Xu Baoguang was born in 470, in Zhejiang province. She was born into the Zhang family. Her father died when she was three years old and her mother moved back to Yongjia, almost 200 miles to the south. There, her mother remarried; her second husband belonged to the Xu family so the child came to be known as Xu Baoguang.
When Xu Baoguang was ten years old she left her family in order to prepare for a religious career under the supervision of a Daoist master. She traveled back north to Yuyao, near Qiantang, and eventually set up her own meditation hall as a center for Celestial Master type ritual activity. Seemingly acting as the family head, in 498 she took charge of the upbringing of her one-year-old nephew Zhou Ziliang.
After twenty-four years, however, her simple religious life came to an abrupt end in 504 when she was forced to reenter lay life and marry in response to an anti-Daoist edict published by Emperor Wu (r. 502-549) of the Liang dynasty soon after his conversion to Buddhism. In 505 or 508, when she was in her late thirties, Xu Baoguang gave birth to a son (Zhu Shansheng) and left her husband, taking her son and Zhou Ziliang back to Yongjia.
Xu Baoguang intensified her religious practice and became an important member of Tao Hongjing’s religious community. Xu Baoguang propagated clashed with the new rituals practiced among Tao Hongjing’s followers, who engaged in intensive and often drug-supported meditation, during which they went on spiritual journeys and met with fanciful immortal figures. Later Zhou Ziliang accused her of attempting to ruin his spiritual career, arguing that by demanding his support in the writing and application of talismans she forced him into contact with minor spirits and thus obstructed his communication with deities of “supreme purity.” Tao Hongjing reinforced these accusations when he proposed that the conflict with Xu Baoguang was one of the reasons for the young man’s suicide, by means of a lethal drug, in 516.
Xu Baoguang was described as “by nature extremely upright,” she claimed never since childhood to have harmed even an insect nor unnecessarily picked plants or flowers and to have eaten but one meal a day. She also admitted to being of a stern disposition and to being a strict disciplinarian.
There is no information about Xu Baoguang's husband, however, she had a son, Zhu Shansheng. She also had a nephew Zhou Ziliang.
