Taishang Daojun Shuo Jieyuan Bazui Miaojing — Spoken by the Most High Lord of the Dao

This is a short scripture of the Lingbao (靈寶, "Numinous Treasure") salvation tradition, preserved in the Daoist Canon as transcribed by Chinese Wikisource. Its precise date and Daozang catalogue number have not been confirmed by this translator; it belongs to a long-lived family of "grievance-release" (解冤拔罪) scriptures, spoken by one of the great Celestial Worthies, that circulated widely in medieval and late-imperial Daoist funerary practice.

Its speaker is the Most High Lord of the Dao (太上道君) — a figure distinct from the Most High Lord Lao (太上老君, the deified Laozi), and in the developed Three Purities cosmology commonly identified with the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure. Surveying the hells from Jade Capital Mountain, he is moved to compassion by the torment of hungry ghosts and destitute souls; at the plea of the Perfected Guangxin, he expounds a scripture whose sincere recitation, through the six watches of day and night, dissolves enmities carried over from past lives and delivers both petitioner and departed from suffering.

The scripture is narrative prose framing a single eight-line hymn of praise near its close, spoken by Guangxin; the hymn's line breaks are kept in the translation below. One of its phrases is read here as naming Luofeng, the underworld capital of Daoist cosmology — a reading defended in the colophon.

Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese of the Daoist Canon, printed in full below the translation. A live web search for a prior English translation could not be completed at the time of preparation; to our knowledge, no published English translation of this scripture is recorded in the standard bibliographies of Daoist texts in translation.

Translation

At that time the Most High Lord of the Dao, together with the assembled sages, sat beneath the Eightfold Qian Grove, within the Seven-Treasure Terrace, ranked in solemn dignity, setting forth the essentials of the Way, at peace in spirit and sitting in silence. On Jade Capital Mountain he sent out a radiance of seven treasures, illuminating the Hall of Blessing and the hells. He saw, within the Hall of Blessing, good men and women, joyful and free of striving, carefree and at ease. And he saw, within the many hells, hungry ghosts and destitute souls, day upon night, undergoing every kind of torment — all of them stripped of human form, their five limbs decayed and rotten, hungry and feeding on raging fire, thirsty and drinking molten copper, their feet treading mountains of blades, their bodies beaten with iron rods, blood flowing over their whole frame, their anguished cries piercing heaven.

At that time, among the assembly there was a Perfected One named Guangxin. He rose from his seat, bowed his head, came forward, and addressed the Lord of the Dao: I do not know — these destitute souls, in life what fault did they commit, that they undergo such suffering?

The Lord of the Dao said: Those who undergo these punishments, while in the world did not revere the Three Luminaries; they deceived and defied the order of the spirits; they committed the Ten Evils and the Five Rebellions; they were disloyal and unkind, uncaring and unfilial; they injured the lives of creatures and killed living beings. When their blessings were spent and their years at an end, they were bound to undergo this suffering.

At this the Perfected Guangxin, his heart moved to pity, wished to save and deliver them, and hoped that, by the Lord's wondrous power and awesome light, he might be granted leave to open a way of deliverance for them. Relying humbly on the Lord of the Dao's grace, who bestowed golden words and broadly set forth the essentials of the Law, for the sake of all living beings the Lord expounded this scripture, named Resolving Grievances and Extracting from Sin, that it might be spread through the world for the benefit of the living and the dead:

If there is any good man or good woman who, with single-minded devotion, enters stillness and keeps the fast, burns incense and practices the Way, and recites this scripture through the six watches of day and night, I will accord with their wish and protect them: their enmities from past lives shall, through this merit, be dissolved and transcended, and their shadowed, suffering souls shall each attain release and ascend.

The Perfected Guangxin, filled with joy, bowed low again and again, and, recounting in full this surpassing cause, composed a hymn, saying:

How great is the Lord of the Dao —
ever-universal, his measureless merit:
a boat and oar upon the sea of birth and death,
ferrying across, delivering beyond Luofeng.
The reckoning for sin no longer met,
blessed reward communing with the hidden world.
His working of spirit — who could fathom it?
In praising him — how could praise be exhausted?

