Daoshi

A daoshi is ordained within one of Daoism's distinct institutional lineages, each with its own requirements, ritual texts and specific relationship between monastic and married clergy: the Quanzhen, Complete Reality, tradition, established in the twelfth century, requires celibate monastic ordination and communal temple life broadly comparable in structure, though not in specific doctrine, to Buddhist monasticism, while the older Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, tradition, tracing its own institutional continuity back to the Celestial Masters lineage founded by Zhang Daoling in the second century CE, permits married, non-monastic priests who typically live among the lay community they serve rather than in a separate monastery.

Ordination in either lineage involves formal transmission of ritual texts and liturgical authority from an already-ordained master to the initiate, together with the conferral of a register, a formal document recording the specific spirits, deities and ritual authorities the newly ordained daoshi is now empowered to invoke and command in ritual, a concept central to Daoist ritual practice's understanding of priestly authority as involving genuine, textually documented command over specific spiritual forces rather than a more general pastoral or teaching authority alone.

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.