The pantheon · The Celestial Bureaucracy
The Three Pure Ones
三清 · Sanqing (Wade-Giles: San-ch'ing)
Daoist
The three emanations of the Dao itself
The three highest deities of Daoism — Yuanshi Tianzun, Lingbao Tianzun and Daode Tianzun — understood not as three separate rulers but as emanations of the Dao at the origin of the cosmos.
- Portfolio
- The Dao made manifest · Cosmic origin · Revelation of scripture
- Observance
- Honoured in the Sanqing Hall (三清殿) at the heart of most Daoist temples; each of the three carries his own scripture-day in the Daoist ritual calendar.
How to recognise them
Three seated figures of nearly identical bearing, distinguished by what each holds: Yuanshi Tianzun with a pearl or an empty hand, Lingbao Tianzun with a ruyi sceptre, and Daode Tianzun — the deified Laozi — with a fan. They sit together at the centre of the temple's main hall, ranked above every other altar.
The Three Pure Ones, Sanqing (San-ch'ing, 三清), stand above the Jade Emperor and above the whole celestial administration. They are Yuanshi Tianzun, the Heavenly Worthy of Primordial Beginning; Lingbao Tianzun, of Numinous Treasure; and Daode Tianzun, of the Way and its Power, identified with the deified Laozi (Lao-tzu, 老子).
They are best understood not as three separate kings but as three aspects in which the Dao — formless and prior to everything — becomes accessible. Daoist cosmology describes them arising in sequence at the beginning of time, each presiding over an age and a heaven, each the source of a distinct body of revealed scripture that the tradition transmits.
Their altar sits at the centre of the main hall in most Daoist temples, the three seated in a row above every other image. Where the Jade Emperor governs, the Three Pure Ones simply are: they stand for origin and principle rather than administration, which is exactly why the tradition places them higher than the emperor who runs the court.
Nearby
Written from
- The Encyclopedia of Taoism — Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.), Routledge, 2008
- The Daoist Tradition: An Introduction — Louis Komjathy, Bloomsbury, 2013
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