Quanzhen's celibate monasticism, influenced by the Buddhist model, distinguishes it from the married, ritual-centred Zhengyi tradition and makes it the principal monastic order of Taoism, long centred on monasteries such as Beijing's White Cloud Temple. The affirmation expresses a path of withdrawal and inner discipline oriented to personal transformation and self-cultivation rather than to communal liturgy. Together the two great schools give Taoism both a monastic and a householder-priestly form.
Quanzhen's internal alchemy built on a much older tradition of Taoist alchemical theory, including the Cantong qi ("Token for the Agreement of the Three"), attributed to the Han-dynasty figure Wei Boyang, but it deliberately turned away from external alchemy (waidan), the physical compounding of elixirs, often mercury or lead based, that several Chinese emperors are recorded to have died from ingesting in pursuit of immortality. Quanzhen and the broader neidan movement reinterpreted the old alchemical vocabulary, cauldron, furnace, and elixir, as symbols for internal physiological and meditative processes, a shift historians of Chinese religion generally date to the Tang and Song dynasties before Quanzhen's founding, which Wang Chongyang's school then systematised into monastic training.