The Ritual of Transmission Attributed to Master Tao
The original text does not specify its author.
It was not included in The Zhengtong Daoist Canon. Two Dunhuang manuscript fragments—S.3750 and P.2259—both incomplete at the beginning and end, preserve a combined total of more than 190 lines of the scripture. The manuscripts had no title originally.
Based on its content, Shinji Obuchi (Ōbuchi Shinji) in his Catalogue of Daoist Texts from Dunhuang identified this manuscript as The Ritual of Transmission, which was written by Tao Hongjing—the renowned Daoist priest of the Liang Dynasty during the Southern Dynasties period.
The text mainly describes the rituals for transmitting core Daoist scriptures and talismans, including The Three Sovereigns Scripture and The True Form Diagrams of the Five Great Mountains.
The phrase “a certain year of the Tianjian era of the Liang Dynasty” appears in the text, indicating that it was composed during the Tianjian reign period of Emperor Wu of Liang (502–519 CE).
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