A daoshi, a master of the Dao, is an ordained Daoist priest, and the term covers two rather different kinds of religious professional.
Two kinds of priest
The word names the ordained Daoist religious professional, and it spans the two great traditions of later Daoism: the married priests of the Zhengyi tradition, who live in the community and perform the liturgies of offering, petition and exorcism for the people, and the celibate monastics of the Quanzhen order, who live in monasteries and pursue inner cultivation and meditation. The daoshi of the one is a ritual specialist embedded in society; the daoshi of the other is a contemplative monk, so the single term holds together two quite distinct religious lives.
Ordination and registers
What makes a daoshi is ordination and, in the liturgical tradition, the conferral of the registers of gods and the ritual documents that authorise the priest to command the unseen bureaucracy, so the authority of the priest rests on that ordination and transmission rather than on any inherent status, and a rite performed without the proper ordination is held to be without effect. The Zhengyi priest traces his authority to the lineage of the Celestial Master, and the Quanzhen monk to his monastic ordination. The daoshi thus represents the ordained clergy of Daoism in its two forms, the community ritual master and the monastic contemplative, and the term marks the ordination that stands behind both.