The Sixty Third Celestial Master

The office Zhang Enpu held is hereditary and traces itself to Zhang Daoling, who is said to have received a revelation in the second century and to have founded the movement from which the Zhengyi tradition descends, which makes it one of the longest continuously claimed religious lineages anywhere. Its seat was at Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, and its function was administrative as much as spiritual. The Celestial Master ordained Daoist priests, issued the registers that give a priest authority over named spirits, and conferred the ranks that determine which rituals a practitioner may perform. A tradition of household priests scattered across a very large area was held together by a licensing authority at one mountain.

In 1949 he left the mainland for Taiwan. That single move carried the office out of the territory where it had operated for centuries, and it happened at the moment when religious institutions on the mainland were about to enter several decades of suppression, culminating in the destruction of temples and the dispersal of clergy during the Cultural Revolution. The atlas records the departure as the pivot of the whole entry, because everything that follows on both sides of the strait proceeds from it.