The revelations Yang Xi transcribed for the Xu family did not become a recognized textual tradition immediately; they circulated within the family and a narrow circle of associates for over a century before the scholar-official and physician Tao Hongjing, working around 499 CE, gathered, authenticated and edited the surviving manuscripts into the Zhen'gao, the Declarations of the Perfected, distinguishing Yang Xi's own transcriptions from later additions and forgeries by close study of the handwriting itself. That editorial labor rescued and stabilized the corpus at the point it might otherwise have been lost or hopelessly corrupted, and Tao Hongjing's own authority as an editor did as much as Yang Xi's original revelations to secure the material's lasting influence.
The tradition built on that corpus, Shangqing, meaning Highest Clarity, developed its own textual canon, meditation techniques and eventually an institutional center at Mount Mao, becoming one of the most intellectually sophisticated and socially influential schools of organized Daoism through the medieval period, shaping later Daoist scripture, ritual and visualization practice well beyond its own immediate lineage. Yang Xi himself remains a genuinely liminal figure in the tradition's memory: revered as the medium through whom the Perfected first spoke, yet known almost entirely through the texts he produced for a single family rather than through any independent record of his own life, a asymmetry common to founding visionaries whose authority rests entirely on what they are reported to have received rather than on anything else they are known to have done.