The Great Meaning of the Profound Gate 洞玄灵宝玄门大义
Paul PengThe Great Meaning of the Profound Gate
The author is unknown.
It was probably compiled around the transition between the Sui and The Tang Dynasty. According to the record in Daozang Quejing Mulu (Catalogue of Lost Daoist Canon Scriptures), the original text consisted of twenty volumes.
The existing version in The Daozang only preserves one volume, included in the Taiping Section. The surviving content interprets the meanings and names of the twelve categories of Taoist scriptures, divided into twenty sections. The first six sections generally explain the core meanings of the twelve categories; Sections 7 to 18 elaborate on each category individually; the last two sections restate that the true scriptures of the Taoist Three Vehicles (Three Caverns) each consist of twelve categories.
The Great Meaning of the Profound Gate
Following a stylistic structure similar to Tongmen Lun (Treatise on the Universal Gate) by Song Wenming of the Southern Dynasties, the entire work quotes extensively from scriptures and classics, analyzing and interpreting the content in a systematic, sentence-by-sentence manner. Its theories exerted considerable influence on later generations—works such as Sandong Zhunang (Pearl Satchel of the Three Caverns) and Yunji Qiqian (Seven Slips of the Cloud Satchel) include lengthy excerpts from this book.
Meng Anpai, a Taoist priest of the Tang Dynasty, also extracted the core essence of this work to compile Daojiao Yishu (Pivot of the Meanings of Taoism) in ten volumes.
