Quanzhen

Quanzhen, Complete Perfection, is the principal monastic order of later Daoism, and it gave the tradition an institutional form parallel to the Buddhist sangha.

Celibate and contemplative

In contrast to the married, community-serving priests of the Zhengyi tradition, Quanzhen Daoists are typically celibate monastics living in monasteries under a disciplined rule. Its emphasis falls on inner cultivation, meditation and internal alchemy, the refinement of body and mind toward union with the Dao, rather than on the communal liturgy of exorcism and offering. It drew Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian elements together self-consciously, and its austere, contemplative character is what allowed Daoism to meet Buddhism on the ground of organised monasticism.

Mongol favour and the White Cloud

The order was founded in the twelfth century in northern China under Jurchen rule by Wang Chongyang and carried to prominence by his seven principal disciples, among them Qiu Chuji, whose journey to meet Genghis Khan won the order Mongol favour and a period of great influence. Quanzhen became the dominant monastic Daoism of the north, and its chief monastery, the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, remains a principal centre and the seat of the state-recognised Daoist association in the modern period.

Quanzhen was founded far later than the Celestial Masters tradition it eventually stood alongside, credited to Wang Chongyang, who began teaching in Shandong in the twelfth century after a reported series of mystical encounters, and who built the order on a deliberate synthesis of Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian practice rather than presenting it as Daoism alone. His teaching produced seven principal disciples, and one of them, Qiu Chuji, gave the young order the political standing that let it grow into a dominant monastic tradition: summoned across Central Asia in the 1220s to meet Genghis Khan in person, Qiu Chuji impressed the Mongol ruler enough to secure tax exemptions and formal protection for Quanzhen institutions, patronage that let the order expand its monasteries across northern China at a moment when other religious communities had no comparable backing.

The White Cloud Temple in Beijing became the order's most prominent monastic seat as a result, and the celibate, cloistered monastic discipline the order established there, modelled openly on Chan Buddhist monastic practice, remains the practice that distinguishes Quanzhen most sharply from the married, household based clergy of Zhengyi Daoism.