The Cheonbugyeong (천부경, 天符經)—the "Scripture of the Heavenly Code"—is an eighty-one-character text in Classical Chinese (Hanja) that sets out a cosmological vision of the universe through number, trinity, and return. Its three stanzas trace the unfolding of the One into Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, the multiplication and interplay of the three realms, and the final return of all things to the stillness of the root.

The text occupies a singular and contested place in Korean religious history. Believers—particularly adherents of Daejonggyo, the modern Korean religion centred on the worship of Dangun as divine ancestor—hold that the Cheonbugyeong preserves teachings from the time of Dangun himself, transmitted orally for millennia before being inscribed in ancient deer-hoof script (Nokdumun) and later transcribed into Chinese characters. In this tradition, the scripture is among the oldest spiritual documents in Korean civilisation.

The earliest verifiable appearance of the text, however, dates to 1917, when a man named Gye Yeon-su (桂延壽) sent a letter to the Dangungyo (later Daejonggyo) organisation claiming he had found the characters inscribed on a stone wall at Myohyangsan Mountain while gathering medicinal herbs in September 1916. The text entered wider circulation through Jeon Byeong-hun's "Mental Philosophy Compendium" (精神哲學通編) around 1920 and the Daejonggyo organisation's "Dantak" (檀鐸) journal in 1921. It was not formally adopted as an official Daejonggyo scripture until 1975.

Mainstream academic historians in South Korea generally regard the Cheonbugyeong as a product of the early twentieth century, composed in the context of the Korean nationalist and new-religion movements that arose during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945). No manuscript, inscription, or textual reference to the Cheonbugyeong predating the twentieth century has been identified. A number of scholars associate its composition with the broader project of Na Cheol (나철, 1863–1916), the founder of Daejonggyo, who sought to establish Dangun as the divine ancestor and origin-point of the Korean nation. Others leave open the possibility that the text preserves or reworks older oral traditions, though this remains unverifiable. The question is not settled to the satisfaction of all parties, and the Cheonbugyeong continues to hold deep spiritual significance for many Koreans regardless of the scholarly debate over its age.

The text has not yet been subjected to philological analysis of the kind routinely applied to ancient Chinese texts, i.e. a systematic study of its vocabulary, grammar, and character usage against dated corpora to establish when and in what intellectual milieu it was likely composed. Several features of the text's language raise questions about its claimed antiquity: the compound 太陽 for "sun" is characteristic of Han dynasty and later cosmological writing rather than archaic Chinese; the term 本心 carries strong associations with Chan Buddhist discourse on original mind; and the overall syntax is notably regular and systematic in a way that distinguishes it from genuinely ancient texts such as the Yijing hexagram judgments or the oldest layers of the Shijing, which tend toward fragmentary ambiguity. The numerological structure, particularly the decimal emanation through ten and the combinatory arithmetic of the middle stanza, has closer parallels in Kabbalistic and Theosophical number symbolism than in any attested pre-modern East Asian cosmological tradition. A full philological study comparing the text's vocabulary and grammatical structures against dated Chinese and Korean sources remains a desideratum in the field.