The Taishang Ganying Pian, Treatise of the Most High on Action and Response, is a Song-dynasty text of about twelve hundred characters and it may be the most widely distributed Chinese religious text after the Daodejing. It opens by declaring that calamity and blessing have no gate of their own but come only as a person summons them, and that reward and retribution follow like a shadow. It then lists, with unusual concreteness, the deeds that accumulate merit and those that shorten life — and specifies the mechanism, with spirits of the Three Corpses and the Stove God reporting on the household to the celestial administration at fixed intervals, and demerits deducted from one's allotted lifespan in specified units. It was printed and given away free in enormous quantities for eight centuries as an act of merit in itself, frequently with illustrated cautionary tales appended, and it was read and endorsed by Confucians and Buddhists as readily as by Taoists — a genuinely trans-traditional Chinese moral text.