| Summary: | 碩士 === 玄奘大學 === 宗教學系碩士在職專班 === 96 === With the Taoism, born and thrived in China, embodying a wealth of the very essence of the grassroots traditional culture, The “Taipingjing”, as an earlier influential Taoist text, has been a manifestation of this underlying essence. Going back nearly two thousand years ago, the spread of the “Taipingjing” has been interconnected to the Taiping Taoist group, yet the significance it symbolizes goes beyond reflecting the state of an era, but also marking a monumental turning point in the formation of systematic religion in China.
As the “Taipingjing” draws and integrates the various early teachings in China, its teachings encompass a wide range of concepts, including ethics, morality, Ying/Yang mishaps, state governance, folklore practices, magic powers, grassroots deity and spiritual faith, and China’s earlier unique supernatural spirituality thinking; the “Taipingjing” systematically transformed all these concept into building a greater religious system to exert an significant influence to the later Taoist theories. With the spread of the earlier “Taipingjing” being interconnected to the Tai-Ping Tao, it has emerged as a critical subject in terms of the development background, correlation and origin of the two.
The thesis, in discerning the correlation between the “Taipingjing” and Tai-Ping Tao, first aims to discern and establish the timeline development of the two elements broaching from the historic angle, and to observe from the angle of the social background then to discover that the relevancy of the Tai-Ping Tao and the “Taipingjing” had been established through its grassroots preaching period over more than a decade’s span following Zhang Jiao’s securing the “Taipingjing” and before the yellow scarf uprising. Yet with the blank window in this period of the history presenting a critical key, it not only fostered the early Taoism to transform into a systematic religious prototype, but also steered it to gradually detach from the conventional magic healing groups or magic healers.
The author attempts to recap how the early Taoism was spread through the “Taipingjing” by hitching onto the Tai-Ping Tao, and to extrapolate the probable causes behind the development by sorting and summarizing the findings in a move to retell the initial state before the early Taoism took shape, and in anticipation to avail the public with a clear concept towards the earlier religious group of the Tai-Ping Tao.
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