The Yellow Stone Lord's Primordial Treatise 黄石公素书

Annotated by Zhang Shangying of the Northern Song Dynasty.

It consists of one volume and is included in the Taiqing (Supreme Purity) section of the Daozang (Daoist Canon).

At the beginning of the volume, there is a preface written by Zhang Shangying, claiming that the six chapters of Huangshigong Susshu were imparted to Zhang Liang by Huang Shigong in the Western Han Dynasty, and the book was obtained by someone who robbed and excavated Zhang Liang’s tomb at the end of the Western Jin Dynasty. The Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao (Annotated Bibliography of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) concluded that Susshu was actually an apocryphal work compiled by Zhang Shangying himself, with both the text and annotations written by the same person. The book extensively expounds the doctrine of the great Dao being empty and formless, advocates abiding by morality, justice and propriety, and discusses the ways of governing the state and nurturing life, whose core purport is rooted in the thoughts of the Huang-Lao School. Its ideological system is an important branch of early Taoism, and Zhang Shangying extolled this book as surpassing the works of Confucius and Laozi.

The Yellow Stone Lord's Primordial Treatise

Hu Yinglin, in his Sibu Zhengwei (Verification of Authenticity of the Four Categories of Books), derogated the content of this book as "nothing but extremely shallow and simplistic passages from immortal scriptures and Buddhist classics".