People
Historical figures with history, tradition and legend clearly separated.
Bai Yuchan (白玉蟾)
Bai Yuchan 白玉蟾 (1134–1229) — the child prodigy from Hainan who failed the examinations, fled after a killing, served Chen Nan nine years, and then did what the southern lineage had never done: stopped transmitting one-to-one and built the Nan Zong school. The poet-sage who ran through the streets half-mad, and the one who made the thunder-rites answer to the inner work.
Chen Nan (陈楠)
Chen Nan 陈楠 (d. 1213) — the barrel-hooper of Huizhou who became the fourth patriarch of the southern lineage: mud-pills for the sick, thunder-rites from a mountain god, poems composed drunk, and the widening of the school — from one-to-one transmission to four named disciples. The master who taught Bai Yuchan, and whose own poem names the date, the place, and the heir.
Chen Tuan (陈抟)
Chen Tuan 陈抟 (871–989) — the 'Sleeping Immortal' of Mount Hua, whose two imperial audiences became the tradition's textbook cases of the Daoist refusing to be used: no alchemy for the emperor, no office for the hermit.
Cheng Xuanying (成玄英)
Cheng Xuanying 成玄英 (608–669) — the Tang Daoist who wrote the second half of the standard Zhuangzi: the sub-commentary that turned Guo Xiang's notes into the Nanhua zhenjing zhushu, and the thinker who built the Chongxuan (twofold-dark) reading of the Laozi from a single phrase — 玄之又玄, the dark that is dark again.
Fu Yi (傅奕)
Fu Yi 傅奕 (555–639) — the Tang court astronomer who tried to have Buddhism abolished, and who produced the Daodejing's most respected ancient recension: the one whose textual instinct the whole later tradition of critical Laozi scholarship descends from.
Ge Hong
Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343/363), author of the Baopuzi — the fourth-century scholar who collected the sitting traditions of his day and gave this site its primary source for taixi and shouyi.
Guo Xiang (郭象)
Guo Xiang 郭象 (c. 252–312) — the man whose edition of the Zhuangzi is the Zhuangzi. Every quote on this site passes through his scissors and his commentary; the tradition has argued for seventeen centuries about how much of the book's meaning is his.
Heshang Gong (河上公)
Heshang Gong 河上公, 'the Elder by the River' — the legendary name on the earliest surviving Laozi commentary, the chapter-and-verse edition that turned the Daodejing into a manual for governing the body.
Kou Qianzhi (寇谦之)
Kou Qianzhi 寇谦之 (365–448), the Northern Celestial Master reformer who brought Daoism into a northern imperial court — the man behind the 415 revelation, the de-Zhang reforms, and the first emperor to take Daoist registers.
Laozi
Laozi 老子: the traditional author of the Daodejing — what the Shiji biography says, what it admits it does not know, and the deification of the Old Master in religious Daoism.
Li Ao (李翱)
Li Ao 李翱 (772–841) — the Tang Confucian who spent his life opposing Buddhism and Daoism, and then, as Langzhou prefect, climbed the mountain to a Chan master and wrote the tradition's most famous poem about things being exactly where they are.
Lu Xiujing (陆修静)
Lu Xiujing 陆修静 (406–477) — the cataloger of the Daoist canon: compiler of the first complete scripture directory, the Three Caverns classification still used by later Daoist canons, and the reformer who gave southern Celestial Masters Daoism its rites and its library.
Ma Yu (马钰)
Ma Yu 马钰 (1123–1183), style name Danyang Zi — the wealthy host who became Wang Chongyang's first disciple: the man known as 'Half of Ninghai' gave away the fortune, funded the Quanzhen Hermitage that named the school, followed the master west, buried him, and kept a three-year mourning so severe the records still quote it. Quanzhen's second patriarch, and its most expensive convert.
Qiu Chuji (丘处机)
Qiu Chuji 丘处机 (1148–1227) — the youngest of the Seven, the founder of the Longmen lineage, the seventy-four-year-old who rode west to meet Genghis Khan, and the man whose famous 'one word to stop the killing' is both the tradition's favorite story and a documented historical dispute. The organizer arc's last act: the one who scaled the teaching.
Sima Chengzhen
Sima Chengzhen 司马承祯 (647–735): the Shangqing patriarch of Tiantai who wrote the Zuowang Lun, taught three Tang emperors, and systematized Daoist seated meditation into seven stages.
