《太平经》 / Taipingjing

Overview

《太平经》 / Taipingjing enters this wiki through Hanji 581 as the text 甘忠可 uses to present renewed Heaven authorization, dynastic continuity, and social peace as a cure for imperial crisis.

Current Profile

The source treats the Taipingjing as a politically usable sacred text rather than as a fully reconstructed religious corpus. Gan Zhongke uses it to tell 汉成帝 that childlessness signals Liu-family mandate decline and that renewed Heaven authorization can restore the line. 夏贺良 later preserves and reactivates this approach under 汉哀帝, where the text’s promise becomes tied to illness, heirs, disaster relief, reign-title change, imperial-title change, and altered timekeeping.

Key Characteristics

• Serves as the textual vehicle for Gan Zhongke’s renewed-mandate claim.
• Connects cosmic order, dynastic continuity, heir production, and “great peace” into one political promise.
• Fails under Chengdi because Liu Xiang’s skeptical counsel blocks the proposal.
• Reappears under Aidi as part of a much more damaging symbolic reset.

Evidence

• Textual vehicle: Hanji 581 says Gan Zhongke studies and writes around Taipingjing material, then seeks to recommend it to Chengdi.
• Promise bundle: Hanji 581 says the teaching links Heaven, Earth, humanity, social peace, and imperial heirs.
• Aidi reuse: Hanji 581 says Xia Heliang keeps studying Gan’s text and later uses the method in Aidi’s court.

Qualifications

This page is intentionally source-scoped. It does not identify the received Daoist Taipingjing corpus with the episode’s described text in a settled philological sense, nor does it reconstruct authorship, dating, transmission, or doctrinal history beyond Hanji 581.

What Changed

• Created from Hanji 581 as the source text behind the Gan Zhongke and Xia Heliang renewed-mandate episode.

Relationships

• 甘忠可 - figure who uses the text to approach Chengdi.
• 夏贺良 - disciple who preserves and redeploys the method under Aidi.
• 汉成帝 - first target of the text-backed renewed-mandate proposal.
• 汉哀帝 - ruler under whom the text-backed method becomes public symbolic policy.
• 再受命改制合法性反噬 - concept grounded by the Aidi reuse and reversal of this textual promise.