Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, is one of the two great traditions of later Daoism, the liturgical counterpart to monastic Quanzhen and the living continuation of the Way of the Celestial Masters.
Priests in the world
Where the Quanzhen order is monastic and celibate, the Zhengyi tradition is served by priests who marry, live in their own homes and serve the surrounding community, and it is this tradition that provides the ritual specialists for much of Chinese popular religion. The Zhengyi priest performs the liturgies of offering, petition and exorcism, drawing on registers of gods conferred at ordination, and his authority derives from that ordination and the transmission of the registers rather than from monastic vows. He is a professional of ritual embedded in ordinary society rather than withdrawn from it.
The lineage from the mountain
The tradition traces its authority to the second-century foundation of the Celestial Masters and to the hereditary line of the Celestial Master seated at Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, which conferred ordination on Zhengyi priests across China. That the priesthood serving the folk temples of the Chinese world traces its warrant directly to a second-century revelation is the point of the name Orthodox Unity, which asserts a continuous and legitimate transmission. The tradition persists in Taiwan, in the diaspora and, in a reorganised form, on the mainland, where it is one of the two officially recognised branches of Daoism.