Shangqing School
The mountain near Nanjing where Tao Hongjing had his retreat, Maoshan (茅山 – fr), today remains the principal seat of the school.
Recruiting from high social classes, during the Tang dynasty, Shangqing was the dominant school of Daoism, and its influence is found in literature of the time period.
Three decades after her death, from 364 to 370, Yang Xi (330-c. 386) was believed to have had revelations[1] "aided almost certainly by cannabis" (Joseph Needham 1980:213) and "received...scriptural and hagiographic literature" from zhenren xian[1] who brought him into a visitation experience.
The immortals and spirits[citation needed] that appeared to him were from "the heaven of Shang-ch'ing" and stated that Imperial China and all other governments in the world would end and be replaced by a theocratic Taoist empire.
[1] The revelation began to spread in aristocratic circles of South China, and eventually Tao Hongjing, advisor to the princes of Qi, joined the group.
He commented upon, and compiled the Shangqing texts, and developed a well-structured system consisting of a pantheon and new ways to reach immortality that depended upon meditation.
The Daoist encyclopedia published under the patronage of the Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou (561-578) placed a great deal of importance on the Shangqing texts.
During the second half of the Northern Song dynasty, the influence of Shangqing Daoism declined at the court, but still remained, changing its focus to rituals and talismans.
At the end of the 20th century, the Taiping Rebellion, the Japanese army and the Cultural Revolution have resulted in the complete destruction of the temples on Maoshan.
However, the absorption of elixirs and other potions aimed to attain immortality was largely replaced in the Song period by internal alchemy that was more linked to meditation techniques (see the Zuowanglun).
Some members of the school during the time of its apocalypticism believed those who would be saved would only be elite Daoists who previously used cultivation techniques or studied them in attempts to become xian.
Dong can be translated as cave or grotto, but also has other meanings such as ‘to communicate.’[2] When the texts were dictated to Yang Xi, the immortals told him that they were the condensed form of primordial qi, and existed before the world was born.
[1] Although several sources confirm that the Dadong Zhenjing dates back to the 4th century CE, and earlier fragments exist, the oldest extant complete text, known as the Perfected Scripture of the Great Cavern of Highest Clarity (Shangqing dadong zhenjing 上清大洞真經), was edited by the twenty-third patriarch, Zhu Ziying, and collated in the 13th century by the thirty-eighth patriarch, Jiang Zongying (d.
