關聖帝君覺世真經
The Sage Therach Guan's true Scripture to Awaken the world.
Guan Sheng Di Jun world Awakening Prayer
A true scripture to awaken the world, by the Holy Imperial Prince Kwan-Foo-Tsze
This text is one of a particular example of what are called in Chinese 善書: meritorious books. This text is attributed to Lord Guan, a Chinese general who is venerated as a god.
The text is in two parts; the first, which is an introduction and is in prose. The second is in verse-- sentences of three of four characters each. This latter section contains an uncompromising moral code-- do not lie, steal, cheat, or you and your descendants will be destroyed!
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This present edition contains three texts: They are the Original Chinese, and two english translations.
The Chinese text I have got from this site:http://www.boder.idv.tw/ks.htm of which an archive link is: https://web.archive.org/web/20201029085841/http://www.boder.idv.tw/ks.htm
The older english translation is by Robert Morrison. You can see it here https://books.google.com/books?id=s8JLo8o1Tz0C&pg=PA146#v=onepage&q&f=false
He included it in Part 3 of his celebrated Chinese-English dictionary. As might be expected from a person of his era, he called it a "Pious fraud" -- that is, he did not believe it was actually written by Lord Guan. However, what Morrison evidently did not object to, was the ethical system contained within. He chose to include it inside his dictionary as a sample of Chinese Ethical beliefs. Morrison's translation is fairly accurate, but is unfortunately incomplete: He only translated the verse section.
The second translation featured is by Andrew Gudgel. It can be found on its original website here:https://web.archive.org/web/20150502063646/http://guanshengdijun.com/GuanShengDiJunWorldAwakeningPrayer.html
And in a copy by a fellow blogger here https://heathenchinese.wordpress.com/guan-sheng-di-jun-prayers/
It is best to leave it to Gudgel to explain how he came to this book:
"Someone had set out a stack of prayer booklets as a deed of merit, hoping that passersby would take them. Out of curiosity, I took home a booklet. Out of curiosity, I began to translate the prayers. After reading the testimonials, I became afraid to not finish translating them. I leave them here on this electronic street corner for anyone to take. " - Andrew Gudgel
Gudgel's translation differs from Morrison's. He translates the complete text, but does so in a more concise, proassic manner. His online edition reproduces several miracle tales surrounding the scripture-- what he calls "testimonials" a common thing for Chinese scriptures. However, as I cannot locate the Chinese originals of these miracle tales, I will not be featuring them here.
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One particular piece of trouble comes the fact of variant texts. Like most Chinese books, there are many small differences between editions of the same text -- sentences added, omitted or rearranged, otherwise different characters used.
With the Morrison text, detecting variants with the online is easy enough, because he printed the Chinese text alongside it. With Gudgel's text, this is a more difficult task, as no chinese text is included.
Judging from the translation, though, Gudgel evidently used a text that was slightly different from both the Morrison and Online ones. The differences get particularly large about section 21-22 of the Verse section. Here it seems Gudgel and Morrison were using sources that had slight variations in the order of the lines. In turn, how many of the variants in Gudgel are simply Gudgel's translation choices, I know not.
I have set Gudgel's translation in common type, and Morrison's translation in italic.
