Zhengyi

Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, is one of the two great traditions of later Daoism, the liturgical counterpart to monastic Quanzhen and the living continuation of the Way of the Celestial Masters.

Priests in the world

Where the Quanzhen order is monastic and celibate, the Zhengyi tradition is served by priests who marry, live in their own homes and serve the surrounding community, and it is this tradition that provides the ritual specialists for much of Chinese popular religion. The Zhengyi priest performs the liturgies of offering, petition and exorcism, drawing on registers of gods conferred at ordination, and his authority derives from that ordination and the transmission of the registers rather than from monastic vows. He is a professional of ritual embedded in ordinary society rather than withdrawn from it.

The lineage from the mountain

The tradition traces its authority to the second-century foundation of the Celestial Masters and to the hereditary line of the Celestial Master seated at Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, which conferred ordination on Zhengyi priests across China. That the priesthood serving the folk temples of the Chinese world traces its warrant directly to a second-century revelation is the point of the name Orthodox Unity, which asserts a continuous and legitimate transmission. The tradition persists in Taiwan, in the diaspora and, in a reorganised form, on the mainland, where it is one of the two officially recognised branches of Daoism.

Zhengyi is best understood not as a new school but as an old one given a new, official consolidation. The Celestial Masters lineage, after its original theocratic state ended in the third century, continued for centuries as a hereditary line of ordained masters, eventually settling at Longhu Shan, the Dragon and Tiger Mountain in Jiangxi province, where generations of the Zhang family held the title of Celestial Master and continued ordaining priests.

Under the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, the imperial court granted this Longhu Shan lineage formal authority over a wide range of regional liturgical and talismanic traditions that had developed independently across China, consolidating them under the name Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, with the hereditary Celestial Master as its recognised head. This gave China's married, locally based ritual priests, the daoshi who conducted funerals, exorcisms and community festivals in ordinary towns and villages, a single lineage of ordination and textual authority to appeal to, even though their day to day practice varied enormously by region. The Zhang family held the Celestial Master title at Longhu Shan in an unbroken line into the twentieth century, one of the longest continuously claimed hereditary religious offices anywhere.