What is the Taiping Yaoshu?
The Taiping Yaoshu (“Essential Arts of Great Peace,” known in Japan as Taihei Yojutsu no Sho) is a book of mysterious arts that appears in the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. At the start of the story, Zhang Jiao, who would later start the Yellow Turban Rebellion, was gathering herbs in the mountains when he met a blue-eyed old man calling himself the Old Immortal of Southern Florescence, who gave him a heavenly book in three volumes called “Taiping Yaoshu.” The old man said, “Use this to spread the teaching on Heaven’s behalf and save the people. If you harbor evil thoughts, you will surely be punished,” and vanished in a gust of wind.
Zhang Jiao and the Yellow Turban Rebellion
Zhang Jiao studied the book day and night, mastered the arts of summoning wind and rain, and called himself the “Taoist of Great Peace.” When an epidemic spread, he cured the sick by handing out talisman water (water in which paper charms had been soaked) and gathered many followers. Eventually he proclaimed, “The Blue Heaven is already dead; the Yellow Heaven shall rise,” and in 184 rose in rebellion with hundreds of thousands of followers wearing yellow headbands. This was the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which weakened the Han dynasty and opened the Three Kingdoms period in which heroes such as Liu Bei, Cao Cao and Sun Quan appeared.
Its model, the Taiping Jing
The Taiping Yaoshu is the novel’s invention, but the book that served as its model really existed. The history Book of the Later Han records that the Taiping Qingling Shu, said to have been given by a god to a man named Yu Ji (Gan Ji), was presented to the emperor, and it is thought to have become the basis of the Taoist scripture Taiping Jing. The “Way of Great Peace” led by Zhang Jiao was also a religious group influenced by these ideas of great peace.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Yu Ji also appears as an immortal in the Jiangdong region, in a scene where he clashes with Sun Ce. The Taiping Yaoshu often appears in Three Kingdoms novels, manga and games as the legendary book behind sorcery.
