Golden Cabinet Divination Canon 黄帝金柜玉衡经

Author unknown. Fa Lin, a Buddhist monk in the early Tang Dynasty, recorded the "Yellow Emperor's Golden Coffer" in his Treatise on Discrimination and Correction, which is suspected to refer to this book. It is a single volume included in the Divination category of the The Dongzhen Section within The Daozang.

In terms of content and phrasing, this book bears great resemblance to The Yellow Emperor's Dragon Head Classic, and it is also a Taoist divination text dating from the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties period. The classic is divided into two chapters: Golden Coffer and Jade Sighting, each containing ten sections of scriptural text. Its content focuses on divination methods for judging the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of specific days and hours, generally predicting the good and bad fortune of human affairs based on the mutual generation and restriction of Yin and Yang in the time and date.

Golden Cabinet Divination Canon

For example, the first scripture in Golden Coffer states: "When Yin and Yang in the day and heavenly stem restrain each other and act as the dominant factor, it is said to mean 'a person is not a person'." Another example is the fourth scripture in Jade Sighting, which proclaims: "On the four Li days (i.e., the days of the eight solar terms in the four seasons), seeing the moon when looking up is an inauspicious omen." The other sections of the scriptural text are all similar in nature to these examples.