Les Directives secrètes du Saint Seigneur du Livre de la Grande paix et la préservation de l'unité

This essay provides the first complete study and translation of the Taiping jing shengjun mizhi (HY 1094), a text from the Ming dynasty Taoist Canon. It begins with a discussion of the modern editions and translations of the text, then reexamines the issues of paternity and datation, traces its ideology and textual sources, and finally clarifies its literary structure. e analysis unearths an early textual layer-excerpts of a 2nd-or 3rd-century Taiping jing (Scripture of Great Peace)-and establishes parallels between the received text and several Taoist classics with commentaries through the period of division and up to the Tang dynasty. e text is thus reinstated in the history of Chinese religions throughout the first millennium of our era.