Liu Tailin刘太琳

Style & Daoist names

Liu Tailin, Perfected of Grand Simplicity (posthumous honorific title)

Period

Late Ming

Dates

? — ?

School

Longmen (Dragon Gate) Lineage of Quanzhen, Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, Wudang Daoism

Role

Quanzhen Daoist PriestFounding Patriarch

Birthplace

Unknown (some say Shanxi)

Places of activity

Wudang Mountains

Life

Liu Tailin, a priest of the Longmen Lineage of Quanzhen in the late Ming, is venerated by the Daoist clergy of Wudang Mountains as the founding patriarch of the Wudang Longmen tradition. According to the genealogies and stele inscriptions of the various Wudang temples, he entered Wudang around the end of the Wanli era and first lived in ascetic retreat at the Taizi Cave (also called ‘Laojun Rock’) east of Zixiao Palace; later, supported by local believers and the local authorities, he revived the temples and opened altars to take disciples, introducing the monastic institutions, rules, and precept-transmission lineages of the northern Longmen Lineage of Quanzhen into Wudang Mountains, which had previously been dominated by Zhengyi and Qingwei, thereby forming the ‘Wudang Longmen’ branch. Thereafter most Wudang temples transmitted their lineages according to Longmen generation-name poems, coexisting with the Zhengyi priestly system that had been established since the Ming, forming the distinctive pattern of ‘Quanzhen and Zhengyi sharing the same mountain’ at Wudang, which has continued into modern times. Liu Tailin's dates of birth and death and his generational position within the lineage are given differently in different genealogies (some say he was of the seventh generation, others the eighth); the surviving records are mostly drawn from mountain gazetteers, stele inscriptions and temple genealogies compiled or revised in the Qing and Republican periods, which are internal transmission documents whose details are difficult to verify rigorously; but that the Wudang Longmen branch did take shape in the late Ming and early Qing is generally accepted by scholars.

Contributions & Influence

• Introduced the monastic institutions and generation-name lineage transmission of the Longmen Lineage of Quanzhen to Wudang Mountains
• Is venerated as the founding patriarch of the Wudang Longmen tradition, opening the Quanzhen branch at Wudang
• Revived the Wudang temples, establishing the pattern of Quanzhen and Zhengyi coexisting on the same mountain

Legends

The episodes of his years of ascetic retreat at the Taizi Cave (Laojun Rock) and of receiving divine protection that enabled him to build the temple are drawn from temple genealogies and later stele biographies, and belong to internal Daoist tradition.