Daoist Meditations

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

“The Upper Scripture of Purple Texts” narrates the journey of a deity known as the Azure Lad to the “Golden Porte,” a heavenly dwelling in the realms of “Upper Clarity.” He arrives at the Golden Porte after extensive spiritual purification and meets with the “Sage Lord of the Latter Age” (Lord Li Hong) to seek a greater perfection from the Purple Texts and to obtain permission to teach them to others as well. The Sage Lord initially ignores his request, being caught up in the instruction of other “Perfected” heavenly beings. In response to more entreaties by the Azure Lad, the Sage Lord picks up a zither and sings the verses of “the Spirit Isles of the Grand Caverns,” a song that describes the Azure Lad’s ascent to the divine realms, complete with allusions to non-duality and alchemical characterizations of the means by which he attained physical purification and mystical gnosis.

After the song, the Sage Lord invites the Azure Lad to join him in a banquet of “liquors” of light and “fruits” from jeweled trees. He orders the Perfected beings in attendance to open jeweled bookcases of “purple petals” and takes out the Purple Texts. He gives the texts to the Azure Lad and charges him to teach it to those who have been ordained to attain Perfection. The Azure Lad returns to his own palace and proceeds to reveal the wisdom of the Purple Texts.

As the Texts contain “the most vital practices of salvation … extracted from heavenly scripture,” the Azure Lad takes exceptional care in copying and preserving them. As the scripture warns, those who are guilty of misusing the Purple Texts are subject to penalties ranging from personal “calamities” to the loss of the text itself.

The practices are listed in detail, including rituals for burning incense, instructions on which cardinal directions to face, methods of invoking the spirits and “knocking the teeth together,” and images to visualize while reciting an incantation designed to help the practitioner summon the assistance of exalted beings. These beings appear as vividly colored pneuma, vapors, and spirit clouds, and they bring the practitioner to the state of perfection and transcendence that represented the goal of esoteric Daoism.

In the final passage, the scripture describes the manner in which the meditations and accompanying incantations will lead to the purification of different kinds of practitioners. The most pure among the adepts can attain perfection merely by meditating upon an image of the sun. Mountain and forest ascetics are instructed to “swallow the auroras of solar root” and the “essences of Grand Solarity,” which they can do through the correct visualization of the “five- colored flowing auroras” of sunlight. Practitioners who are still stuck in the workaday world are told to practice the meditations according to a strict pattern of ten designated days each month. The scripture promises that if a seeker can practice the meditation of the Purple Texts for eighteen years, then “Upper Clarity will refine [their form] to golden perfection.” Final instructions for preparing and swallowing a talisman complete the ritual by which the Daoist seeker can reach the status of a “Jade sovereign” and become “exalted over all below heaven.”

Read and meditated upon in the spirit of esoteric Daoism, this scripture offers an authentic means of self-transformation and world transcendence. Read strictly as a historical document, this scripture gives us good evidence of the degree to which Daoism, generally considered in the modern West to be a simple philosophy of living in harmony with nature, is also a profound religion of rituals, theologies, spiritual hierarchies, and sacred texts. The Purple Texts, and the entire genre of Upper Clarity scriptures to which it belongs, reveals the multilayered richness and synthetic complexity of post-Han Daoism.