Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei Receives Taoist Investiture

In 442, three hundred years after Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Celestial Masters in 142, already recorded here, and one hundred seventy six years before the Tang dynasty elevated Taoism as its ancestral faith in 618, also recorded here, the Northern Wei emperor Taiwu ascended a specially built platform in the capital Pingcheng and, at the urging of the reformist Celestial Master Kou Qianzhi, formally received Taoist amulets of investiture, changing the color of his court's ceremonial flags to blue to mark his new allegiance. Kou Qianzhi had claimed in 415 a revelation from Laozi commissioning him to purge the Celestial Masters tradition of hereditary and commercial abuses and reorganize it under a new code, the Yunzhong Yinsong Xinke; carried to the Wei court by the chancellor Cui Hao, the reformed teaching won Taiwu's favor, and in 440 the emperor adopted the reign title Taiping Zhenjun, True Lord of Great Peace, to declare it. The 442 investiture completed that declaration in person, making Taiwu the first of a line of Northern Wei emperors to receive a Taoist register of ordination and installing Kou Qianzhi as something close to a state pontiff mediating between the ruler and the celestial hierarchy. The theocracy did not outlast Kou's death in 448 and Taiwu's own death in 452, and it darkened in 446 into the persecution of Buddhism that the alliance of Kou and Cui Hao is also remembered for, an episode on which sources differ over how far Kou himself pressed the persecution against Cui Hao's harsher line. But the 442 ceremony stands as the clearest moment Taoism ever became formally, personally the religion of a reigning Chinese emperor, three centuries after Zhang Daoling founded the tradition that made it possible.