Local Daofa in the Ming Daoist Ordination

Daoist ordination is a mechanism in which the ordinand receives liturgical registers (*lu* 籙) listing the divine generals and their soldiers whom the ordinand can summon to protect him/her or carry out his/her order to exorcise demons, heal patients, or bring in rain or sunshine. The register also contains the titles of the scriptures transmitted to the ordinand in the ordination rite. In effect, the conferral of the liturgical register on the ordinand signifies that he or she enters into a covenant with the deities as well as the master who bestows the register. As the ordinand advances, he or she is given a longer register with more deities and more scriptures. In that sense, a register serves as a credential for one’s advancement ordination. Such Daoist ordination ceremony is known as *shoulu* 授籙 (conferral of registers). Shoulu thus embodies the aspirations and standards that Daoist priests give themselves and that society accepts and employs Daoist priests. After the Song (960–1279), along with the newly emerged exorcistic rites and revelations, the concept and practice of a rank of particular exorcistic methods in the office of the celestial bureaucracy (*fazhi* 法職) awarded to the ordinand has been added to the Daoist ordination. With the rise of so many new texts, revelations, and liturgies and methods (*fa* 法 or *daofa* 道法) of local traditions in and after the Song, the medieval Daoist ordination system no longer reflected reality. As a result, Daoist ordination underwent significant changes. One yardstick for such changes is the appearance of the bureaucratic codex for Daoist ordination, known as the *Tiantan yuge* 天壇玉格 (Jade standards of the Celestial Altar), which made the new *fa* of the Song correspond to the traditional Zhengyi liturgical registers.

This paper explores how local *daofa* traditions were incorporated into the mainstream Daoist ordination in the Ming (1368–1644), or the interactions between the mainstream Daoist institution represented by the orthodox ordination in the Daoist centers and local Daoism. The local *daofa* traditions in Daoist ordination are analyzed in the context of the transformation of the Daoist ordination ranking from the medieval seven-level system to the modern five-level system after the Southern Song. While the dominant *daofa* was Qingwei 清微 (Pure Tenuity) in the mainstream Daoism, the Lüshan 閭山 tradition with its red-head ritual masters proliferating in southeast China and Earth Spirits rites (Diqi fa 地祇法) that circulated in the Huguang region were also included in the orthodox ordination. Even the elite Daoist priests at Wudangshan 武當山 (Wudang Mountain) with the highest degree of classical liturgical registers sometimes were endowed with these local *daofa* as credentials in their ritual repertoire. Such an analysis is achieved through the checking of these *daofa* titles against the standards of the *Tiantan yuge* in its Ming versions. I have so far found twenty cases of the Ming Daoist priestly ordinations from ritual texts, ordination documents, archaeological discoveries, and stele inscriptions in which twenty priests’ ordination titles are provided. Through the examination of the twenty ordination cases, we can see what local *daofa* traditions were more prevalent in practice in the Ming. In addition, these cases demonstrate the local and geographical roots of these *daofa* even though now they were incorporated into the mainstream Daoist ordination system. By the incorporation, such “lowly” local *daofa* as Lüshan and Earth Spirits rites were elevated to the mainstream Daoist orthodoxy.