Yiguandao stands within the same broad religious landscape as Chinese folk religion, yet it shapes that heritage into a more self-consciously systematized path. It draws from the shared reservoir of Confucian ethics, Taoist cosmology, and Buddhist soteriology, and it participates in the familiar world of incense-filled altars, ancestor veneration, and a multi-tiered cosmos populated by deities such as Guanyin, Maitreya, the Jade Emperor, and various immortals. In this sense, it does not stand apart from Chinese folk religion so much as crystallize many of its diffuse elements into a more unified doctrinal vision. The moral cultivation prized in village temples and household shrines is retained, but framed within a more explicit teaching about karma, rebirth, and universal salvation.

At the same time, Yiguandao belongs to the lineage of Chinese redemptive or salvationist sects, rather than to purely local cults. It shares with these movements a claim to heavenly mandate, a strong emphasis on moral reform, and the use of initiation rituals that transmit the Dao in a distinct, esoteric manner. Its veneration of figures such as Confucius and Laozi as spiritual guides, and its devotion to deities like the Original Mother, align it with other sectarian traditions that seek to reveal an ultimate, unifying truth behind the Three Teachings and popular worship. This places Yiguandao in a translocal, missionary-style framework that differs from the more decentralized, temple-based patterns of ordinary folk practice.

Ritually, Yiguandao both mirrors and disciplines the practices of Chinese folk religion. It makes use of incense, altars, spirit-writing traditions, and communal vegetarian gatherings, yet tends to standardize these into a relatively uniform liturgy. Practices that are common in local settings—such as fortune-telling or more unregulated forms of spirit-mediumship—are often downplayed or brought under stricter moral and doctrinal guidance. Scripture study, meditation, and ethical self-cultivation are elevated as central means of aligning with the Dao, while everyday customs like ancestral rites may be reinterpreted through its own theological lens rather than rejected outright.

In its self-understanding, Yiguandao often regards the diverse expressions of Chinese folk religion as partial or fragmented glimpses of a deeper, underlying reality. It presents itself as the “Way of the One Unity,” a comprehensive synthesis that both grows out of and seeks to transcend the local cults and practices from which it emerged. Thus its relationship to other Chinese folk religions is neither simply oppositional nor merely imitative: it is a relationship of continuity and reconfiguration, in which shared deities, rituals, and cosmologies are gathered up into a more organized, universalist project of salvation and moral renewal.