Yang Changxuan is from Shanxi Province. According to the "Great Mountain Taihe Mountain Annals" of the Qing Dynasty, Yang passed the imperial examination in the thirteenth year of the Chongzhen reign of the Ming Dynasty (1640 AD). Not long after, he resigned from his official position and entered Mount Hua. It was relocated to Songshan Mountain in Henan Province again. Later, he retired to Wudang and moved three times to a cave in Beiyan (seventy li northwest of Tianzhu Peak), where he consumed Polygonatum odoratum and Atractylodes for six years. He became friends with Bai Yuanfu, who lived on the mountain of Wudang, as Taoist friends. Later, foreseeing that Wudang Mountain was about to suffer from military disasters (during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Wudang Mountain was repeatedly hit by wars), he traveled around the Yangtze River and Han River basins. During this period, he recited sutras for Yu, the deputy chief of the Censorate (a high-ranking official appointed by the imperial court to be stationed in a provincial government), and prayed for blessings and disaster relief for the local area. He once compiled and published the "Collected True Works of Liu Dongyang" (Liu Dongyang refers to Liu Daoming, a high-ranking Taoist priest of Wudang in the Yuan Dynasty). The details of the funeral are unknown. Before his death, he, along with Bai Yuanfu and Zhang Jingming, restored most of the Wudang palaces and temples that had been destroyed by war with the donations of CAI Gong, Wang Gong, Wang Gong, and Ga Gong, the General of Pacification.