Tiāntáishān jì 天台山記
Records of Mount Tiān-tái
written by 徐靈府 (Xú Língfǔ / Mòxīzǐ 默希子, fl. Yuánhé era 806–820, 撰)
About the work
A 1-juan mid-Tang Daoist gazetteer of Mount Tiāntái 天台山 (the great mountain of southeastern Zhèjiāng, sacred to both the Buddhist Tiāntái 天台 school and to the Shàngqīng 上清 Daoist tradition), written by the Tang Daoist master 徐靈府 Xú Língfǔ (號 Mòxīzǐ 默希子 / Tóngbǎi zhēngjūn 桐柏徵君) in the Yuánhé 元和 era (806–820). The SòngBǐngshēn 1236 colophon by an unnamed mid-Sòng official explicitly identifies the author: “Tang Daoist Xú Língfǔ composed [it]. He was a Yuánhé era person.” Transmitted in Taishō 51 as T2096.
Abstract
The work opens with Sūn Chuò’s 孫綽 (314–371) famous formulation: “Across the seas there are Fāngzhàng and Pénglái; on land there are Sìmíng and Tiāntái — truly so!” — fixing Tiāntái as the canonical eastern mainland-counterpart to the legendary islands of immortality. The work then proceeds to a topographical survey of the mountain’s principal features — the great peaks (the eight peaks of the inner mountain), the Cíxīngyán 紫星巖 (“Purple Star Cliff”), the spring-and-stream system, and the locations of the major Daoist establishments.
The text is an unusually clear example of the integrated Buddhist-Daoist religious geography of mid-Tang Tiāntái: although the author is a Daoist and the foreground entries are Daoist sites, the narrative is integrated with the Buddhist establishment (the Guóqīngsì 國清寺, the great Buddhist monastic centre, is given parallel treatment) and the Tiāntáishān 天台山 tradition is presented as a single religious landscape with multiple confessional inhabitants.
The SòngBǐngshēn (1236) colophon by a 路 (Lú) official who served as 假守臨海 explains the work’s circulation: he was assigned to Línhǎi 臨海 (now Tāizhōu, the prefectural town adjacent to Mount Tiāntái) and intended to make the climb, but was prevented by snow; the work was incorporated into his 臥遊 (“travel from one’s reclining-place”) collection. The work is therefore preserved in the Buddhist canonical transmission because it was incorporated by mid-Sòng Tiāntái Buddhist scholars into their own corpus of Tiāntái documentation — a documentary integration of the Daoist witness into the Buddhist tradition.
Translations and research
- 牧田諦亮, 中國佛教史研究·天台山關係文獻 — the principal modern Japanese-language treatment.
- 杜光庭 (the Tang Daoist 杜光庭’s Tiān-tái-shān shí èr fú-dì jì 天台山十二福地記) — sister work; also preserved in the Daoist canon.
- Edward H. Schafer, Mao Shan in T’ang Times (Boulder: Society for the Study of Chinese Religions Monographs, 1980) — analogous Tang sacred-mountain study.
- Russell Kirkland on the Mid-Tang Daoist literature.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the principal mid-Tang Daoist gazetteers, one of the very few that survived the Tang-Sòng transition intact. Its preservation through the Buddhist canonical channel is itself a witness to the fluid confessional boundaries of pre-modern Chinese sacred-mountain religiosity, in which a Daoist master’s geographical compendium could be incorporated into the Buddhist canon as a Tiāntáishān reference document.