Taishang Laojun Shuo Liaoxin Jing — Spoken by the Most High Lord Lao
This is a short anonymous scripture of Tang-dynasty China (618–907), preserved in the Daoist Canon printed in 1445 (the Zhengtong Daozang, where it is catalogued as DZ 643). It belongs to the small family of "Clarity-and-Stillness" texts that gathered around the famous Qingjing jing — brief meditation scriptures in which the deified Laozi, the Most High Lord Lao, teaches the stilling of the mind in language that borrows freely from Buddhist emptiness literature: the mind that abides nowhere, the attainment in which nothing is attained.
The whole scripture is eighty characters of verse — five quatrains in four-character lines — followed by two sayings in Lord Lao's own voice. It turns on the word liao 了, which means at once to understand a thing through to the bottom and to be finished with it; English "realize" carries the first sense, and in its other meaning — to make real — points to what the text promises. The scripture plays this word against xin 心, the heart-mind, which is heart and mind in a single word. English must choose one, and this translation says "mind," asking the reader to keep the heart in it.
Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese of the Daoist Canon, which is printed in full below the translation. To our knowledge, this is the scripture's first complete published English translation.
Translation
Whoever would cultivate the Way
must first observe the mind.
The mind is the spirit's master;
motion and stillness follow the mind.
A moving mind has no stillness;
unmoving, it realizes the real.
The mind is the root of calamity;
the mind is the ancestor of the Way.
Neither moving nor still,
nothing imagined, nothing held —
no mind, no motion;
whatever moves, moves from the mind.
The mind realized is true nature;
the nature realized is true mind.
In the mind, no place of abiding;
in abiding, no place of mind.
Realize: no clinging, no abiding —
free of clinging, one turns true.
In emptiness, no place of emptiness;
in the place of emptiness, the real is realized.
Lord Lao said: Through measureless kalpas I have observed the mind and attained the Way, reaching even to empty nonbeing. What was there to attain? For the sake of all living beings, forcing a name upon it, I call it attaining the Way.
Lord Lao said: I watch living beings fail to realize their minds. In vain they toil through vast kalpas; for nothing they conscript their spirits. With the mind unrealized, they sink and drown, kalpa upon kalpa. Rely upon my sacred teaching: wander free and at ease, embracing the real.
Colophon
This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Chinese shelf of the Good Works Library. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below. No English translation of this scripture was found to exist, so none was consulted; every rendering was derived directly from the source characters. The five verse paragraphs of the original — each four four-character phrases — are kept as five quatrains, and the two closing sayings as prose.
Before the claim below was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed: the standard bibliography of Daoist texts in English translation (Komjathy, Daoist Texts in Translation), the survey of this scripture's own textual family in Komjathy's Scripture on Clarity and Stillness handbook (which records published translations for related texts and records none for this one), the dedicated anthology of Tang Daoist meditation literature (Kohn, Sitting in Oblivion, 2010, which translates eight texts of this genre and does not include or mention this one), and the open Daozang translation projects were each checked, along with general searches under the scripture's Chinese, romanized, and English titles. To our knowledge, this is the first complete published English translation of the Liaoxin jing. We state this as the limit of our knowledge, not as a certainty.
A note on two words. The title's liao 了 is rendered "realize" throughout, holding together its two senses of complete understanding and completion. Kalpa (jie 劫), the Buddhist aeon, is kept as the loanword it already was in the Chinese: this scripture wears its Buddhist borrowings openly, and the translation does not hide them.
Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.
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Source Text: 太上老君說了心經
Classical Chinese text of the Zhengtong Daozang, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.
若夫修道，先觀其心。心為神主，動靜從心。
心動無靜，不動了真。心為禍本，心為道宗。
不動不靜，無想無存。無心無動，有動從心。
了心真性，了性真心。心無所住，住無所心。
了無執住，無執轉真。空無空處，空處了真。
老君曰：吾從無量劫來觀心得道，乃至虛無，有何所得。為諸眾生，強名得道。
老君曰：吾觀眾生不了其心，徒勞浩劫，虛役其神，於心無了，永劫沉淪。依吾聖教，逍遙抱真。
Source Colophon
The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Zhengtong Daozang edition of this scripture (article 太上老君說了心經, revision of 17 December 2016), inspected from a witness copy captured on 8 August 2026. Chinese Wikisource transcriptions are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL; the scripture itself is ancient and in the public domain. The wiki header and license templates have been removed; the text is otherwise complete and unaltered.
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