Jingming Dao: Xu Xun, Xishan, and Loyal-Filial Teaching
Jingming Dao is more than a relabeling of Confucian loyalty and filiality. Its teaching links inward clarity, ethical conduct, scriptures, registers, and the Xishan temple landscape. The beginning of its distinct lineage is described differently in Song and Yuan records.
What makes up the Jingming tradition?
Teaching, transmission, cult, and place together explain the tradition.
An inward ethical ideal connected to loyalty, filiality, and care for others.
Xu Xun and Xishan
The tradition honors Xu Xun and centers important memory on Xishan temples.
Loyalty and filial conduct
Moral virtues are presented as part of the tradition's religious life.
Registers and liturgy
Scriptures, registers, and fasting rites accompany its ethical teaching.
Daoist and other vocabularies
Later explanations engage Neo-Confucian and three-teaching language while remaining Daoist.
How did Jingming Dao take shape?
Claims about its founder give different weight to Song antecedents and Yuan organization.
- 01Eastern Jin narrative
Xu Xun becomes an ancestral figure
Later accounts mingle remembered history with narratives of an immortal.
- 02Tang–Song
The Xishan cult continues
Temples and stories of Xu Xun provide a local religious setting.
- 03Early Southern Song
He Zhengong's transmission is reported
Sources describe a Jingming teaching before its later organization was fixed.
- 041280s–1290s
Liu Yu reorganizes the teaching
A clearer lineage identity and written doctrinal framework emerge.
- 05After the Yuan
Later transmission and integration
The tradition spreads and eventually relates closely to broader Zhengyi networks.
Cult, lineage, and later affiliation
These are connected historical layers rather than three names for one moment.
Xu Xun cult
- Meaning
- Local and wider devotion centered on Xu Xun's memory.
- Focus
- Xishan, an ancestral figure, and regional society.
- Distinction
- Older than the formal name Jingming Dao.
Jingming Dao
- Meaning
- A Song–Yuan Daoist tradition of ethics and transmitted liturgy.
- Focus
- Liu Yu, doctrine, registers, and temples.
- Distinction
- Not only a secular moral society.
Zhengyi
- Meaning
- A wider Daoist framework later incorporating many liturgical lineages.
- Focus
- Transmission and broader institutional affiliation.
- Distinction
- Later association does not erase Jingming's separate history.
Where to go next
Begin with Xu Xun and Xishan, then study Liu Yu and Jingming texts before comparing related Daoist lineages.
Names and variants
- Simplified
- 净明道
- Traditional
- 淨明道
- Other names
- Jingming Tradition, Jingming School, Jing Ming Dao, Jingming Zhongxiao Dao
- Pinyin
- Jìng míng dào
- English
- Jingming Dao
Source material and earlier definitions
English textThe reviewed English overview and source notes remain available below1 section · 340 words
Jingming describes an inward condition of purity and clarity. Zhongxiao, part of the tradition's fuller name, refers to loyalty and filial responsibility. These are complementary emphases: the condition of the mind and the conduct through which it is expressed. The tradition treats moral relationships as central to the Daoist path rather than as an optional addition to ritual or cultivation.
Xu Xun, also known as Xu Jingyang, is the revered ancestral master. His cult and the sacred landscape of Xishan provided the setting for the tradition's development. Accounts of his divine transmissions belong to its religious genealogy; they should be distinguished from the later organization of communities using the Jingming name.
The Chinese sources describe an early Southern Song community at Xishan and a later reorganization under Liu Yu around the beginning of the Yuan. They differ over some names and precise dates. The broad distinction is clearer: earlier devotion to Xu Xun and related teachings preceded Liu Yu's adoption and promotion of Jingming as a named tradition.
Huang Yuanji continued the teaching after Liu Yu. Later accounts also associate Xu Yi, Zhao Yizhen, and Liu Yuanran with its transmission. Relationships with scholar-officials and the Zhang Celestial Masters helped give Jingming a place in Yuan and Ming religious life. Its teachers also had contacts with Quanzhen Dao; these connections did not make every lineage identical.
Jingming draws together Daoist cultivation, Confucian ethical concerns, and ideas expressed in Buddhist language. Its use of loyalty and filial responsibility reflects the social and intellectual setting in which it developed. The teaching also retained ritual and contemplative dimensions related to Lingbao Tradition. Describing it simply as Confucian morality would miss this Daoist religious setting.
For comparison with other traditions, three features are especially useful: devotion to Xu Xun, the Xishan setting, and the connection between inward clarity and outward ethical life. Jingming later became closely associated with Zhengyi Dao and interacted with Quanzhen lineages. The surviving accounts are less complete for later succession, so they should not be extended into an invented continuous genealogy.
References
- [1]Dictionary of Daoism