Zhang Daoling, a scholar and practitioner of longevity techniques active in Sichuan in the mid-second century CE, is said to have received a revelation on Mount Heming in 142 CE from Laozi, worshipped in this account not as the historical author traditionally credited with the Daodejing but as a deified cosmic power. The revelation appointed Zhang as Tianshi, Celestial Master, and transmitted to him a covenant establishing a new relationship between the deity and humankind, sealed through ritual registers held by ordained priests.
Zhang organized his followers into a structured religious community across twenty-four parishes in Sichuan, each administered by an officer responsible for registering members, collecting a standard tax of five pecks of rice, which gave the movement its common name, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, and overseeing communal rituals, confession practices and mutual aid, including free lodging houses for travelers. Leadership within the movement became hereditary, passing from Zhang Daoling to his son and grandson, establishing the Celestial Master lineage that Daoist tradition holds has continued, with interruptions, into the present.
The movement operated for several decades as a largely self-governing religious and political community in Sichuan before its later accommodation with, and partial absorption into, the wider Chinese imperial order during the following centuries.