ABSTRACT
In China, Daoist monks are special companions of death. This chapter focuses on ethnographic data that collected in Daoist monasteries of the Quanzhen order in Shaanxi province since the early 1990s, as well as on other social anthropological and historical accounts of death in contemporary China and in earlier periods. It explores how monks come to think of death, accompany it, and cure it, while they themselves strive, in their own self-cultivation practice, to avoid it by pursuing the quest for immortality. Daoist monks perform rituals of two kinds: those for the living, which they consider yang rituals, and those for the dead, or yin rituals, in conformance with the diagram, their religion's emblem, known as the 'Great Ultimate'. Monks usually perform only one ritual chaodu, selecting the date as well as possible, depending on when the laypeople make the request.
