Canon of Supreme Mystery - Collected Commentaries 太玄经集注

Compiled and annotated by Sima Guang of the Northern Song Dynasty.

Comprising six volumes, it is included in the Taiqing Section of The Daozang.

There is also a printed edition from the Jiaqing reign period of the Qing Dynasty.

This work is an annotated version of the Taixuan Jing.

The Taixuan Jing was written by Yang Xiong, a renowned scholar of the Western Han Dynasty. Modeled after the Zhouyi, it takes the Three Realms (heaven, earth and humanity) as its foundation, focusing on expounding the philosophy of cosmic genesis, the operation of heaven and earth, and the changes of human affairs, and contains dialectical elements. This book exerted a profound influence on the development of astronomical image-number studies since the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, its language is abstruse and obscure, so numerous scholars throughout the dynasties have written annotations and exegeses for it. Sima Guang’s Collected Annotations on the Taixuan Jing is the most complete surviving annotated version. The book collects annotations from seven scholars: Song Zhong of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Lu Ji of the Wu State, Fan Wang of the Jin Dynasty, Wang Ya of the Tang Dynasty, and Song Weiliang, Wu Bi and Chen Jian of the Northern Song Dynasty. At the beginning of the book, it is prefaced with Sima Guang’s self-written preface and two essays, Reading the Taixuan and Discussing the Taixuan. Most of the annotations from the seven scholars focus on textual exegesis rather than elaborating on philosophical connotations, while Sima Guang was quite capable of exploring the essential meanings. For example, in the essay Discussing the Taixuan, he comments on the similarities and differences between the Zhouyi and the Taixuan Jing, stating that the two works "are generally identical in their underlying philosophy but different in their expression methods". The Zhouyi is based on yin and yang, with hexagrams composed of two types of lines, whereas the Taixuan Jing uses trigrams to symbolize the Three Realms (heaven, earth and humanity). This can be described as an insightful and pertinent view. Rooted in the ideological system of Taoism, the philosophical connotations of the Taixuan Jing are closely linked to the five elements theory in traditional Chinese philosophy.