZ 332 Tài shàng huáng tíng wài jǐng yù jīng and elsewhere; the present DZJY recension is Jiǎng Guózuò’s nèidān commentary on a slightly contracted text, preserved as the second half of his paired Huáng tíng edition (the first half being KR5i0011). Internal evidence places composition c. 1700–1750.
Jiǎng’s running gloss inserts standard inner-alchemical equivalences: the “Yellow Court” (黃庭) is the lower dāntián (近脾丹田之上); 關元 is the lower abdomen (近尾閭丹田之下); 幽闕 is the kidney; 命門 is the navel; the “Jade Pool” (玉池) is the mouth-cavity; the “Spirit Hut” (神廬) is the nose. Such cross-references make this a useful primer to the standard SòngYuánQīng nèidān mapping of Yellow-Court terminology.
Translations and research
- For the base scripture and the Nèi-Wài tradition see Robinet, Schipper, Homann (citations under KR5i0010).
- No substantial secondary literature located on the Jiǎng Guó-zuò recension specifically.
Other points of interest
Jiǎng’s commentary preserves a key sentence from a (now lost?) preface by Xǔ Yuánzhuāng 許元莊 — “the Wài jǐng of old was divided into three sections, the verses chapter-by-chapter aligning with the Nèi jǐng” — a fact otherwise valuable for tracking the textual history of the paired scriptures.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5i0012
- Annotator: 蔣國祚.