Profound Wonder of Primal Beginning Original Mystery's Boundless Salvation Highest Scripture (靈寶元始無量度人上品妙經): Scrolls 1 - 15

Yuanshi Tianzun -元始天尊- "Celestial Venerable of the Primordial Beginning", the highest personality in the Ling Bao Daoism, is the legendary source of the 5th century Ling Bao scripture "Profound Wonder of Primal Beginning Original Mystery's Boundless Salvation Highest Scripture", book 5 of the Daoist canon, the first Ling Bao scripture in the canon. The "Ling" in " Ling Bao "is "靈", and it is something that not everyone sees, and the purpose of these scriptures is to open people's eyes to it. It is the numinous, the energy all around us, the thread from the mysterious origin that rings in a steady note outside the consensual reality consciousness of our worldly-minded culture. It is the world that the pine trees and the stars stare at, transcendent, beyond space and time, and yet everywhere. Du "度" is another concept throughout the scripture, sometimes translated as salvation, and this scripture is sometimes called the "Book of Boundless Salvation". It is the ferry of the numinous that carries all of us, disciples who see it walking with open hands, permeated on all sides like a young plant, released from human suffering, escaped from the tyranny of the netherworld of the human mind, holding a branch that can be grabbed to lift up into the perspective of immortality, to escape into idleness, invited by the numinous energy to become "perfected into truth" ("眞"), "Crossbow Firing in the Whirlwind through the thick and Deep Vault". "Leaning on the pillar of simplicity in the nothingness web, the lamp of leisurely clarity does not separate from the numinous energy of the Original Mystery".The full scripture is made up of 61 scrolls. Most of the material in each of the scrolls is repeated, to be chanted by disciples, but there are also several unique sections in each of the scroll referred to as the "32 Heavens" sections, poems describing the wonder of the Ling Bao Daoist vision, full of the boundless glory of the universe. Another unique component that changes in each scroll is the "first, second, and third parts" which work together like three-part sermons, and finally each scroll has a second set of 32 heavens, the "jade writings", that seems to be written by a different author because it uses a different, much more obscure vocabulary, but still follows the overall message with its own very esoteric way of making the same points about the wonder of the universe, and the direction into the perspective of immortality. The talismans that are at the end of some of the scrolls are also unique to each. Some of the scrolls also have additional sets of "32 Heavens", but the minimum is the two sets, the initial one and the "Jade Writings". Rather than translating the repeated chant from every scroll, I've decided to translate just the parts that are unique to each scroll. This is everything that is unique in the first 15 of the 61 scrolls. In a separate document, I've translated scroll 53 in full.The Ling Bao school of Daoism is about being "awakened to the illumination of the royal dragon's school", the "royal dragon" being the constellations of the sky, "Temple School of Bright White Luminosity" , "school of purpose for the ten thousand bright scenes", the constellations a gown that surrounds the Big Dipper and the North Star at the center, and so the "Big Dipper is a Tight Seal on the School Book", "Ancestral School Opening Out from the Farthest Beginning", "Original Mystery school of purpose", "school of life extending into forever", "school of talismans sent across the Void", "school of the ten thousand roads", "system of regulation and restraint a spring from the spear tip of the ancestral school", "school of the nine voids", the sky divided up into nine segments, the 'eight directions' and the center, school of "疏 shū" - of beautiful sparseness, ("Sparseness is beauty, denseness is stateless"), School of "殊冥梵康 - the Divine Prayer of Peaceful Repose in the Separation of Infinity Darkness Temple". Read more