early buddhism in china: daoist reactions 235
The text consists of two parts of unequal length and compiled
at different times: an introductory narrative, relating Han Emperor
Ming’s famous dream of a golden person with a nimbus who
ew to his palace and was identi ed as the Buddha. It also says that
the enlightened emperor sent messengers to the west who eventually
brought our text to China whereupon stpas and monasteries were
erected and Buddhism vastly expanded. The second part of the text
“is a short collection of aphorisms and pithy moralistic parables”^154
and consists of forty-two sections containing the Buddha’s instructions
on precepts, proper conduct and ethical behaviour to be observed by
the monks and is mostly Hnaynist in nature.
Most scholars agree that the introductory narrative must have been
written after the Han dynasty but before ca. 300 AD, most probably
around 250.^155 The main part, the forty-two sections, however, must be
older. There exists in fact an unmarked early quotation in the famous
memorial submitted by the scholar Xiang Kai in the year 166
AD which provides us with a terminus ante quem.^156
In the Nanjing area, between the years 364 and 370, a very gifted
young man, called Yang Xi (330–?), became the religious medium
serving members of the Xu family, a clan of high of cials. In a
series of midnight visions, some dozen Immortals (zhenren ) from
the Heaven of Supreme Purity (shangqing ) appeared to him, in
order to communicate both their canonical writings and personal
instructions,^157 many of them directed at individual Xu family members.
The discontinuous portions of the revealed materials, namely the oral
instructions and fragmentary poetic effusions dictated to Yang by his
celestial visitors,^158 were edited by Tao Hongjing (456–536) in
AD 499 as Zhen gao (Declarations of the Perfected). It is in this
Zhen gao that we now nd the Daoist version of the Forty-two sections of
Buddhist stras.
Yang Xi apparently had separated both parts of the text. Accordingly,
the narrative part is now to be found in juan 9 and the “forty-two sec-
tions” are included in juan 6 of the Zhen gao. The rst or narrative part
was not modi ed by Yang, this means that it is immediately recognizable
(^154) Sharf, loc. cit.
(^155) Zürcher 1959, p. 22.
(^156) Zürcher 1959, pp. 36–38.
(^157) Strickmann 1977, p. 3.
(^158) Strickmann 1977, p. 4.