The Divine Three Thousand Observances FULL NAME IS
Scripture of the Three Thousand Ritual Norms and Contemplation of the Scriptures as Revealed by Divine Beings
The author is unknown, and the scripture was seemingly composed in the Tang Dynasty.
It is not included in The Daozang.
The original text was presumably in four volumes, with four Dunhuang manuscripts surviving to the present day.
Among them, three manuscripts (P2410, P2828, S5308) are copies of the second volume of the original scripture, preserving 369 lines of the text and remaining mostly complete. Manuscript S3140 only retains 20 lines of text, with its original volume number unidentified. This scripture was modeled after the Buddhist classic The Scripture of the Three Thousand Ritual Norms for Great Bhikkhus. It enumerates by category the disciplinary precepts and ritual norms that Taoist practitioners must observe in daily life, as well as in the study and cultivation of the Dao — ranging from the grand etiquettes of an audience with emperors and attendance on teachers and elders, down to the minor details of walking, sitting, lying posture, attire, diet, speech and conduct, all with specific regulations. The total number of disciplinary articles in the original scripture may have amounted to one thousand, yet only several hundred articles of the second volume are preserved in the existing Dunhuang manuscripts, which correspond to the latter half of the first volume of the aforementioned Buddhist scripture, and its ritual system aligns with the disciplinary traditions recorded in The Dongshen Section.
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