The new school, Jing-ming dao (淨明道), took a long time to evolve. A Taoist high priest, favored by the Emperor Gao Zong, was worried about the precarious relations between the Southern Sung and the Juchen, who moved their capital from Manchuria to Yenching (燕京) present-day Beijing in 1153 at the pinnacle of their power. Gao Zong waged a long futile war with the Juchen. Moreover, rebellion broke out in various parts of the Sung domains. He Zhengong, the priest, called on divine help.

There was a minor Taoist deity the Emperor Hui Zong of the Northern Sung Dynasty proclaimed as Shen-gong miao-zhi zhen-jun (功妙濟真君) or Divine merit miraculous-cure true majesty. That deity was none other than Xu Xun (許遜), a noted priest during the Dynasty of East Jin (東晉)(317-420). Xu became an immortal.

He turned to the miraculous cure of Xu Xun for help. He set up a special altar at his temple where he held a special service to invoke an incarnation of the immortal. Xu Xun, however, did not materialize. Instead He received Jin-ming zhong-xiao ta fa (淨明忠孝道) or Loyalty-filial piety pure and clear great law from Heaven, apparently with the assistance of Xu Xun.

With the great law as the base, He was able to develop a new canon, which was passed over finally to Liu Yu (劉玉), another high priest who actively spread the gospel of what he called Jing-ming dao or Pure and Clean Way during the reign of Kublai-khan of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1260-1295).

Marco Polo visited Peking or Beijing, which Kublai made the capital of his vast empire. Kublai also ordered two invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281, both of which were repelled thanks to two unlikely tropical storms the Japanese called Kamikaze or Divine Winds.

The Pure and Clear Way school advocated a merger of Taoism and Confucianism. It taught loyalty and filial piety rather than how to practice asceticism and/or produce pills of immortality. It was activist. The faithful were urged to help the living and pray for a happy afterlife of the dead. “To train to attain the way to mortality,” its teaching required the faithful to learn, “one has to train to attain the way of man first; to train to practice loyalty and filial piety in the way of man is to train to attain the way to immortality.”

In effect, the Pure and Clear Way is somewhat like a twentieth-century moral re-armament movement. As such, it was welcomed by the monarchs who tried to take advantage of it to consolidate their paternalistic imperial rule over China just as the Emperor Wu-ti of the West Han Dynasty (西漢武帝)(140-86 B.C.) made Confucianism the state religion of his empire.

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