Qingcheng Shan

Qingcheng has the strongest claim of any mountain in China to being a place where Taoism began institutionally, rather than a place it later occupied.

142

In 142 the teacher Zhang Daoling is held to have received a revelation on this mountain from Laozi, deified as Taishang Laojun, appointing him Celestial Master.

What he founded was the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, better known later as the Way of the Celestial Masters.

Why it matters

This was not a philosophical school. It was the first organised Taoist church, and it had the apparatus of one:

• A priesthood, with ranks and ordination.
• A territory, divided into twenty-four parishes.
• A tax, the five pecks of rice from which the movement took its name.
• A hereditary line of Celestial Masters, which has continued in claimed succession to the present.
• Written registers, confession of sins as a healing practice, and communal rites.

At its height in the late second century it governed an effectively autonomous state in the Hanzhong region under Zhang Daoling's grandson Zhang Lu, before submitting to Cao Cao in 215.

The distinction being drawn here is the important one. There is philosophical Taoism, the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, which is much older. There is institutional, liturgical, priestly Taoism, which is a religion with clergy and sacraments, and which begins here.

Whatever the details of the revelation account, the movement is historical and well documented, and this is where it locates its origin.

The mountain

Thirty-six peaks, densely wooded, the name means Green City Wall, from the way the treeline encloses the site.

Eleven Taoist temples stand along the paths, with the Shangqing Palace near the top at over fifteen hundred metres and Jianfu Palace at the foot, dating from the Tang.

The architecture is deliberately modest, built of timber, bark and thatch and set into the forest rather than commanding it, a marked contrast with the imperial monumentality of Wudang.

Dujiangyan

UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 2000 together with the Dujiangyan irrigation system below it, a third-century BCE waterworks, built without a dam, that still functions and still irrigates the Chengdu plain.

The pairing is apt. Dujiangyan works by dividing and channelling the river rather than blocking it, which is about as clean an illustration of wu wei as an engineering project can offer.

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake damaged the mountain's temples, and repairs followed.

Qingcheng Shan's caves and cliffside temples sit close enough to one of ancient China's largest engineering projects that the mountain's religious and practical achievements share the same valley.

A cave associated with the founder

Tianshi Cave, on the mountain's slopes, is traditionally associated with Zhang Daoling, credited in tradition with founding organised Taoism as an institutional religion in the second century CE, and the mountain's dense forest cover and cliffside temple architecture reflect a long continuous history of habitation by Taoist practitioners drawn to the same site tradition identifies with that founding.

An engineering marvel nearby

Immediately adjacent to the mountain lies Dujiangyan, an irrigation system built around 256 BCE by the engineer Li Bing that still functions today, channelling the Min River without a dam to control flooding and irrigate the surrounding plain, a rare case of a major ancient engineering achievement standing directly beside, and sharing UNESCO recognition with, a major religious mountain site rather than being treated as an unrelated separate monument.

As this entry's companion article covers

The broader claim that Qingcheng Shan marks the specific point at which Taoism shifted from philosophical schools of thought toward an organised religious institution with structured practice is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.