Three Caverns Collected Biographies of Immortals 三洞群仙录

Compiled by Chen Baoguang, a Taoist priest of the Zhengyi Dao in the early Southern Song Dynasty.

The book was completed in the Jiaxu year of the Shaoxing reign (1154 AD), consisting of twenty volumes and included in the Zhengyi Section of The Daozang. As a collection of biographies of Taoist immortals, it compiles stories of more than a thousand figures who attained immortality from remote antiquity to the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled into a single work.

Three Caverns Collected Biographies of Immortals

Each entry is titled with a four-character parallel phrase first, followed by citations from Taoist scriptures and immortal biographies to narrate the figures' life stories. For example, the first entry is titled "Pangu the Ancestor of All Things, Huangdi the Patriarch of the Dao", and then quotes books such as Records of Wonders, Chronicle of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, The True Scripture and Biographies of Daoist Scholars to recount the stories of Pangu creating the heaven and the earth and Huangdi cultivating the Dao to attain immortality; the rest of the entries follow the same pattern. The entire book cites nearly 200 ancient books, all with clear annotations of their sources, and its stylistic form is similar to Pearls Compiled from the Immortal Garden by Wang Songnian of the The Tang Dynasty.