One Lineage Among Two Very Different Priesthoods

Dragon Gate's codified ordination lineage sits in sharp institutional contrast with Daoism's other major clerical tradition, the Zhengyi school, whose priesthood is hereditary and householder rather than monastic and celibate: a Zhengyi priest typically marries, lives among the community he serves and often passes the office to a son, while Longmen ordination instead requires entering monastic life and severing the family ties that structure Zhengyi succession. The Encyclopedia of Taoism records that this monastic, precept-based model made Longmen the dominant institutional lineage among China's ordained Daoist monastics, most temples and monastic communities associated with organised Quanzhen practice today tracing their ordination back through Wang Changyue's reformed platform rather than through any of the more locally variable ordination practices Quanzhen itself had used before his reform. The Daoism Handbook notes that Longmen's formal, recorded chain of transmission, each ordinand's name and generation entered into the lineage's own records at the time of ordination, has also made it comparatively legible to outside historians in a way looser, undocumented forms of transmission are not, so that Longmen's prominence in scholarly accounts of modern Chinese Daoism partly reflects how thoroughly it kept its own institutional records rather than reflecting its numerical size relative to Zhengyi practice alone.