Zhang Enpu

The office Zhang Enpu held is hereditary and traces itself to Zhang Daoling, who is said to have received a revelation in the second century and to have founded the movement from which the Zhengyi tradition descends, which makes it one of the longest continuously claimed religious lineages anywhere. Its seat was at Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, and its function was administrative as much as spiritual. The Celestial Master ordained Daoist priests, issued the registers that give a priest authority over named spirits, and conferred the ranks that determine which rituals a practitioner may perform. A tradition of household priests scattered across a very large area was held together by a licensing authority at one mountain.

In 1949 he left the mainland for Taiwan. That single move carried the office out of the territory where it had operated for centuries, and it happened at the moment when religious institutions on the mainland were about to enter several decades of suppression, culminating in the destruction of temples and the dispersal of clergy during the Cultural Revolution. The atlas records the departure as the pivot of the whole entry, because everything that follows on both sides of the strait proceeds from it.

In Taiwan he set about building an institutional home for a clergy that had never needed one there. Daoist associations were organised, ordinations were conferred, and Zhengyi ritual, which in southern Chinese practice means a married priesthood serving communities rather than a monastic order, continued and expanded on an island where local temple religion was already strong. The result is that for several decades the acknowledged head of a mainland lineage was resident in Taiwan and the ancestral seat was not accessible to him.

Since his death in 1969 the succession has been contested. More than one person has claimed the title, arguments have been made from descent, from ordination and from possession of the seals and regalia, and separate arrangements have developed around the restored temple complex at Mount Longhu, where religious life resumed after the reform period. The atlas records the dispute and does not name a current holder, because doing so would take a side in a live disagreement between religious bodies. What can be said without controversy is that the office existed, that he held it, and that the question of who holds it now is open.

A succession dispute in a hereditary religious office is not merely a family matter, because the office issues licences. A priest ordained by one claimant holds a document signed by a person whose authority another claimant denies, and since the register is what authorises the ritual, the question reaches into every ordination performed since 1969. That is why the argument has continued rather than fading, and why the atlas treats naming a holder as taking a side rather than recording a fact.