Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
Descendants' temples and public ones.
A zisunmiao belongs to a family or a master's line and is inherited; a conglin is a public monastery where any properly ordained Quanzhen cleric can present credentials and be housed. The distinction decides who may walk in and stay. Zhengyi priests frequently have no temple at all and work from an altar at home.
⚖ contested within
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Two clergies, one Way.
Zhengyi priests inherit the craft, marry, and serve the villages; Quanzhen monastics renounce and keep the mountain temples — Taoism kept both answers.
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Who pays.
Incense money in the box, candles and paper goods sold at the door, per-household subscriptions when a jiao is held, and fees for funerals, house blessings and talismans. A lay committee holds the money and hires the priests — in Taiwan and Fujian those committees are locally powerful and often politically connected.
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The Celestial Masters, and the argument about who is one.
The office has passed by descent in the Zhang family for a claimed sixty-four generations. The 63rd fled to Taiwan in 1949 and died in 1969 without an undisputed successor, and rival claimants have been recognised by Taiwan, by mainland bodies and by different branches of the family ever since. The ancestral seat at Mount Longhu is in Jiangxi.
⚖ contested within
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The state, and the association.
The Chinese Taoist Association, founded in 1957, is the channel through which temples register, clergy are certified and restoration is funded. It was shut down entirely during the Cultural Revolution, when temples were wrecked and clergy forced back into lay life. Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora were never interrupted, and in several respects preserve more.
⚖ contested within
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The temple on the street.
A committee of local men manages the god's money, hires the opera troupe, organises the procession and decides who carries what. This is the real unit of Chinese popular religion, and it does not sort neatly — the same committee will engage Taoist priests, Buddhist monks and a spirit medium for different jobs without any sense of inconsistency.
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Dividing the incense.
A new temple is founded by taking ash from the censer of an established one, which makes it a daughter house obliged to return periodically and renew the connection. The result is a traceable network running from Fujian to Taiwan to Southeast Asia and North America — and the Taiwanese Mazu pilgrimages back to Meizhou have been politically freighted since the 1980s.
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