Religious Taoism: Immortality and Ritual

Religious Taoism developed an elaborate pantheon that both absorbed older Chinese deities and reorganized them into a celestial bureaucracy paralleling the imperial administration. At its summit, many Taoist schools placed the Three Pure Ones (Sanqing) — the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Beginning (Yuanshi Tianzun), the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure (Lingbao Tianzun), and the Celestial Worthy of the Way and Its Power (Daode Tianzun), the last of these a divinized Laozi. Popular devotion also centered on the Jade Emperor (Yudi), imagined as the supreme administrator of the heavenly bureaucracy, and on the Eight Immortals (Baxian), a group of legendary transcendent figures whose stories, blending humor, moral instruction, and wonder, remain widely known in Chinese popular culture. Underlying this pantheon was the goal of xian, "immortality" or "transcendence," the aspiration to become a being who has transformed the body and refined the self beyond ordinary mortality.