Quanzhen (Complete Reality)

The White Cloud Temple in Beijing is a principal monastery of the Quanzhen school.

This source names Quanzhen directly: "Dragon Gate, or Longmen, lineage of Quanzhen Daoism, the other two being the Zhongji Jie, the Precepts of Middle Ultimate, and the Tianxian Jie, the Precepts of Celestial Immortality."

Founded the Quanzhen school in Shandong between 1167 and his death in 1170, teaching the unity of the three teachings and a monastic path of internal alchemy.

Quanzhen took alchemy inward: the crucible is the body, the ingredients are breath, essence and spirit, and the elixir is refined within rather than compounded in a vessel.

Quanzhen priests are celibate monastics, and their chanting belongs to the monastery's own daily office rather than to a rite commissioned by a household, so the same liturgy serves an internal discipline and not a client.

The Quanzhen daoshi is a celibate monastic living under a rule in a temple, on a pattern borrowed in part from Buddhist monasticism. Married householder and celibate monastic hold the same title and lead different lives.

The eight trigrams around a centre are worn on the ritual robe, set over a door and used in the internal alchemy the order teaches, where the diagram maps the body as readily as the world.

Quanzhen practice puts inner cultivation before ritual service, so the talisman is present in its temples without being the centre of its priesthood's work as it is for Zhengyi.

Quanzhen priests are monastic and celibate where Zhengyi priests are householders, but the high ritual robe is worn in both for the great offerings.

The mountain carries Quanzhen monastic temples along its ridges, and the school's discipline of retreat is practised on it.

Quanzhen cultivation joins breath, posture and stillness in a single discipline, and the practices later grouped under this name belong to its monastic training.

Quanzhen is the one Taoist school to establish celibate monks and nuns living under a rule in monasteries, an arrangement borrowed from Buddhism and the sharpest difference between it and the married priesthood of Zhengyi.

Narrates the life of Wang Chongyang, Quanzhen's own founder, at one of Quanzhen's own three major Yuan dynasty ancestral temples.

The Dao as the way underlying and producing all things is the shared metaphysical ground of every Taoist school, pursued here through monastic inner cultivation.

The Daozang, the compiled Taoist Canon, gathers this school's own scriptures alongside those of every other Taoist lineage.

Inner power or virtue, the potency gained by embodying the Dao, is affirmed across organized Taoism and foundational to this school's monastic cultivation.

Quanzhen meditation is inner alchemy: sitting in stillness with regulated breath and inward attention to refine the body's own essence, breath and spirit, the goal being immortality of the spirit rather than insight into impermanence.

The uncarved block, original simplicity before it is shaped into named forms, is a shared Taoist ideal of the state to return to.

The Daode Jing is foundational scripture across organized Taoism, read in this school as a guide to inner cultivation.

Central to this school's monastic path of inner alchemy, neidan, the refining of jing, qi and shen through meditation and discipline distinguishes it from Zhengyi's liturgical, householder priesthood.

Acting without forcing, so action arises from the situation rather than the ego, is a shared Taoist ideal pursued here through meditation and stillness.

Wudang is held today chiefly by Quanzhen clergy, though the mountain's history is not the property of one order.

The Zhuangzi is part of the shared Taoist classical canon, its parables of spontaneity and non-attachment congenial to this school's contemplative discipline.

The self-so, things being as they are of their own accord, is affirmed as the standard the Dao itself follows, held across the Taoist schools.