The Daoshi's Ritual And Community Functions

A daoshi performs a wide range of ritual functions depending on lineage and local tradition, including jiao, large communal offering rituals intended to renew cosmic and community harmony, funerary rites guiding the deceased through the Daoist afterlife bureaucracy, exorcistic rituals addressing malevolent spirits or misfortune, and, particularly within Zhengyi practice, individual ritual services performed for lay families on request, a pattern of on-demand ritual service delivery that has kept Zhengyi priests closely integrated into everyday community religious life across much of Chinese folk religious practice, which overlaps considerably with organized Daoism in everyday popular practice even where the two are formally distinguished by scholars.

The Celestial Masters lineage specifically maintains a hereditary succession of its own highest leadership position, traditionally passed within a single family line claiming descent from the tradition's second-century founder, an arrangement historically centered at Longhu Mountain in China before the sixty-third Celestial Master relocated to Taiwan following the Chinese Communist Party's 1949 victory, after which the mainland lineage's continuity became a matter of some historical complexity distinct from the ordinary training and ordination of individual daoshi across both Quanzhen and Zhengyi traditions more broadly.