Taishang Shuo Fengdu Bagu Yule Miaojing — Spoken by the Celestial Worthy Who Relieves Suffering and Restores Joy

This is a short scripture of the Daoist Canon; its date of composition is not established here. It belongs to the Lingbao tradition of salvation liturgy addressed to the great hells of Fengdu — the underworld capital of Chinese religious geography, seat of the bureaucracy that judges and punishes the dead. Its speaker, the Celestial Worthy Who Relieves Suffering and Restores Joy, is placed in the Palace of the Eastern Pole above Fengdu: the same eastern heaven the Daoist Canon elsewhere assigns to Taiyi Jiuku Tianzun, the Great Unity who rescues from suffering, whose own signature act is likewise the transformation of hell's mountain of knives and forest of swords into paradise. Whether the two names belong to one figure or two, this translation leaves open; it renders only what the text before us says.

The scripture is a single unbroken passage of parallel, rhythmic prose rather than formal verse: a vision of the torments of Fengdu's thirty-eight thousand hells, followed by the proclamation of a saving scripture and a cascading vow that every instrument of torment be turned to paradise. Its vocabulary is heavily Buddhist in coloring — kalpas, the wheel of rebirth, the ten directions, the Six Paths — worn as openly here as elsewhere in the Daoist salvation literature that draws on Buddhist eschatology and cosmology.

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

At that time, the Celestial Worthy Who Relieves Suffering and Restores Joy, dwelling in the Palace of the Eastern Pole in the upper realm of Fengdu, sent forth a five-colored halo of light that shone upon the worlds of the ten directions. Within Fengdu's thirty-eight thousand hells and twenty-seven thousand dark dungeons he beheld living beings suffering beyond measure — crossing back and forth upon the Mountain of Knives, turning ten thousand times and wheeling a thousand times, fainting away in anguished weeping; cast one and all into furnaces of coals and cauldrons of boiling water, turning and turning through the wheel of rebirth without ceasing day or night, ten thousand births and ten thousand deaths, without any respite.

Therefore the Celestial Worthy, in compassion and mercy, pitying all living beings, set forth for you the Wondrous Scripture of Fengdu's Universal Salvation, universally ferrying across the suffering, destitute souls undergoing punishment, that they might gain life in Zhuling, ascend to the realm of the immortals, and be transfigured by immortality into whole persons.

May the Mountain of Knives become a jeweled throne, and the Forest of Swords a soaring grove; may the Six Paths and the Three Realms of Woe be consumed in fire and utterly disperse; may boundless great sins of every kind all be turned to dust; may they, across kalpas and worlds as numberless as the sands of the river, receive the sovereign's grace and be granted pardon; may they turn their minds back to the true Way, and rise, faint and far, into the Purple Tenuity.

Colophon

This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Lingbao Salvation Scriptures shelf of the Good Works Library. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below. The source is a single unbroken passage of rhythmic, parallel prose, without stanza breaks, lemma-commentary structure, or interlinear notes; it has been set here as three English paragraphs — the vision of Fengdu's hells, the proclamation of the saving scripture, and the closing vow for hell's transformation into paradise — following the two rhetorical units the source itself marks with sentence-final periods.

Before the claim below was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed. Both local bibliographies supplied for the library — Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud Press survey of Daoist Texts in Western Languages — were searched for the scripture's Chinese title, its component words (拔苦, 愈樂), and any entry for Fengdu (酆都) generally; neither bibliography contains a single match, meaning this text is not recorded in either at all. Two web searches were then run — the Chinese title with "English translation," and the romanized title with "translation" — and turned up only the bare Chinese source text, hosted on an unrelated Daoist scripture-library site, and no English rendering of it. To our knowledge, this is the first complete published English translation of the Fengdu Bagu Yule Miaojing. We state this as the limit of our search, not as a certainty.

A few notes on the Chinese. Zhuling (朱陵), the place where the saved dead are said to "gain life," is left here as a proper name; the scripture assumes its reader already knows it as a paradise-realm, and this translation does the same. The compound 騫林, rendered "a soaring grove," could not be checked against a specialized glossary; 騫 carries a sense of soaring or rising, and the rendering follows that sense alone. The scripture's own body names itself "the Wondrous Scripture of Fengdu's Universal Salvation" (酆都普濟妙經) — a title distinct from the one heading the text — and both are given here exactly as the source has them, without harmonizing one to the other.

Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.

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Source Text: 太上說酆都拔苦愈樂妙經

Classical Chinese text of the Daoist Canon, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.

爾時，拔苦愈樂天尊，在酆都上境東極宮中，放五色圓光，照十方世界，酆都三萬八千獄、二萬七千幽牢之中，見無量受苦眾生，往來刀山之上，萬轉千迴，悶絕哀哭，俱入鑪炭鑊湯之中，展轉輪迴，不捨晝夜，萬生萬死，無有休息。是故天尊慈惠，哀愍衆生，為汝演說酆都普濟妙經。普度受罪窮魂，獲生朱陵，上登仙境，仙化成人，願刀山成寶座，劍樹化騫林，六道與三塗，火化皆消散，無邊諸大罪，普悉化為塵，歷劫河沙界，皇恩得赦除，回心歸正道，縹渺上紫微。

Source Colophon

The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon edition of this text (article 太上說酆都拔苦愈樂妙經, revision of 10 September 2018), 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 text 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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