Daoshi

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.

Organised Daoist religious life, including the ordination and training of daoshi, was suppressed almost to the point of extinction on mainland China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when temples were closed, damaged or repurposed, ritual texts and images destroyed, and priests forced to abandon religious practice, marry, or take secular work, a rupture severe enough that a great deal of transmitted ritual knowledge and training that had continued for centuries came close to being lost entirely within a single generation.

Daoism has revived substantially on the mainland since the 1980s under a policy of managed toleration, with reopened and reconstructed temples, new ordinations of daoshi, and a state-recognised China Daoist Association that trains clergy and administers officially sanctioned temples, though the relationship between the tradition and the state remains one of oversight rather than full independence, since religious organisations operating openly in China do so within limits set by the government. Daoist communities in Taiwan and among the overseas Chinese diaspora, by contrast, maintained unbroken and unsupervised transmission of the Zhengyi and other lineages throughout this period, and have since become an important resource for mainland temples seeking to recover ritual practices interrupted by the Cultural Revolution.