Although the Huichang religious persecutions 會昌廢佛 erupted during Guanxiuʼs early teens, they seem to have had little effect on him, as we find no mention of them whatsoever in his writings. Several years later, at the age of twenty, he took formal monastic orders at Wuxie temple 五洩寺 (about sixty-five miles northeast of Lanxi). He was also growing as a poet. At the age of twenty-seven, after he bested more than one hundred competitors in a poetry contest on the occasion of Xuanyuan Jiʼs 軒轅集 departure for Mt. Luofu 羅浮山, he became one of the most highly regarded poets of his day.

The rest of his life would be characterized by wandering. From his twenties until his seventies, Guanxiu rarely lived in a given place for more than a year. Though he remained mostly in the Jiangnan area (understood to span from roughly Hangzhou in the east to Changsha 長沙 in the west), he made trips to the capitals, to multiple sacred mountains, and all across the empire, from modern Beijing in the north to modern Guangzhou in the south.

Mt. Lu 廬山 was a place he returned to time and again. It was the most important mountain in his native region of Jiangnan—one of the Five Marchmounts 五嶽 which formed the pillars of the world and home to numerous temples of multiple religious traditions. It was located within a dayʼs hike from Hongzhou 洪州—home to a flourishing lineage of meditative Buddhism (the so-called 'Hongzhou school'  洪州宗)—and also served as a central gathering point for the rapidly growing numbers of poet-monks. Guanxiu lived there for three spans of time, namely 861–863, 870–871, and 880–885. The mountain seems to have embodied all the same contradictions as Guanxiu himself: imbued with the histories of Buddhism, Daoism, and classicism; reclusive yet well-connected; serene yet active. It was where Huiyuan 慧遠 reportedly founded the White Lotus Society four centuries earlier, of which the painter Zong Bing 宗炳 was a member. It was where the poet Bai Juyi wrote verses with monks in the early ninth century. A generation after Guanxiu, his admirer and self-styled successor Xiumu 修睦 would serve as Saṃgha Rectifier 僧正 of the mountain for 30 years (899–929).

Perhaps the most important event of Guanxiuʼs life, and of the entire ninth century, was the Huang Chao Rebellion. The salt smuggler-turned-rebel commanderʼs sack and occupation of the capital, destroyed tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of lives and reduced the thousand-year-old capital of Chang'an to ruins. Guanxiu experienced the violence firsthand as the rebellion swept through his home county of Lanxi in July of 880, forcing him to flee to Piling 毘陵 a few dozen miles northeast. What he saw—the utter destruction of his childhood home—was seared into his memory and resurfaces time and again in his later writings.

During the next few decades, as the central government fell apart, the warlords who wrested control of various regions sought to establish their own legitimacy by attracting literary and religious professionals. Being both, Guanxiuʼs skills were in high demand. In 893, he moved to Hangzhou to seek patronage from Qian Liu 錢鏐 (852–932), the reigning military governor of the area and future founder of the splinter kingdom Wuyue 呉越. Guanxiu wrote the ruler a flattering poem which included the line, "Your lone sword shines like frost and snow over fourteen prefectures"  一劍霜寒十四州, referring to the fourteen administrative areas currently under his governorship. Qian demanded that Guanxiu change the 'fourteen' to 'forty'  四十 to accommodate his ambitions. The monk responded by quipping that poems, like the territory under oneʼs control, cannot be easily altered. Qian immediately banished him, and he took to the road once more.

Ten years later, in 903, he finally settled down in Chengdu, where the newly established King of Shu, Wang Jian 王建 (847–918), built a temple specifically for him and gave him the title Master Chanyue 禪月大師. There he attracted many disciples and reconnected with other intellectuals who had emigrated southwest, such as Wei Zhuang 韋莊 (836–910) and Du Guangting 杜光庭 (850–933). When he died in early 913, he was buried north of the city at a pagoda built in his honor. Eleven years later, his disciple Tanyu 曇域 collected and published Guanxiuʼs works, consisting of nearly one thousand poems, in woodblock edition, making him the first individual in the history of the world to have his collected poems printed.

Guanxiuʼs works cover a wide stylistic range, from tightly regulated occasional verse to exuberant ekphrasis in mixed meter. He was fond of mixing elements of different poetic styles, linguistic registers, and discursive traditions in search of new modes of expression. He set the standard for Buddhist 'mountain-dwelling poems'  山居詩, a subgenre in which Yongming Yanshou 永明延壽 (904–975), Shiwu Qinggong 石屋淸珙 (1272–1352), Hanshan Deqing 憨山德淸 (1546–1623), Hanyue Fazang 漢月法藏 (1573–1635), and Zekkai Chūshin 絕海中津 all wrote in later centuries.

Early critics regarded Guanxiu as the best of the poet-monks and as the true successor to poets as varied as Li Bai 李白 and Bai Juyi 白居易. In the Northern Song dynasty, Guanxiuʼs work fell out of favor with the literati, who often characterized his verse as too 'uncouth' for their tastes. Though these judgments reigned for nearly a thousand years, there have been efforts to revive his reputation in the last seventy. His modern biographer Kobayashi Taichirō, writing in 1947, compared his linguistic and imaginative experiments to those of Stéphane Mallarmé and his paintings to those of the surrealists.

Guanxiuʼs work was first collected as the Western Marchmount Collection 西岳集 around 896, then re-edited by his disciple Tanyu 曇域 in 924 as the Collection of Master Chanyue 禪月集. Though this version was said to contain 1000 poems, modern editions contain closer to 724. See Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳. T 2061.50.897b1.

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