Wang Zhe was born in 1113 to a landowning family near Xianyang in Shaanxi, and grew up under a falling dynasty: the Jurchen Jin conquest of north China ended the Song order in which a gentleman's career made sense. He attempted both the literary and the military examinations, reached middle age with neither career nor purpose, and by his own later account drank and raged through his forties, calling himself Harmful Wind the Madman. In 1159, in a wineshop at Ganhe, he met two strangers he later identified with the immortals Zhongli Quan and Lu Dongbin, who transmitted secret instructions to him; the school he founded treats the meeting as its origin point.
What followed was one of the strangest apprenticeships in religious history. Wang abandoned his family, dug a pit grave in the Zhongnan foothills, roofed it, named it the Tomb of the Living Dead, and meditated in it for over two years, then filled it in, built a hut, and after several more years burned the hut down and left for Shandong, dancing, by the accounts, as it burned. In Shandong between 1167 and his death he gathered the disciples later counted as the Seven Perfected, including Qiu Chuji and the woman master Sun Bu'er, organized lay congregations, and founded the movement he called Quanzhen, Complete Reality. He died in 1170, leaving a school barely three years old that would within a century administer much of the religious life of north China.