At that time the Perfected Guangxin, together with the assembled sages, having heard the teaching to its close, each bowed their heads in submission and took refuge, believing, receiving, and upholding it with reverence.

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 scripture's narrative frame — the dialogue between the Most High Lord of the Dao and the Perfected Guangxin — is rendered as prose, following the source's own paragraph turns; the single eight-line pentasyllabic hymn (頌) near the close is set out with its own line breaks, as verse.

Before the claim above was written, a translation-status check was performed: the Chinese title, its pinyin, and reasonable variant forms were checked against Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation bibliography and the 2023 Purple Cloud update of Daoist texts in Western languages; neither records this scripture or any near variant of its title. A live web search for a prior English translation could not be completed at the time of preparation — the available search budget was exhausted before either planned query could return a result. Given the incomplete check, no firstness claim is made here: from the sources actually consulted, we know of no published English translation of the Jieyuan Bazui Miaojing, but a genuine web search was not possible, and this is stated as the limit of our knowledge, not as a certainty.

A few notes on the Chinese. The speaker, 太上道君 ("the Most High Lord of the Dao"), is a distinct figure from 太上老君 ("the Most High Lord Lao," the deified Laozi) translated elsewhere in this library; in the developed Three Purities scheme the Lord of the Dao is commonly identified with the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure. 真人 is rendered "the Perfected," following the house glossary. In the closing hymn, 羅豊 is translated as Luofeng (羅酆), the underworld capital of Daoist cosmology: under its ordinary reading as a variant of 禮 ("ritual vessel"), 豊 does not rhyme with the hymn's other three rhyme-words (功, 通, 窮, all -ong finals), but 酆 does — an internal signal, not a certainty, that a phonetic substitution is at work. Two further phrases resist full confidence: 八騫林 ("the Eightfold Qian Grove"), a place-name whose precise identity could not be confirmed, and 幽魂苦爽, where 爽 may stand for 魄 (the "po"-soul, pairing naturally with 魂, the "hun"-soul, in the common compound 魂魄). Both are translated as sense demands and flagged here rather than silently resolved.

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

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Source Text: 太上道君説解冤拔罪妙經

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

太上道君説解冤拔罪妙經

爾時，太上道君，與諸聖眾，在八騫林下，七寶台中，羅列威儀，敷陳道要，怡神默坐，於玉京山，放七寶光明，照福堂地獄，見福堂之内，男女善人，快樂無為，逍遙自在，復見諸地獄之中，餓鬼窮魂，以日繼夜，受種種苦惱。 悉無人形。 五體壞爛，飢餐猛火，渇飲熔銅，足履刀山，身負鐵杖，遍體流血，悲號徹天，是時，會中有一真人，名曰廣信，從座而起，稽首前進，上白道君曰: 不審此輩窮魂，生有何咎，而受茲苦。

道君曰: 受諸罪者，在世之時，不敬三光，欺負神理，十惡五逆，不忠不仁，不慈不孝，毀傷物命，殺害眾生，福盡壽終，當受斯苦，是時，廣信真人，心生哀憫，欲其濟拔，幸望妙力威光，許令開度，伏蒙道君，垂賜金言，廣設法要，為諸眾生，演説是經，名曰解冤拔罪，流佈於世，利益存亡，若有善男子、善女人，一心専志，入靜持齋，焚香行道，六時轉念是經，吾當隨願，保佑其人，使宿世冤仇，乘福超度，幽魂苦爽，各獲超升，真人廣信，歡喜再拜，覙縷勝因，而作頌曰： 偉哉大道君，常普無量功，舟楫生死海，濟度超羅豊，罪對不復遇，福報與冥通，用神安可測，贊之焉能窮，是時廣信真人，與諸聖眾，聞法將畢，各各稽首皈依，信受奉行。

Source Colophon

The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon edition of this text (article 太上道君説解冤拔罪妙經, revision of 30 March 2025), 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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