The Quanzhen school of Taoism required its ordained monks and nuns to live celibate in monastery halls, distinct from married village priests
Quanzhen Taoism created something structurally new within Chinese religion, a celibate, monastery-based clergy modeled partly on Buddhist institutional forms, existing alongside an older Taoist priesthood that had always married and passed roles down through families.
The Quanzhen, Complete Perfection or Complete Reality, school was founded in the twelfth century by Wang Chongyang in Shandong province, during a period of Jin dynasty rule over northern China, and represented a significant institutional departure from earlier Taoist practice. Where older Taoist lineages, particularly the Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, tradition still active in Wang's own time, were led by married priests who lived among ordinary villagers and often inherited their ritual roles through family lines, Quanzhen required its ordained monks and nuns to renounce marriage and family, live communally in monastery halls, and follow a disciplined daily schedule closer in structure to Buddhist monasticism than to prior Taoist norms. This borrowing was not incidental; Wang Chongyang explicitly taught a synthesis of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian elements, and Quanzhen's monastic celibacy reflects that Buddhist institutional influence layered onto a distinctly Taoist theology of internal cultivation. The distinction between celibate Quanzhen monastics and married Zhengyi priests persists in Chinese Taoism today, meaning Taoism, unlike most traditions in this collection, contains two parallel and coexisting models of religious life rather than one.
Celibate Quanzhen monastics and married Zhengyi priests remain the two principal living branches of institutional Taoism in China today.