Fashi

A fashi, a master of rites, is a specialist in the more overtly magical and exorcistic side of Chinese religious practice, and the office sits at the meeting of Daoism and popular religion.

Rites, healing and exorcism

The fashi performs the practical ritual work that ordinary people most often need, the exorcism of malign spirits, the healing of affliction, the protection of a household, and the resolution of disturbances traced to the unseen world, drawing on a repertoire of spells, talismans, gestures and the summoning of divine generals and spirit-soldiers. The office is more martial and demonstrative than that of the classical Daoist priest, and the fashi is often distinguished from the daoshi as the master of the vernacular, exorcistic rites rather than the high liturgy of offering, though the two traditions overlap and a single practitioner may command both.

Between traditions

The fashi belongs to the broad and living world of Chinese popular religion, where the ritual master serves the everyday needs of communities for protection and healing, and his methods draw on Daoist, Buddhist and local elements, so the office is less bounded and less institutional than that of the ordained daoshi. His authority rests on initiation into a ritual tradition and on the transmission of its methods and its register of deities. The fashi thus represents the practical, protective and exorcistic dimension of Chinese religion, the specialist to whom people turn when they are troubled by the unseen, and he occupies the ground between the formal traditions and the immediate ritual needs of ordinary life.

The exorcistic and martial ritual repertoire associated with the fashi traces identifiable roots to specific historical schools, including the Song dynasty thunder rites tradition, Leifa, which systematised the summoning of spirit generals and thunder deities to combat malign forces, giving the fashi lineage of practice a documented textual history reaching back roughly a thousand years rather than being simply an undocumented folk survival.

That lineage of practice continued with particular strength in Taiwan and in overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, where fashi, sometimes called by regional titles such as ang-i-sensi, the red-headed master, in Taiwanese Hokkien usage, remained in open and continuous demand for household protection, exorcism and healing ritual throughout the twentieth century, in contrast to the severe disruption organised religious practice suffered on the mainland during the Cultural Revolution; Taiwanese and diaspora fashi traditions are consequently now an important living resource for mainland Chinese communities seeking to reconnect with ritual practices that were interrupted or lost at home during that period.

A working fashi is visually distinctive at ceremonies, typically wearing an embroidered ritual robe reserved for exorcistic work rather than the plainer vestments of high Daoist liturgy, and wielding specific tools of the trade, a buffalo horn trumpet blown to summon spirit generals, a ritual sword for symbolically striking at malign forces, and talismans brush-written in cinnabar ink on yellow paper on the spot for the person requesting help, a visible and immediate toolkit that marks the fashi's practical, on-demand style of ritual work apart from the more formal, scheduled liturgy of the ordained Daoist priest.