I get told I’m not a real Daoist priest because I’m married. Usually the person says it and then looks embarrassed.
They are checking what they see against a picture they already carry, and in that picture a Daoist priest lives in a mountain temple, eats no meat and marries no one.
That picture is fine. It’s a picture of Quanzhen, and I’m not Quanzhen.
A thousand years apart
Zhengyi comes down from the Celestial Masters at the end of the Han. Quanzhen came much later, in the Jin–Yuan period, and set its rules from scratch.
The Way of the Celestial Masters grew up inside ordinary village society. The people in it had land, households, weddings and funerals, and the organisation handled their faith and their rites rather than their withdrawal from any of that. So Zhengyi has had householder priests since its founding, not as a later concession.
Quanzhen arose in a different world and took the monastic road: living in temples, keeping a rule, ordaining by the transmission of precepts. (English makes me pick ‘priest’ or ‘monk’. Neither fits. I use priest.)
Diet and marriage
Quanzhen is vegetarian and celibate. That is a hard rule.
Zhengyi requires no vegetarianism, permits marriage, and has nothing to say about holding another occupation. Mine is software.
Most people’s next sentence is: so Zhengyi is the lax one?
The question assumes both schools are running the same race at different speeds. They judge the work itself differently. Quanzhen’s centre is inner alchemy, the joint cultivation of nature and life, which takes the practitioner’s own body and mind as the vessel being refined. If your own body is the equipment, you keep it clean. Food and sex both count as variables. Zhengyi’s competence sits in talismanic registers and liturgical rite: submitting petitions on behalf of other people, conducting ceremonies, handling the traffic upward. It passes down by the conferral of registers, master to disciple, with a dharma name and a generation character attached. Mine is Shan. That road doesn’t require cutting yourself off from ordinary life.
Zhengyi is not short of rules either. There is fasting and ablution before a rite, and during those days the restrictions apply as written. The liturgy reads like a runbook: when the altar opens, which direction you face, which passage is chanted, which document goes up and in what form.
Registers and precepts are different documents
Zhengyi confers registers. Quanzhen transmits precepts. Outside the tradition the two words get used interchangeably, which muddles both.
A register grants authority. It sets out which spirit-officials you may summon and which grade of rite you are cleared to perform, so in plain terms it is a credential with a permissions list attached. Precepts work the other way round. Take them and you are a monastic within that system; they hold you from then on and they don’t come off.
That is a coarse way to put it and I would defend only the broad shape of it. If a Quanzhen priest wanted to correct the second half, I would take the correction.
What the generation character means
People hear “Shan generation” and assume it is a rank. Zhengyi keeps a poem of generation characters, and when you receive registers your dharma name takes the character belonging to whichever generation your transmission places you in. You cannot award yourself one. Someone confers it, it appears on the certificate, and your master keeps the record at his end.
I get asked what Shan is equivalent to. Third grade, fifth grade, something in that shape. It’s a position in a line. There’s nothing to convert it into.
The half I can’t speak to
I have never lived in a Quanzhen monastery. What the daily rule feels like from the inside, how an ordination hall is actually run, when the boards are struck in the morning: I have all of that from books and from listening to other people. When someone asks me about those details I tell them I don’t know and point them at a Quanzhen priest.
Most people’s impression comes from the movies
Overseas the information gap is wider than people back home assume. A large share of what anyone here pictures on hearing “Daoist priest” comes from Hong Kong cinema of the eighties: yellow robe, peachwood sword, a paper talisman slapped on a hopping corpse’s forehead, and the corpse holds still.
If I could do that I would have changed careers.
I have watched those films and enjoyed them. The trouble is what survives the watching. People keep the sword and the talisman and lose the fact that both of them sit at the end of a long piece of liturgy the camera has no patience for.
Two more questions, specific to Sydney
“Do you have a temple?” and “Why aren’t you in robes?”
No temple. Most Zhengyi priests in Australia work the same way: an altar at home, and you travel out when there is a rite to perform. Vestments come out for the rite itself, a handful of times a year, and the rest of the time I dress like everybody else. What the Chinese community here mostly wants is blessing rites and rites for the dead, and both of those are ordinary Zhengyi work. The phone runs hot in the seventh lunar month and around Qingming, and there is not much room in the calendar those weeks.
In Australia, if a person calls himself a Daoist priest, there is no register to look him up in. Asking is the only instrument you have. Ask who ordained him and where the certificate is. That usually settles it. If the answers stay vague, weigh that for yourself. Families in the diaspora have paid real money to learn this.
What I don’t do
Ritual does not stand in for a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant. I promise no supernatural outcome, and I do not take work that involves pronouncing on someone’s life, death or fortune from a distance. Anything touching illness, the law or money, go to the professional whose job it is.
Back to the question. I am married, there is a mortgage, I write code on weekdays and put on vestments when the calendar calls for a rite. None of that says anything about how well I do the work. It tells you which school I belong to, which is what the question was about.