Despite its problematic textual history, the Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing) transmitted in the Taoist Canon of the Ming clearly reflects ideas deeply rooted in the world-view of Han times (206 BC-220 AD). The cohesiveness of its outwardly heterogeneous content resides in the triadic ideology which underlies its cosmological substratum and depicts the whole universe as an arborescent structure derived from the basic Heaven-Earth-Man pattern. Two forms of triadic logic conflict in this ideology: a ternary process of decline in which Man has fallen from primordial perfection and a synthetic process of reversion to Unity in which Man embodies the harmonious reuniting of the poles of binarity. The vitalist trifunctionality of the scheme fluctuates accordingly.
