Quanzhen Daoism introduced a genuinely new institutional model into Chinese religious life: a celibate, monastically organized Daoist clergy living in communal monasteries under a rule of discipline, closely paralleling Buddhist monastic organization, in contrast to the older Celestial Masters pattern of a hereditary, largely household-based priesthood serving lay communities through ritual and registers. This monastic structure allowed Quanzhen to build large, centrally organized religious institutions, staffed and resourced in ways more comparable to Buddhist monasteries than to earlier Daoist lineages.
Qiu Chuji's meeting with Genghis Khan in Central Asia in 1222, during which the Mongol ruler is said to have questioned him on the secrets of longevity, resulted in Quanzhen Daoism receiving tax exemptions and official protection under the subsequent Mongol Yuan administration, resources the school used to expand its monastic network significantly across northern China in the following decades. This period of rapid growth eventually brought Quanzhen into direct competition and conflict with Buddhist institutions at the Yuan court, a rivalry that culminated in the imperially staged debates of 1258 and 1281 and the subsequent burning of much of the Daoist canon.
Quanzhen and the Celestial Masters lineage, later reorganized under the broader Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, designation, remain the two principal organized traditions of Chinese Daoism today, and Quanzhen's major monastic centers, including the White Cloud Monastery in Beijing, continue to train ordained monastic clergy according to a recognizably similar discipline to the one Wang Chongyang established in the twelfth century.