The school puts its main emphasis on the practice of internal alchemy, in order to realise Tao, thus achieving a status of "an immortal and a buddha".
As E. A. Torchinov noted in the foreword to his translation of Zhang Bo-duan's "Chapters of Understanding Life", "With time the immortals came to be regarded as taoist counterparts of Buddhas, which have led to creation of syncretical schools (albeit dominated by Taoism) of Immortals and Buddhas (xianfo) in 16th-17th centuries; in these schools tenets of Buddhist doctrine were only perceived through the lens of taoist tradition.
[3] The Russian translation was made by V.V Maliavin and was included into "Ascending towards Tao: a Compendium (Chen Kai-guo, Zhen Shun-chao)"[4] under the title of "Book of Consciousness and Life".
A translation from the German by Carl F. Baynes as 'The Book of Consciousness and Life' was added to "The Secret of the Golden Flower" and published in 1962 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
One of the more widely known of such lines of transmission is the Qian Feng Pai or Thousand Peaks school, whose popularity stems from a book by Zhao Bi-chen "Secrets of cultivation of Life and Destiny".