Invoking the Heavenly Worthy Who Saves from Suffering

This is a Taoist invocation recited for the dying, the dead and those in distress, addressed to the Heavenly Worthy of the Great Unity who Saves from Suffering (Taiyi Jiuku Tianzun), a great salvific deity of religious Daoism. Comparable in role to the compassionate saviour figures of Buddhism, this Heavenly Worthy is held to descend into the realms of suffering and the underworld to rescue and release souls in torment, and his name is called upon to relieve the afflicted, to guide the dead, and to draw them toward deliverance.

The invocation, opening with namo, a term of homage taken into Daoist usage, is used in the rituals of salvation and in mortuary liturgies performed by Daoist priests for the benefit of the deceased. It reflects the strong soteriological current in later Daoism, in which named celestial deities are appealed to for the salvation of the living and the dead, and it remains a familiar formula in Daoist ritual for the suffering and the departed.