Accumulating Virtue to Become Immortal: A Moral Turn Within Daoist Cultivation in the Taishang Ganying Pian (Tractate of the Most High One on Actions and Consequences)

Early Daoist cultivation is often presented through technical repertoires such as alchemy, ritual, and specialised bodily disciplines, while ethical discourse is treated as preparatory or auxiliary. This article examines how ethical practice could instead function as a sufficient mode of cultivation oriented toward immortality within the Daoist morality books. Focusing on the Taishang Ganying Pian 太上感应篇 (Tractate of the Most High One on Actions and Consequences), it argues that the tract articulates a coherent cultivational model in which moral conduct is rendered cumulative, intention-sensitive, and enforceable through a bureaucratised system of oversight. Moral deeds are quantified and graded, intentions are treated as morally efficacious prior to action, and both are embedded within a system of registers, inspectors, and periodic assessments that make moral causality predictable. A focused comparison with Ge Hong’s Baopuzi Neipian 抱朴子内篇 highlights a structural contrast in the ordering of virtue and technique and in the degree of certainty attributed to moral retribution. Tracing the text’s reception, the article further shows how this ethical logic was canonised, pedagogically simplified, and socially embedded in later morality texts. It concludes that the Ganying Pian estabilished an alternative Daoist pathway in which everyday ethical life itself could function as a practicable route toward immortality.