Fulu

[4][5][6] These practitioners are called 符籙派; fúlù pài; 'the fulu sect', an informal group made up of priests from different schools of Taoism.

[9] According to scholar Yang Zhaohua, while a number of the earliest known Taoist talismans were "simple and legible", later examples had become deliberately cryptic in order to signal their divinity.

[10] Fulu tend to have irregular strokes that resemble Chinese characters, often elongating existing words while incorporating non-character symbols.

[3] The method of writing down these characters is generally passed down in secret from a Taoist priest to their disciples and treated as a special craft with which to communicate to local deities and spirits.

[3] According to Fudan University professor Ge Zhaoguang, the unreadability of Taoist talismanic is a type of 'linguistic archaism' deliberately designed to be incomprehensible, as "a veil of unfathomable otherwordliness" that allows only a small number of qualified clergy to adequately produce them.

[14] Known as 祝由; zhuyou in medical writings, the use of talismans enjoyed official support between the Sui and the late Ming dynasties, though seeing decline when rival acupuncture practices were recognised by the imperial court as a medicinal discipline in the 6th century.