Page 394 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

DENG YO U GONG 355

of the tradition, Shangqing gusui lingwen guilu J: ~j1f iif lW 'l8l)c * f=I:t (Devil's
Code of the Spinal Numinous Script of the Highest Clarity; CT 461), which
originally was established by *Rao Dongtian. He appears to have lived on
Mount Huagai (Huagai shan ~~ ill ) in central Jiangxi. He seems not to be
identical with the man by the same name who lived I2IO- 79 and in the same
area (see Quan Song ci ~ * ~PJ, 4.2977). For one thing, it seems difficult to make
the line of tran mission through four masters stretch over a period of more
than two hundred years, and furthermore none of the available information
concerning the Deng Yougong of the thirteenth century affords any grounds
for associating him with Taoism, let alone with the priesthood and the ritual
traditions that emerged from Mount Huagai. It may be added that some of
the place names occurring in Deng's prefaces appear to indicate that he lived
during the period of the end of the Northern Song dynasty, rather than in
the thirteenth century. Note also that the totality of the "devil's code" that
he edited, Gusui lingwen guilu, is included also as juan 6 of the other early
compilation of the methods of the Tianxin tradition, * Taishang zhuguo jiumin
zongzhen biyao, contributed to the Taoist Canon of emperor Song Huizong by
Yuan Miaozong 5t:!l'.J>* in llI6. The information found in the preface to the
"devil's code" by Deng Yougong, concerning his procedure in searching for
and collating different versions of the text, together with a comparison of his
version with the one included in the Zongzhen biyao, appears to indicate that
the latter was derived from the text established by Deng Yougong, rather than
the other way around. The inescapable conclusion thus would seem to be that
an important part of Deng's activity occurred before the year llI6.
As for the date of the Shangqing tianxin zhengfa, it is worth noting that a
text with this title is listed in the Tongzhi im;t (Comprehensive Monographs;
completed ll6I), though in this catalogue the book is said to consist of three
juan, as opposed to the seven juan of the compilation by Deng Yougong trans-
mitted in the Taoist Canon (van der Loon 1984, 75). It has been suggested that
the threejuan work mentioned in the Tongzhi was another, earlier compilation
transmitted by Rao Dongtian himself (see Zhong Zhaopeng 1993, 33), but
we have no evidence for the existence of such a work. In his preface to the
current seven-juan version, Deng Yougong mentions having divided his work
into two juan, a fact that would seem to indicate a certain fluidity in the juan
divisions during the early transmission of the work. It also seems possible
that, in fact, Deng Yougong's preface originally belonged to a version earlier
than the current seven- juan edition of the Shangqing tianxin zhengfa, which
certainly contains elements that must have been incorporated later than the
first decades of the twelfth century-for instance, materials adopted from
the *Shenxiao tradition, which did not emerge until around Ill7, and the de-
scription of a set of talismans that is said to be copied verbatim from the text