Dragon Gate became the dominant Daoist monastic order because of an administrative achievement rather than a doctrinal one. In the seventeenth century Wang Changyue, abbot of the White Cloud Monastery in Beijing, established a public ordination platform there and set out a graded system of precepts: an initial rank of preliminary precepts, an intermediate rank, and a highest rank conferred rarely. Ordinations were held in large public assemblies, candidates came from monasteries across the country, and the lineage record was kept centrally.
That gave Chinese Daoism something it had lacked, a recognised and portable ordination that a monastery anywhere could accept. Houses that had no historical connection to Qiu Chuji adopted the Longmen lineage poem and the Longmen ordination, so the branch spread partly by affiliation rather than by descent, and modern scholarship treats the seventeenth century construction of the lineage as at least as important as the twelfth century founding.
The contrast that defines the order in practice is with Zhengyi. A Zhengyi priest is ordinarily married, lives at home, inherits his office within a family, and serves a community by performing rites for it. A Dragon Gate monastic is celibate, lives in a monastery under a rule, wears the robe and the hair coiled and pinned, and follows a daily liturgical and meditative round. The White Cloud Monastery is today the seat of the national Daoist association, which keeps the ordination tradition at the centre of official Daoist life.