Taishang Xuhuang Baosheng Shenzhou Jing — Spoken by the Most High Void Sovereign
This is a short spell-scripture (神呪經, shénzhòu jīng) of the Daoist Canon, spoken throughout in the voice of an exalted figure called "the Most High Void Sovereign" (太上虛皇). Its fourteen quatrains of four-character verse move from a vision of celestial palaces and cosmic transformation to a five-direction invocation — East, South, West, North, and Center — each pairing a directional spirit with a plea for bodily protection and long life.
Its date and authorship are not established here. The scripture survives in the Ming-dynasty printing of the Daoist Canon (the Zhengtong Daozang of 1445); its language of the Three Caverns, the hún and pò souls, and the five-direction guardian spirits belongs to the common stock of medieval Daoist ritual cosmology, but this translation makes no claim about when the text was first composed or by whom, and no Daozang catalogue number is given here with confidence.
The whole is spoken in the first person, apparently the deity's own voice throughout: it opens on the Void Sovereign's own palace and power over life and death, invokes each of the Three Caverns of the Daoist Canon in turn — Mystery, Perfection, Spirit — as three degrees of transformation, and closes with the five-direction spell proper, in which each direction's spirit is asked to preserve one part of the reciter's life. 保生 (bǎoshēng), "preserving life," is the phrase the whole text turns on, repeated once for each direction.
Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese of the Daoist Canon, printed in full below the translation. To our knowledge, this is the scripture's first complete published English translation.
Translation
The Most High Void Sovereign
opens wide the Jade Court;
the Golden Chamber blazes and gleams,
the Kingfisher Terrace lush and green.
I set forth the Three Ways,
destroying ghosts, giving life to spirits;
I am able to be without death,
and able also to be without birth.
Long life and ease;
far from old age, returned to the infant;
the hún and pò souls undergo their refining;
the Five Spirits rest in peace.
Whirlwind turns the chariot wheels;
northward I pay court at Jade Clarity;
I ascend into the Great Nothing,
my brightness joined with the sun's.
Thus I become a Perfected Person;
the Five Emperors unite as one;
what the Three Primes proclaim,
the myriad spirits all heed.
The samadhi of the Cavern of Mystery:
measureless true spirits;
hosts of immortals stand in guard,
their names ranked within Jade Clarity.
The Cavern of Perfection, the Jade Void —
the nothing within nothing,
the way within the way;
the spirit transforms in an instant.
The Cavern of Spirit answers with numinous power;
the ritual forms take effect;
driving off evil, destroying wickedness,
turning the jade pivot of the heavens.
In the East, preserving life:
the Azure Lad, a divine spirit;
Orthodox Unity guards the hún-soul,
surely preserving my flourishing years.
In the South, preserving life:
consolidating the qi, the Vermilion Spirit;
the myriad spirits transgress not,
making me forever at peace.
In the West, preserving life:
attending the pò-soul, the White Spirit;
warding off demonic vapors,
making me prosper and thrive.
In the North, preserving life:
freely circulating the primal essence;
the true talisman of the Five Qi
makes this servant flourish forever.
At the Center, preserving life:
governing my bodily form;
flying free and at ease,
level with Heaven and Earth.
I roam and gaze on the Great Void;
above, I pay court at the Jade Capital;
below, I dispel demons and specters,
bringing blessing and grace to all living beings.
Colophon
This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Talismans, Registers, and Star Lords shelf of the Good Works Library. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below. The source is fourteen lines of verse, each built of four four-character phrases; each line is kept here as one English quatrain. The whole is rendered as a single continuous incantation in the first person, since the source itself marks no internal divisions.
Before the claim below was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed. Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud survey of Daoist texts in Western languages were searched for the Chinese title, its pinyin, and its distinctive words (保生, 虛皇, 神呪); neither lists this scripture or any translation of it. Two web searches were then run — the Chinese title and the pinyin title, each paired with "translation" — and returned only the Chinese source text at the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), no translation into English or any other Western language. A further search for the scripture's classification within the Daoist Canon returned inconsistent, unverifiable results and is not relied on here; no catalogue (DZ) number is claimed. To our knowledge, this is the first complete published English translation of the Taishang Xuhuang Baosheng Shenzhou Jing. We state this as the limit of our knowledge, not as a certainty.
A note on terms. 保生 (bǎoshēng), "preserving life," is the scripture's own refrain and is kept as one phrase throughout. 三昧 (sānmèi), the Buddhist loanword samadhi, and the Three Caverns — 洞玄 "Cavern of Mystery," 洞真 "Cavern of Perfection," 洞神 "Cavern of Spirit" — follow the terms used elsewhere on this shelf. One line, 正一守魂 ("Orthodox Unity guards the hún-soul"), is genuinely ambiguous: 正一 may name the Zhengyi ("Orthodox Unity") lineage acting as a guardian power here, or may simply mean "the correct and unified" as a descriptive epithet; the translation keeps the proper-name reading, but the ambiguity is real and unresolved. Likewise 使臣長榮 near the end briefly shifts from the poem's usual "I" (我) to the self-humbling 臣, "this servant," which is kept literally rather than smoothed into the surrounding "I."
Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.
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Source Text: 太上虛皇保生神呪經
Classical Chinese text of the Daoist Canon, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.
太上虛皇，開散玉庭，金房晃曜，翠臺鬱青。
我設三道，滅鬼生靈，我能無死，亦能無生。
長生自在，迥老返嬰，魂魄受鍊，五神安寧。
迴飇車輪，北謁玉清，升入太無，與日合明。
遂成真人，五帝合并，三元所告，萬神咸聽。
洞玄三昧，無量真靈，羣仙侍衛，名列玉清。
洞真玉虛，無中之無，道中之道，神化須臾。
洞神靈應，法象有為，驅邪滅惡，運轉璇璣。
東方保生，青童神靈，正一守魂，克保昌齡。
南方保生，固氣赤靈，萬神無越，使我長寧。
西方保生，侍魄白靈，辟除妖氣，令我利亨。
北方保生，通利元精，五氣真符，使臣長榮。
中央保生，主我身形，飛行自在，天地齊并。
遊觀太虛，上朝玉京，下袪祆魅，福惠羣生。
Source Colophon
The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon edition of this scripture (article 太上虛皇保生神呪經, revision of 18 July 2009), 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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