Jiao

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.

The jiao's transmission runs through ordained Daoist priestly lineages, above all the Zhengyi, or Celestial Masters, tradition, whose priests are formally qualified through initiation and training to perform the elaborate cosmic liturgy on a community's behalf, a specialist role that distinguishes the jiao sharply from folk rites any layperson might perform.

Unlike festivals tied to a fixed point in the yearly calendar, a jiao is typically scheduled by a temple or community on its own extended cycle, commonly staged only once every several years or, in some localities, only once in several decades, and the specific interval is a matter of local temple tradition rather than a rule fixed uniformly across all of Chinese Daoism. Organized Daoist religious practice suffered serious disruption in mainland China during the twentieth century, particularly during the decades of the Cultural Revolution, when religious activity of many kinds was suppressed, and the jiao's continuous, large scale performance survived this period much more intact in Taiwan and in overseas Chinese communities than on the mainland, where its practice has revived unevenly since restrictions eased. A large jiao today can extend across several consecutive days, involving multiple distinct liturgical stages, processions, and the participation of the whole local community rather than only its priests, making it one of the most elaborate ritual events sustained in any living Chinese religious tradition.