The call usually opens the same way. Someone would like to arrange a rite. The next two questions are how much and how soon.
Almost nobody asks what happens during it. From outside it is smoke, sound and a lot of movement you have no key to.
Zhai and jiao started out as two things
People say fashi, a rite. The technical term is zhaijiao, a compound of two older practices.
Zhai is the purification side. Before the day the priest fasts and washes, eating and sleeping get pulled back into order, and there is an accounting to be done with yourself. Jiao is the altar side: how the altar is laid out, what is offered on it, how incense is presented, how the matter at hand is formally reported upward. The two were joined long ago, and a rite today generally carries both halves.
Talismanic and liturgical work is Zhengyi’s core business, which I went into in Why a Daoist Priest Can Marry and Eat Meat.
The frame
The space gets purified first, which is to say taken out of ordinary use. Whatever it was an hour ago, living room or hall or storeroom, it is swept, sprinkled and purified before it counts as an altar at all.
Summoning. With the altar standing, the officers are called. Which ones, and in what order, depends on the service, and the manual specifies it. One thing to flag here: the names themselves are not uniform across texts, which I come back to below.
Submitting the memorial. The part that surprises people most is that it is paperwork. The occasion, the household’s names, birth data and address, what is asked, who signs and submits it: written out properly and sent up. This goes back to the earliest days of the Celestial Masters at the end of the Han, and the format is borrowed from the imperial civil service: petitions, memorials, set wording, a fixed order of business.
The service itself. The three preceding parts are all preparation. Blessing runs one way, rites for the dead another, and consecrations, land-appeasing and averting services each have their own manual. This is the longest section, and the one you least want to interrupt.
Whoever was invited then has to be escorted out, and skipping that leaves the altar improperly closed. Only after the sending off does the altar come down: offerings cleared, some things burned and some put away, the room becoming a living room again. I then tell the family what was done and what remains for them to handle on their own.
Following the manual
Yike yanjiao, teaching performed according to the manual, is the working rule of the trade. The manual gives you the whole sequence: the hour the altar opens, the direction it faces, which step the first incense belongs to, where each person stands. Deviate and you have not performed the rite.
This is the part furthest from what outsiders picture. The picture is improvisation, atmosphere, the more mysterious the better. Anyone who has stood at an altar knows better: preconditions, a fixed order, and if you get a step wrong you go back and do it again. I write software in the daytime (that story is in Why a Daoist Priest Writes Code), so the shape is familiar, except that this procedure has been in service close to two thousand years and you need standing before you may edit it.
There is no single manual. Temples and lineages hold different copies, and for the same service the order and wording can differ. Some of that is regional transmission, some is copying drift. Which recension is older, or closer to whatever the original looked like, I cannot tell you, and I have not seen anyone settle it convincingly. Lists of names vary most of all. The Four Sovereigns are the standard example: different texts give different rosters, several versions circulate, and I am not going to pick one here and call it settled. I follow the copy that came down through my own teacher, and I do not comment on anyone else’s.
How a talisman is written, how the oral formulas run, what the hands are doing during any given passage: those are transmitted from teacher to student and do not go on paper. That is just the rule.
No wishing machine
The common expectation is that money changes hands, a name is submitted, and matters ought to start improving.
I do not sell it that way. I perform the liturgy; the family brings their intention; what the occasion works on is the state of the people performing it and of the family. Supernatural outcomes I do not promise. Australian consumer law takes a dim view of misleading claims. The plainer reason is that I cannot promise them.
So what does change. The people in the room. Something happens in a family, everyone holds it separately, nobody raises it, and life carries on around the hole. Then a date is set, the relatives who should be there are there, and everyone stands in proper clothes while a sequence is worked through from beginning to end. Most of what happens over the course of a service happens on the human side, and at a funeral service you see it plainly.
What it takes to do this in Australia
Zhengyi priests here mostly have no temple. The altar is at home and we travel out for the occasion.
For a living room, measure first. Three or four people and a blessing service will fit comfortably. Twenty-odd relatives for a memorial service will not.
That means hiring somewhere, usually a Chinese association hall or a community centre, with questions to ask before signing rather than on the day: whether open flame is permitted indoors, whether there are sprinklers overhead, what the agreement says about smoke and candles, whether you need your own insurance, what time you have to be out, how many parking spaces there are. In an apartment add the strata by-laws: naked flame on common property, smoke into corridors, noise after a certain hour. One complaint from a neighbour and you hear from the building manager. The smoke alarm question I covered in Ancestor Rites from Australia and will not repeat, except that a full service burns far more incense than a household offering, which makes those workarounds matter more. Association halls also tend to be doing three other jobs: table tennis tables shoved against the wall, badminton lines you cannot scrub off the floor, Chinese school and Cantonese opera and community dance classes taking up the weekends, so a Saturday usually wants booking several weeks out.
The two requests that actually come in
Blessing services and services for the dead.
Blessings cluster around moving into a house, opening a shop, wanting to settle things after a bad stretch, or a zodiac year that matches your own. Services for the dead come at the seventh day, the hundredth day, the anniversary, and sometimes years late from a family that never got around to it.
On the second of those: months of not sleeping, of getting through the day and collapsing at night, is a medical matter and a rite will not touch it. An Australian GP can write a Mental Health Treatment Plan, which brings Medicare rebates for sessions with a psychologist. Lifeline is 13 11 14, any hour.
The nine days in the ninth month
The first to the ninth day of the ninth lunar month is the Nine Emperor Festival, and across those nine days I teach the Beidou Scripture, in full the Taishang Xuanling Beidou Benming Yansheng Zhenjing. That one is fixed and runs every year.
Teaching a scripture and performing a rite are two separate jobs, and people coming for the nine days often run them together. Teaching means opening the text and going through what the words say, where they came from, what the passage is doing, while people listen. A rite is performed step by step out of the manual. Someone signs up for the nine days and wants a service on the side; that gets booked separately.
For details, or to have a rite performed, write to iching@dao.today or book a time at https://booking.dao.today/book.