INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL CONCORDANCES AS TOOLS FOR THE EXPLICATION THE SUBJECTIVE REALITY OF THE AUTHORS OF THE SECRET TAOIST SCRIPTURES

Abstract

The article reflects the experience of using a modern academic, instrumental and methodological base for the analysis and introduction into a wide research circulation of the poorly studied written monuments of the Supreme Purity (Shangqing) Taoist lineage, that reflect specific cosmological issues. The author believes that the modern academic base, prepared by the pioneering research works of Western scholars, supplemented by the outstanding achievements of Japanese and Chinese Sinology and signifi-cantly expanded by prominent Taiwanese researchers, combined with up-to-date digital tools for information analysis, makes it pos-sible to move on to a scrupulous study and translation of even the most secret scriptures of the early Supreme Purity Taoist lineage. The paper presents the results of a preliminary study of one of these texts, namely «Scripture on Dipper Transfer with Three Limits for Opening Heaven» (HY 1306). These results allow to conclude that in early Shangqing Taoism there was an integral system of cosmological concepts based on the special perception of the stars of the Northern Dipper (Big Dipper) and including the following components: a notion typologically comparable with the concept of “creative cosmogony” by Stanislav Lem, reflected in his “The New Cosmogony” («Alfred Testa “Nowa Kosmogonia”»); the notion of Multiple universes; ideas about the parallel universes; psy-chotechnical techniques of “time management”, and algorithms and procedures for “Chronotope travel”.