Gongde

The Taoist service for the dead is easiest to understand if the governing metaphor is taken literally, because the tradition takes it literally. The other world is an administration. It keeps records, it has jurisdictions and ranks, it holds people pending the resolution of their files, and it responds to correctly drafted documents submitted by someone with standing to submit them. The Taoist priest has that standing by ordination, which registers him with the same bureaucracy, and the liturgy he performs is in large part the drafting, reading and burning of memorials addressed upward.

What the family is buying is therefore a legal service as much as a religious one. The documents name the dead person, state their case, ask for the cancellation of the debts and offences recorded against them, and request their release and advancement. Burning is the transmission method: paper goes up as smoke and arrives as a filed document, and the same logic covers the money, houses, clothing and servants sent in paper form for the dead person's use.

This is a different transaction from the Buddhist one, and Chinese families frequently commission both. The Buddhist funeral generates merit by chanting and by giving to the sangha, and dedicates it to the dead. The Taoist service petitions an authority to act. The two coexist without much friction, priests of both are engaged for the same funeral in many regions, and no one involved regards this as inconsistent.

The most visible episode of a gongde is the rescue from the underworld. In its common forms the officiant assaults a constructed fortress, made of paper or of a tiled arrangement on the floor, in which the soul is held; or leads the family across a bridge set up in the ritual space, carrying the tablet of the dead. The mourners take part rather than watch. The set is built for the occasion and destroyed in the course of it, and the destruction is the point: something is being got out of somewhere.

The service admits of very different scales. A modest household may engage a small group of priests for one night. A wealthy one may commission several days, with a full complement of officiants, musicians, and elaborate constructions, and the difference is publicly legible to everyone attending. That visibility is part of the institution rather than a corruption of it: funerary expenditure has been a recognised way of stating a family's standing in Chinese society for a very long time, and reformers from the imperial period onward have complained about it in almost identical terms across the centuries.

Regional variation is wide. The liturgy differs between the Zhengyi priests of the south, who marry and live among the communities they serve, and other lineages; local traditions have their own sequences, their own musical settings, and their own names for the same episodes. What is constant is the bureaucratic frame and the paid, professional character of the officiant, who is a specialist engaged for the work rather than a congregational leader.