Page 664 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

622 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM A-L

None in the world can approach his depth;
we can only look up to his eternal life.
Thus our divine emperor offers a sacrifice to Laozi to document his
holy spirituality.
I, this humble servant, in my turn strive to ensure his continued fame
and thus engrave this stone to his greater glory.

The Laozi ming is the first official and best dated early document on the
divinization of Laozi, and an important text for our understanding of Han
religion and of the myth of the god.
Livia KOHN

m Chen Yuan I988, 5-6; Kusuyama Haruki I979, 303-I6; Maspero I98I, 394-95;
Seidel I969, 36-50, 12I-30 (trans.).

* Laozi and Laojun

Laozi Xiang'er zhu

Xiang' er Commentary to the Laozi

The Xiang' er commentary to the Laozi is important as a text of the Laozi (Daode
jing) , as a commentary on the Laozi, and as one of the few surviving docu-
ments from the early years of the Celestial Master movement (*Tianshi dao).
Long thought lost, a partial copy of the first of two chapters (chapters 3-37
of the received edition) of the Laozi text with this commentary appended to
each chapter was found at *Dunhuang (S. 6825). Rao Zongyi (I956) combined
this with quotations in other sources to assemble roughly half the original
work, which he studied and commented on and which has been translated
into English by Stephen R. Bokenkamp (I997, 29-148). Taoist scriptures from
the late Six Dynasties attribute the work to *Zhang Lu, as does the early Tang
commentator Lu Deming ~ {:5 Hfj (556-627). *Du Guangting, writing in the
tenth century, attributed the work to *Zhang Daoling. References to the work
in the mid-third-century "Dadao jia lingjie" )(@ * 4- JtX: (Commands and Ad-
monitions for the Families of the Great Dao; trans. Bokenkamp I997, I48-85)
are somewhat garbled but clearly seem to refer to this text and to associate it
with Zhang Lu. Attempts to date the text to as late as the fifth century on the
basis of a dubious history of ideas seem unfounded.