Sun Bu'er (孙不二)
Sun Bu'er (1119–1182), original name Sun Fuchun — the only woman among the Quanzhen Seven Perfected, wife of Ma Yu, founder of the Qingjing (Clear-Stillness) lineage, remembered as Immortal Lady Sun. The Seven Cranes birth legend, the couple who became fellow disciples, and the retreat in the Fengxian'gu cave at Luoyang where she died in sitting.
Tan Chuduan (谭处端)
Tan Chuduan (1123–1185), courtesy Boyu, dharma-name Chuduan, hao Changzhenzi — the Quanzhen Seven Perfected's member who came to Wang Chongyang on crutches and left them at the door. The wind-paralysis cure story, the Luoyang years of 'practicing the mind amid wine and flowers,' the third patriarchate, the lineage that taught renunciation was not required — and the teacher who recorded 'loyalty, filial piety, and mercy surpass leaving home.'
Tao Hongjing (陶弘景)
Tao Hongjing 陶弘景 (456–536), the compiler of the Zhengao and the 'prime minister in the mountains' — the scholar-adept who turned the Yang–Xu household notes into the charter documents of the Shangqing tradition.
Wang Bi (王弼)
Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249) — the twenty-three-year-old genius whose Laozi commentary became the book's earliest surviving philosophical reading, and the other half of the received text's dual foundation.
Wang Chongyang (王重阳)
Wang Chongyang 王重阳 (1112/1113–1170) — the founder who organized what the alchemical poets had only taught: the Quanzhen order, built on inner alchemy, monastic discipline, and the doctrine that the three teachings are one — the last and most institutional of the tradition's great organizers.
Wang Chuyi (王处一)
Wang Chuyi 王处一 (1142–1217) — the Iron-Foot Immortal, Quanzhen's ascetic wing: fatherless from childhood, devoted to his mother, taken by Wang Chongyang in 1168 and sent into nine years of solitary mountain practice, nicknamed for what he did with his feet. The hermit-severity answer to his fellow disciple Qiu Chuji's court path — one master, two ways.
Wei Huacun (魏华存)
Wei Huacun 魏华存 (251/252–334), the Lady of the Southern Marchmount — the aristocratic woman behind the Shangqing tradition and the traditional attribution of the Huangting Jing: recorded history, deification, and text-attribution kept in separate layers.
Yan Zun (严遵)
Yan Zun 严遵, also Zhuang Zun 庄遵, courtesy name Junping (d. c. 6 CE, aged over ninety) — the Chengdu fortune-teller whose Laozi zhiguì is the earliest surviving Western Han commentary on the Daodejing, and whose counter was the lecture hall where Yang Xiong learned the old book.
Yang Xi (杨羲)
Yang Xi 杨羲 (fl. c. 364–370), the medium of the Shangqing revelations — the young Celestial Master adept through whom, the tradition records, the Lady Wei transmitted the Highest Clarity scriptures at Jurong in the 360s.
Zhang Boduan (张伯端)
Zhang Boduan 张伯端 (984–1082) — the poet of inner alchemy: author of the Wuzhen pian, the verse classic that gave Daoist self-cultivation its body-first doctrine (nature and life, both cultivated, life first), and the founder of the Southern lineage's line of transmission.
Zhang Daoling (张道陵)
Zhang Daoling 张道陵 (traditionally 34–156 CE) — the founder of the Way of the Celestial Masters, the first organized Daoist church on record: a recorded movement with a founding revelation, twenty-four parishes, and a hereditary line that continues today.
Zhang Sanfeng (张三丰)
Zhang Sanfeng 张三丰 — the most famous and least documented of the Daoist patriarchs: recorded in the official Ming history as an eccentric mountain recluse the emperors searched for, credited by later tradition as the founder of Wudang martial arts and a master of inner alchemy, and claimed by no reliable early source for the things his name now carries.
Zhiyi (智顗)
Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), the Tiantai founder whose beginner's manual supplied the operating language of Chinese sitting — the five adjustments and the four faulty breaths.
Zhuang Zhou
Zhuang Zhou 庄周, Master Zhuang: the lacquer-garden clerk who refused a kingdom's prime ministership — the Shiji biography, the butterfly dream, and how to separate the person from the parables.