Texts
The most important text from the Northern Wei period of the Northern Celestial Masters is the Laojun Yinsong Jiejing (New Code). This text was revealed to Kou Qianzhi in 415, and is now mostly lost apart from a few fragments. The surviving text contains thirty-six precepts that outline rules which a Daoist had to abide by. The behavioral rules outlined proper public conduct and what to do in case of sickness. There were also guidelines describing how banquets were to be set up, as well ritual instructions concerning funeral rites, immortality practice and petitions.
One of the most important text's from the school's Louguan period is called the Xishengjing (The Scripture of Western Ascension). This text describes Laozi's emigration to India and the transmission of the Daode Jing to Yin Xi. However, the text is not really a narrative, but uses the stories as a framework to describe how an adept should live his life. The text describes how an adept can make use of the Dao that is inherent in the world, outlines meditation techniques, and discusses the results of living a sagely life and what happens after death.
Read more about this topic: The Northern Celestial Masters
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“The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.”
—Paul Deman (1919–1983)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)