The Date, Authorship, and Literary Structure of the Great Peace Scripture Digest

Abstract

The text opening the “Great Peace Part” (“Taiping bu” 太平部) in the Ming Taoist Canon, the Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao 太平經鈔), is widely confused with the famous Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing 太平經), which follows it in the Canon. The first full analysis and reassessment of the Great Peace Scripture Digest, this paper reviews the textual morphology of its ancient and modern editions, discusses current hypotheses concerning its date and authorship, and investigates its literary structure and form, pointing to clusters of prosodic patterns. Light is shed on strata of diachronic origin coexisting in the text, which should not be regarded as being the product of an inconstant solitary compiler, but rather as the conflation of shortened renditions of the Great Peace Scripture perhaps dating to the Tang and pre-Song or early Song eras. A full linear analysis of the text, including a concordance, completes the literary study.