Cultivation, Salvation, and Obligation: Quanzhen Daoist Thoughts on Family Abandonment

This article explores one of the great paradoxes of imperial China: the rise of religions that required qijia (family abandonment) in a society that privileged a patriarchal family system. Grounded in the case of Quanzhen Daoism, the article examines representations of qijia in poetry, hagiographies, inscriptions, and plays to explain the distinctive ways in which this nonscriptural tradition of renunciation configured its relationship with families. It demonstrates that there existed ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward the issue of family, particularly that of parents, in different genres of Quanzhen texts. This ambivalence speaks to irreconcilable family-monastery tensions as the Quanzhen order transformed from a local movement with a few ascetic elites to a nationwide monastic order in the early thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century qijia narratives, Quanzhen apologists deployed flexible renderings of filial piety to validate personal and universal salvation—instead of familial salvation—as the principal goal of a Quanzhen monastic career. Neither the Quanzhen ideology nor its monastic institution truly addressed the interests of natural families. As such, the Quanzhen tradition contrasts sharply with the medieval Buddhism and Daoism, whose apologists conceptualized the family-monastery relations to harness the family interests to the needs of the churches. Despite posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal family system, Quanzhen Daoism developed into one of the two major Daoist schools after the thirteenth century. Its success resulted from the Quanzhen order’s salvationist contribution to the crumbling northern Chinese society under Mongol conquest, as well as its initiatives producing texts to promote pro-Quanzhen narratives.