A Revelation in Sichuan, and a Priesthood Built on It

The Way of the Celestial Masters traces its founding to 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling, practicing in Sichuan in western China, reported receiving a direct revelation from a deified Laozi, who conferred on him the title Celestial Master and a mandate to organize a new religious community built around Taoist teaching, ritual healing and moral discipline. What Zhang Daoling built was substantially more organized than earlier, looser Taoist philosophical and ascetic practice: a structured religious body with a defined priesthood, a system of tithing in rice, which gave the movement its early alternative name, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, and a register recording the faithful, closer in institutional shape to an organized church than to the individual philosophical and meditative practice that had characterized earlier Taoist thought.

The Celestial Master title and the authority attached to it, over the movement's priesthood, its ritual calendar and its relationship to the vast bureaucratic hierarchy of spirits and celestial officials Taoist cosmology holds governs the unseen world, passed by hereditary succession within Zhang Daoling's own family. Adherents of the tradition hold that the lineage has continued, with periods of political disruption but without a genuine break in the hereditary claim itself, from Zhang Daoling's own lifetime down to the present holder of the title, a claimed continuity of roughly nineteen centuries that places the office among the longest continuously claimed religious leadership lineages anywhere in the world.