Taiping Jing (Scripture of Great Peace)
The Taiping Jing 太平经: the Eastern Han scripture that turned guarding-the-One from a saying into a systematic meditation with a protocol — the site's primary source for the shouyi tradition.
What the book is
The Taiping Jing — the “Scripture of Great Peace,” fully the Taiping Qingling Shu — is the earliest large-scale scripture of the organized Daoist tradition: a Han-dynasty text whose received remnant (57 juan of an original 170) preserves a world of teaching in the form of dialogues between a “celestial master” (天师) and his “true person” (真人) disciples. Tradition says it was revealed to the healer Yu Ji and presented at the Eastern Han court by Gong Chong around the mid-second century CE; the Hou Han shu describes it as “centered on serving heaven and earth and following the five phases” — ethics, cosmology, healing, and meditation in one curriculum. The same textual tradition fed the Taiping movement that ended the dynasty.
Why it matters for sitting practice
This book is where guarding the One becomes a method. Before it, shouyi is a saying — the Daodejing’s “carrying the soul, embracing the One” (ch. 10). In the Taiping Jing it becomes a protocol, and this site’s shouyi practice page is built on exactly that transition:
- A chamber practice. The text’s “guarding the One and contemplating the spirits” (守一思神) method: hang images of the five viscera in the room, sit in quiet contemplation with fasting and incense, and let the qi of the four seasons and five phases enter the body to become the “five viscera spirits” — with whom the meditator may converse. The method is visual, ritualized, and embodied.
- The inner-vision strand. Alongside it, the book transmits the “inner viewing” (内视) method — closing the eyes and contemplating within, adjusting the body’s yin and yang — which the book itself traces back to the Zhuangzi.
- A graded curriculum. The book ranks practice against conduct: guarding the One works with good deeds, proper government, and diet — meditation as one organ of a whole way of life, not a standalone technique. That framing is the book’s own, and this site keeps it.
The text’s condition, stated plainly
The received text is a fragment: the Ming Daoist Canon carries 57 juan of the original 170 (with the 10-juan Tang-era Taiping Jing Chao abridgment alongside, and the first ten juan of the Canon text supplied from that abridgment). The standard scholarly collation is Wang Ming’s Taiping Jing Hejiao (1960). Quotations on this site are used with that condition in mind: the book is a partial witness, its received wording sometimes rougher than later scriptures’ — and its witness to the practice tradition (that shouyi was a real, taught, chamber meditation by the second century) is nonetheless solid.
Uncertainty preserved: the revelation story (Yu Ji, the immortals) is tradition; the dating and social context are scholarly reconstruction; what is secure is the text’s age, its content, and its role as the earliest systematic shouyi source.
The earliest shouyi teaching is dated at Taiping Jing: Shouyi and the Exit Conditions (Eastern Han).
Sources
- Taiping Jing, received text: 57 juan (126 pian) in the Ming Daoist Canon (the Canon also carries the 10-juan Taiping Jing Chao abridgment; original was 170 juan / 361 pian)
- Hou Han shu, biography of Xiang Kai, quoting the book's self-description ('centered on serving heaven and earth and following the five phases')
- Wikipedia (scholarly synthesis); Wang Ming, Taiping Jing Hejiao (1960), the standard collation