This is a Chinese amulet coin used to gather luck, forgive sins, and relieve bad luck. Its main function is to soothe the invisible guilt or self-blame in the mind and prevent the emotions from falling into internal friction. Even setting aside the situation with only characters, it is extremely special – it uses the names of deities to imply appeals and reinforces the beliefs by using the names of deities again. Therefore, the main function of this coin is to forgive sins – traditional Chinese culture believes that many things that violate morality will affect one’s financial fortune and health.
In fact, most Chinese amulet coins have nothing to do with religious beliefs. They only use widely recognized and praised names and talismans to fix specific beliefs. When you anchor your beliefs with special symbols, the power of history and subjectivity can magnify them and guide things in the desired direction.
On the front of it are the words “The Three Officials”, representing the three core deities in Taoism, namely the Heaven Official who bestows luck, the Earth Official who forgives sins, and the Water Official who relieves bad luck, collectively known as the “Three Primordial Emperors”. These three deities have no specific images. They originally stem from the natural worship of heaven, earth, and water and then form conceptual gods through folk beliefs. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, when Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Five Bushels of Rice, he deified them and formed the ceremony of “Handwritten Letters to the Three Officials”. Believers wrote prayers and threw them into the mountains, buried them in the earth, or sank them in water to pray for the elimination of disasters and diseases. Among them, the Heaven Official is the Purple Micro Emperor of the Upper Yuan, symbolizing blessings and being in charge of worldly fame and official positions. His birthday is the 15th day of the first lunar month, which is the origin of the Lantern Festival; the Earth Official is the Pure Void Emperor of the Middle Yuan, forgiving the sins of the deceased and超度ing the wandering souls during the Ghost Festival; the Water Official is the Dongyin Emperor of the Lower Yuan, resolving water-related disasters and misfortunes and dispelling disasters during the Xiayuan Festival.
On the back, the upper half has the word “Tai Shang” and the lower half has the word “Lao Jun”, which together are “Tai Shang Lao Jun”. The Celestial Worthy of Morality is one of the “Three Pure Ones” in Taoism, and his divine duties cover almost all functions of Taoism, symbolizing the embodiment of the “Tao”. Interestingly, there is a casting error between the characters “大 (dà, great)” and “太 (tài, supreme)” on this coin. Is it to avoid the names of the noble? Or is it a writing error caused by insufficient cultural knowledge? Anyway, this is the original form of the cultural relic. Similar situations have also occurred in other places. For example, the national treasure coin of China, “Tai Xia Zhen Xing”, also has a writing error between “大” and “太”. Its original intention is the combination of the national title and the emperor’s reign title, so it should correctly be “Da Xia Zhen Xing”.
In other instructions on this site, we have introduced the Later Heaven Eight Trigrams. They were deduced by King Wen of Zhou and focus on describing the laws of the birth and extinction of all things in time and space, representing the laws mastered by humans themselves; while the Earlier Heaven Eight Trigrams are used to explain the “Cosmological Ontology”, and because its concept is too vast, it is not often used in daily life.
This coin, in its small size, condenses the Taoist worldview of the trinity of “god-law-tool”: The Three Officials protect the well-being of the present world, Tai Shang Lao Jun enlightens transcendent wisdom, and the Later Heaven Eight Trigrams regulate the order of time and space. Its design is not only a carrier of folk beliefs but also the ultimate expression of the philosophy of “the co-construction of heaven and man” by ancient craftsmen.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.