Wang Chongyang, a former minor official from Shaanxi who abandoned civil life after a reported mystical experience, began teaching a new synthesis of Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian practice from 1167 CE onward, traveling through Shandong and gathering a group of committed disciples who would carry his teaching forward after his death only a few years later, in 1170. Wang taught celibate monastic discipline, strict ethical self-cultivation and internal alchemy, neidan, aimed at cultivating an immortal spirit body through inner refinement rather than through external elixirs or communal ritual of the kind associated with older Daoist lineages.
Among Wang's disciples, seven came to be recognized as his principal successors, each founding or leading a distinct branch of the tradition; the most historically significant of them, Qiu Chuji, built the Longmen, Dragon Gate, branch into the school's most influential lineage. Qiu's later journey to Central Asia in the 1220s to meet the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, and the resulting imperial favor granted to Quanzhen Daoism, gave the young school a level of political protection and institutional resources unusual for a religious movement only a few decades old.
The name Quanzhen, Complete Perfection, reflects Wang's teaching that the practitioner's task was to recover an original, complete and perfected nature obscured by worldly desire, a goal pursued through disciplined monastic life rather than through the household-based priesthood characteristic of the Celestial Masters tradition.