Life
Qiu Chuji joined Wang Chongyang as a teenager and outlived him by more than half a century. The branch he founded, Longmen — the Dragon Gate — became the dominant monastic lineage of Chinese Taoism and remains the one most often named in discussions of neigong.
His famous act came in his seventies. Summoned by Genghis Khan, he crossed Central Asia to meet him, and used the audience to argue against unnecessary killing and in favour of governing rather than plundering. He returned with an imperial exemption from taxation and corvée for his order — the most consequential thing any Taoist has achieved in a conversation.
The Longmen curriculum of seated work, retreat and inner alchemy is set out in the modern literature in enough detail to be recognisable to any reader of this archive: the same fields, the same gates, the same three refinements, worked with more supervision and far more modest claims. See Wang Liping.
