The Great Offering of Renewal

The jiao is the major communal liturgy of Daoism, a rite of cosmic renewal performed by ordained Daoist priests (daoshi) on behalf of an entire community to restore harmony between it and the powers of heaven and earth. It is not a congregational service in the Western sense: the community sponsors and attends, but the essential work is done by the priests, who in the classical liturgy conduct an interior visualisation and a formal audience with the highest gods, submitting written documents that are then burned to be transmitted to heaven.

A full jiao unfolds over several days and is often mounted to consecrate a rebuilt temple or to mark a cyclical renewal of a locality, absorbing local deities and popular festivity around a Daoist ritual core. Kristofer Schipper and other scholars have shown how the rite preserves an extraordinarily old ritual grammar, the priest's body itself understood as the cosmos, the offering as a re-ordering of that cosmos, beneath a surface of regional variation. It is one of the clearest cases in which an ancient liturgical tradition survives embedded in living community religion.