Title

“Flying Curtained Carriages” and Perfected-Immortals: Research on the New Celestial Vehicles Found in the Poetry of the Visiting Perfected-Transcendent

Author

Zhang Mengru

Genre

Article

Pages

659-584

DOI

10.6503/THJCS.202312_53(4).0002

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

The School of Highest Clarity, Declarations of the Perfected, the poetry of the Visiting Perfected-Transcendent, curtained carriages, the rites

Abstract

 In the poems written by an individual identified as the Visiting Perfected-Transcendent in the Declarations of the Perfected (Zhengao 真誥), there is a new type of celestial journey vehicle, the curtained carriage, which is not mentioned in earlier literary texts. The reasons for the appearance of the curtained carriage are twofold. First, curtained carriages were originally the vehicles used exclusively by noble women to travel, and most of the main characters in the Mao Shan 茅山 Revelations were goddesses. So, the individuals who created the scriptures referenced the vehicles used by Shangqing 上清 (Highest Clarity) Perfected-Immortals. Second, the authors of the scriptures inherited the Wu 吳 and Yue 越 religious traditions of the Six Dynasties and the folklore of the time, which held that when a goddess came to descend, the vehicle used was a curtained carriage. On this basis, the Shangqing school developed a vehicle for use in celestial journeys, and at the same time, this vehicle, known as the “green curtained carriage,” also came to be employed by mortals to ascend to heaven. The prototype of the “green curtained carriage” was the “azure curtained carriage” from the Eastern Jin dynasty, which was the vehicle used by both the empress dowager and the empress to travel to the southern suburbs to worship the sky on the winter solstice. Since then, the “curtained carriage” entered secular texts as a new vehicle for celestial journeys, and the “green curtained carriage” became the exclusive vehicle used in Taoist scriptures.