ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how modern schooling for training novice Daoist priests has brought about a new style of learning and a new type of knowledge among the younger generation of Daoist priests in Shanghai. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Shanghai Daoist College (Shanghai Daojiao xueyuan; henceforth “the College”), this chapter argues that the curriculum instituted by the College is actually an attempt to reset the priority attached to different ways of learning and different kinds of knowledge. In sharp contrast to their predecessors who prioritized rote learning and repetitive bodily practice, and who attached the highest value to the ability to exert efficacious power while achieving the highest aesthetic qualities in representing tradition, the College-trained younger Daoist priests are taught to prioritize understanding, explanation, argumentation, and to accord the highest value to the ability to produce awe-inspiring discourse, embroidered with references to many books. In short, the College’s curriculum functions, purposefully or inadvertently, to instigate an intellectual revolution in the training of future generations of Daoist priests, by replacing “ritual skills” with “discursive knowledge” as the new ideal model for Daoist knowledge. This “paradigm shift” of Daoist knowledge/learning style, it is argued, is not directly imposed by state authority or enforced by the official ideology of atheism, but derives from an acute sense of a crisis of legitimacy, or even survival, of Daoism that is now widely shared among the Daoist clergy. This sense of crisis was actually cultivated by the state in the first place through forcing Daoism to engage in a peculiar Chinese-styled inter-religious competition that is arguably biased against Daoism as a tradition of “mere” ritual skills. However, the inflictor role of the state tends to be ignored, as it also functions as the enlightening pedagogue that shows Daoist clergy the way toward emancipation: modern priestly schooling modeled after the state-run public schooling system.
