Dragon Gate

Quanzhen, the teaching of complete perfection, was founded in the twelfth century by Wang Chongyang in northern China under the Jurchen Jin, and it broke with the Daoism around it by being monastic and celibate. Its central discipline is internal alchemy, the refining of essence, breath and spirit within the practitioner rather than in a crucible, and it drew openly on Buddhist meditation and Confucian ethics while insisting the three teachings agreed at the root.

Qiu Chuji was one of Wang Chongyang seven principal disciples and the founder of the Longmen or Dragon Gate branch. In old age he was summoned by Chinggis Khan and travelled from Shandong to the Hindu Kush to meet him, a journey of three years recorded by his companion Li Zhichang in a travel account that is still read as a source for the geography and peoples of the route. What he said at the audience is reported as counsel against killing and in favour of restraint.

What he returned with mattered more institutionally. Quanzhen received Mongol favour, including exemption from taxation and corvee for its clergy, and it used the position to acquire temples on a very large scale. That expansion produced a backlash under later Mongol rulers, including public debates with Buddhists that Quanzhen lost and orders to burn Daoist texts, but the school survived with its monastic organisation intact.

Dragon Gate became the dominant Daoist monastic order because of an administrative achievement rather than a doctrinal one. In the seventeenth century Wang Changyue, abbot of the White Cloud Monastery in Beijing, established a public ordination platform there and set out a graded system of precepts: an initial rank of preliminary precepts, an intermediate rank, and a highest rank conferred rarely. Ordinations were held in large public assemblies, candidates came from monasteries across the country, and the lineage record was kept centrally.

That gave Chinese Daoism something it had lacked, a recognised and portable ordination that a monastery anywhere could accept. Houses that had no historical connection to Qiu Chuji adopted the Longmen lineage poem and the Longmen ordination, so the branch spread partly by affiliation rather than by descent, and modern scholarship treats the seventeenth century construction of the lineage as at least as important as the twelfth century founding.

The contrast that defines the order in practice is with Zhengyi. A Zhengyi priest is ordinarily married, lives at home, inherits his office within a family, and serves a community by performing rites for it. A Dragon Gate monastic is celibate, lives in a monastery under a rule, wears the robe and the hair coiled and pinned, and follows a daily liturgical and meditative round. The White Cloud Monastery is today the seat of the national Daoist association, which keeps the ordination tradition at the centre of official Daoist life.