The Daoist pantheon did not gradually form a complete system until the Northern Song. This process showed itself mainly in several ways. First, the final ranking of the highest Daoist deities was eventually fixed. Before that, the order among the Three Pure Ones, especially the relative honor given to Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy and the Supreme Lord Lao, had never truly stabilized. Second, the borrowing and absorption of Buddhist concepts became systematic. Ideas such as the underworld and the Eighteen Hells had already sunk deep into popular consciousness and were therefore incorporated into Daoism. Third, Daoism retained many gods of older worship, such as City Gods and Earth Gods. Fourth, the proportion and influence of popular gods, figures transmitted in the folk sphere and then absorbed into Daoism and granted divine status, grew ever larger: Lord Guan, Lü Dongbin, Wang Lingguan, Mazu, Zhang Sanfeng, and many others.
In that process, the status of early Daoist gods inevitably declined, in some cases all the way to complete disappearance. Many can no longer be studied in any reliable way. One vanished deity who survives for special reasons is called Nüqing.
In 1997, tomb no. 3 at the new railway station in Nanchang, Jiangxi yielded a funerary inventory slip for Lei Gai’s burial garments, identified as dating to the eighth year of Yonghe in the Eastern Jin, 352 CE. It contains the phrase: “This inventory is as a Nüqing edict: it must not be violated.” This is the earliest excavated material presently known to contain the characters Nüqing. So far, more than a hundred land-purchase contracts, tomb-quelling texts, and related ancient documents have been excavated. They often bear inscriptions such as “Nüqing edict,” “Nüqing statutes and ordinances,” and similar formulas. Their contents need not detain us here, but the closing stock phrase will sound strangely familiar:
By decree of the Supreme Lord Lao, Nüqing’s edict is to be carried out at once, in accordance with the statutes and ordinances!
There are many similar formulas, for example “as with the statutes and ordinances of Nüqing, emissary of the Five Emperors of the Five Directions,” “at once, as with the statutes and ordinances of Nüqing, emissary of the Five Emperors,” or “at once, as with the subterranean statutes and ordinances of Nüqing.” In all of them, the deity who conveys the command is called Nüqing.
The deity Nüqing must have taken shape no later than the early Eastern Jin. By the Northern and Southern Dynasties, several major Daoist traditions, Zhengyi, Lingbao, and Shangqing among them, had all been influenced to varying degrees by the concept of Nüqing. The extant Orthodox Daoist Canon even preserves an important Daoist text, the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing. This work records the names of more than a thousand ghosts. Its authorship is unknown. It is said originally to have consisted of eight juan, though only six survive, and these are not a version formed in a single era but a patchwork compiled from different Daoist texts.
Han legal codes were called lü, statutes, as in Xiao He’s Nine-Chapter Statutes. Judging by the source of the wording, “ghost statutes” here really means “Daoist statutes.” The Ghost Statutes of Nüqing presents itself as a code promulgated by the Great Dao. The scripture says: “The statutes say: Heaven’s Dao uses ghosts to assist the gods in dispensing qi. Men fear ghosts and do not fear gods, and therefore the name is entrusted to them, each taking its rank from that.”
This Ghost Statutes of Nüqing describes the many ghosts, their ghost-lords and dwelling places, their names, powers, and harms. It urges people to keep the prohibitions carefully so as not to offend the various ghosts, and teaches that by reciting talismans, spells, and the names of ghosts one may control them and ward them off. Put simply, its logic is that all ghosts in the world have proper names, and once you know a ghost’s true name you can subdue it. In this scheme, the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling commands the ghosts and spirits, while the one who administers this profound capital code of ghosts is Nüqing.
As for “Nüqing” itself, that is only an assumed name, not the true one. Nüqing is a divine messenger who transmits statutes and ordinances. At different times, what Nüqing transmitted were the decrees of a Heavenly Worthy, of the Supreme Lord Lao, or of the Five Emperors. My suspicion is that the principle is the same as in the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing: if you know a ghost’s true name, you can arrest it. By the same logic, if you knew the true name of the deity who transmitted the ghostly statutes, the statutes themselves would lose force. For that reason, Daoist Celestial Masters never directly spoke Nüqing’s true name. In the course of transmission, no one any longer came to know it. In truth, I have found no reliable evidence even for whether Nüqing was male or female. Nearly all texts and modern scholarship seem simply to assume, on the strength of the character nü, that this must have been a female deity. Some scholars believe Nüqing too was modeled on the green ghost of Buddhism. I remain doubtful.
Early Daoism, especially the Celestial Masters movement, was often called a “ghost way.” One reason was the profound influence of primal forms of worship among the people: ordinary folk believed in ghosts and spirits rather than serving the Great Dao. Before the appearance of the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing, the laws of heaven were only a vague idea. In Han tomb-quelling texts, the “statutes and ordinances” said to come from the Highest God, the Heavenly Emperor, had no actual written legal text corresponding to them, and this remained largely unchanged down to the Wei and Jin. “Statutes and ordinances” as heavenly law still existed only as a religious concept in the minds of believers.
After the middle Northern Song, Daoist scriptures no longer mention Nüqing. From that point onward, the deity gradually disappeared from view.