Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity)

Zhengyi is the liturgical tradition of Taoism, and its priests are not monks. They marry, live in the communities they serve, work at other trades, and pass their office, their registers and their manuscripts within the family. Where Quanzhen produced monasteries, Zhengyi produced a hereditary profession.

The lineage claims descent from Zhang Daoling, who by tradition received a revelation from Laozi in the year 142 and founded the movement called the Way of the Celestial Masters, which built an effectively autonomous religious polity in Sichuan by the end of the second century. That is the tradition's account of its beginning, and the date is a traditional one. The Zhengyi name as an umbrella is much later: in 1304 the Yuan court placed all Taoist schools other than Quanzhen under it.

The priest's work is ritual performed on behalf of a community. He conducts liturgies addressed to the gods and to ancestors, draws and empowers talismans, performs rites of healing, blessing and exorcism, and presides at the jiao, the great offering that renews a community's relationship with its gods and may run for days.

His authority rests on a register conferred at ordination, naming the spirits he is entitled to command. The model is bureaucratic, and deliberately so: Taoist ritual addresses the celestial administration in the forms of a memorial submitted to a government office, because that is precisely what it takes itself to be doing. The heavens are staffed, and the paperwork must be correct.

The lineage's seat is Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, where the descendants of Zhang Daoling held the title of Celestial Master and, from the Tang onward, imperial recognition. The office is hereditary, which is unusual in Chinese religion, and has made its succession a matter of record rather than of election.

That record broke in 1949. The sixty-third Celestial Master, Zhang Enpu, left the mainland for Taiwan, carrying the lineage with him, and died there in 1969. His successor held the title until his death in 2008, and since then the succession has been open. Several claimants to the sixty-fifth office have asserted themselves in mainland China and others in Taiwan, and no authority exists that could adjudicate between them, which is the difficulty with a hereditary office whose family has been split by a border and whose principal seat lies in a state that administers religion through a body of its own.

Organised Taoism in the People's Republic accordingly runs through the state-supervised association rather than through any Celestial Master. Zhengyi ordination continues within that structure, and Mount Longhu functions.

The dispute matters less to ordinary practice than the structure might suggest. A Zhengyi priest's standing rests on his register, his manuscripts and his community's acceptance, and a village engaging him for a jiao is not consulting a central roll of authority. The office is a symbol of continuity, and the argument over it is an argument about the symbol.

No credible figure exists for Zhengyi Taoism, and the reason is instructive rather than merely inconvenient. Its priests are village and household ritual specialists, generally engaged for particular occasions by families and communities that would not describe themselves as members of anything, and there is no roll to count. This is the ordinary condition of Chinese popular religion, which the categories used by census-takers fit badly.

The tradition is strongest where the twentieth century interfered least. Taiwan has an unbroken and highly developed liturgical practice, and the Celestial Master lineage transplanted there in 1949 gave it institutional weight. Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the wider Chinese diaspora sustain temples and ritual specialists. In the People's Republic, temples were closed and priests dispersed during the Cultural Revolution, and the tradition has been rebuilt since the 1980s within the framework the state provides.

What survives most robustly is the ritual itself. The jiao offering, the funeral liturgies, the talismanic healing and the temple festivals are woven into the ordinary life of Chinese communities, and much of what an outside observer would call folk religion is served by Zhengyi priests using texts and forms of considerable antiquity. Scholars working in Taiwan and Fujian from the 1960s onward found liturgies in living use that they had previously known only from the medieval canon.

The tradition's own view of itself is worth noting. It presents less as one option among several than as a service performed for the community by those qualified to perform it, which is why the question of how many Zhengyi Taoists there are is, in its own terms, slightly beside the point.