The Heaven of Great Clarity

The history of this heaven—of what has been written about it in different times and in different contexts—reveals many details on the nature of the Taiqing tradition. This chapter examines some aspects of this history the use of the word taiqing to denote an inner spiritual state, the features of the heaven of Great Clarity mentioned in several Taiqing and Daoist sources, and the destiny that this heaven faced when it lost its status as the highest celestial realm. 

The deities of the heaven of Great Clarity generated and handed down the alchemical scriptures to each other before they were written in a form comprehensible to mankind. The versions of those scriptures transmitted to the world are inferior and partial counterparts of those divine prototypes. According to Ge Hong, the Scripture of Great Clarity that circulated at his time was the last part of a longer text to which human beings have no access ... 

The texts in the Taiqing supplement, therefore, yield knowledge of the heaven of Great Clarity because they are deemed to originate from that celestial domain, and to serve as a support for obtaining access to it. 

CT 1138), 19.8a. The Wushang biyao locates the Great Tenuity between the heavens of Great Clarity (Taiqing) and Elighest Clarity (Shangqing) see above, p. 48. 

---