222 stephan peter bumbacher
no particular god at all, is of no importance for our purpose. What
matters is the fact that this meditation consists of visualising (sixiang
) divine beings.
In a text written by members of an unknown early Daoist af liation—
located in the area of Chengdu in present-day Sichuan^107 —, which was
composed after 185 AD but before the end of the Han^108 and survives
only as a manuscript found at Dunhuang, the Laozi bianhua jing
(Scripture of the Transformations of Laozi), we nd Laozi
addressing his followers, saying: “[if ] in meditation you are loosing
me, [your] spirit will go away” (jingsi fang wo, shen wei zou ,
).^109 Here, too, the adept’s task consists in visualising Laozi in
his own body where he resides both in his essence (semen) and in his
spirit (wu yu jing shen ).^110 In this case, preserving the mental
image of Laozi has the effect that the god will save the adept from
imminent catastrophes.
While not questioning this form of meditation as such, applying it to
visualise the dei ed Laozi (the Most High Lord Lao, Taishang Laojun
), the manifestation of the One or the dao, as it is done in
the above mentioned stelae, was severely criticised by adherents of the
Daoist Heavenly Master tradition. To them is attributed a commentary
to the Daode jing, the so-called Xiang’er commentary^111 which has
come down to us only as an incomplete manuscript (covering chapters
3 through the end of chapter 37), obtained from the Buddhist grottoes
at Dunhuang by Sir Aurel Stein in the early twentieth century and now
housed in the British Library.^112 It must have been written before 255
AD.^113 As Anna Seidel has shown, this commentary at several places
takes issue with Daoists who localise the One (viz., in its manifestation
as Laozi) in any speci c part of the human body:^114
Now, where does the dao reside in the body of a person? How can a person
hold it fast? The One does not reside within the human body. Those who(^107) Seidel 1969, p. 73.
(^108) Seidel 1969, p. 74.
(^109) Li shi, loc cit., Seidel 1969, p. 71.
(^110) Loc. cit.
(^111) A general introduction into what survives of the Xiang’er commentary and its rst
integral translation into any Western language is to be found in Bokenkamp 1997, pp.
29–124. Text edition: Rao 1991.
(^112) Stein manuscript S 6825.
(^113) Bokenkamp 1997, p. 60.
(^114) Rao 1991, p. 12, tr. Bokenkamp 1997, p. 89.