Scripture of Great Peace (Taiping jing)太平经

Also known as

Taiping qingling shu (Scripture of Great Peace and Right Guidance), Taiping qingling shu (alternate title, writing 'blue' for 'clear')

Author / transmission

Yu Ji, Gong Chong

Period

Eastern Han · Tradition holds that Yu Ji and Gong Chong presented the 170-fascicle Taiping Qingling Shu during the reign of Emperor Shun (126–144); the received text gradually took shape in the late Eastern Han and was compiled by Daoist priests of the Six Dynasties, and only fifty-seven fascicles survive in the Zhengtong Daozang.

Canon division

Taiping Section

Collected in

Zhengtong Daozang, Taiping Section

Category

Early Daoist Scriptures

Fascicles

Originally 170 scrolls; 57 scrolls survive today, along with the ten-scroll Digest of the Scripture of Great Peace by Lüqiu Fangyuan of the Tang and the Dunhuang catalogue S.4226

Synopsis

The Taiping Jing (Scripture of Great Peace) is the earliest and longest of the surviving early Daoist scriptures, and the intellectual source of the Way of Great Peace (Taiping Dao) at the end of the Han. According to the 'Biography of Xiang Kai' in the Hou Han Shu, during the reign of Emperor Shun, Gong Chong of Langya presented the Taiping Qingling Shu, a divine text obtained by his teacher Yu Ji; during the reign of Emperor Huan, Xiang Kai presented it again, and Zhang Jiao 'possessed much of the text,' whereupon he founded the Way of Great Peace. The whole work is written as a dialogue between a Celestial Master and a Perfected One, and its content is wide-ranging: it explains the cosmos through the theory of primordial qi, and explains calamities and anomalies through yin-yang, the Five Phases, and the resonance between Heaven and humanity; it proposes the doctrine of inherited burden (chengfu) to explain how the consequences of good and evil are transmitted across generations; it advocates that in an age of Great Peace, ruler, ministers, and people should be mutually connected in threefold harmony, that the destitute should be relieved and the urgent aided, and that goods should circulate freely; it opposes the killing of infant girls and the valuing of persons over things; and it discusses longevity techniques such as guarding the One, visualization, ingestion of substances, and talismans and incantations. Its thought lies between the prognostication texts and apocrypha of the Han, Huang–Lao learning, and later Daoism, and it is a primary source for studying the origins of Daoism and Han-dynasty society. Wang Ming's Taiping Jing Hejiao (Collated Edition of the Taiping Jing) is the standard critical edition.

Key Ideas

• Primordial qi and Great Peace: the way to bring about Great Peace
• The doctrine of inherited burden: the faults of ancestors pass down to their descendants
• Threefold harmony and mutual connection among ruler, ministers, and people
• Guarding the One, visualization, and ingesting qi in pursuit of longevity
• The resonance between Heaven and humanity, and calamities as reproachful omens
• An ethics that determines lifespan by good and evil conduct

Structure

Originally divided into ten sections under the ten Heavenly Stems (jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui), each of seventeen fascicles; the received text is fragmentary, and the Taiping Jing Chao and the Taiping Jing Shengjun Miyi preserve excerpted content.

Editions

• The Zhengtong Daozang edition
• Wang Ming, Taiping Jing Hejiao [Collated Edition of the Taiping Jing] (Zhonghua Book Company, 1960)
• Yu Liming, Taiping Jing Zhengdu [A Correct Reading of the Taiping Jing]
• Yang Jilin, Taiping Jing Jinzhu Jinyi [The Taiping Jing, Annotated and Translated into Modern Chinese]

Translations

• Barbara Hendrischke, The Scripture on Great Peace (2006), a partial English translation

Full Text & Online Resources

• CTEXT: Taiping Jing Hejiao
• Wikipedia: Taiping Jing

Related scriptures

Related figures