The Way and Its Powers. An Ethnographic Account of Taoist Practice and Religious Authority in Northern Taiwan by Yves Menheere (review)

The Way and Its Powersis an attractive title for an important contribution to our understanding of Taoism as a living religious practice. The result of years of intense fieldwork, during which Menheere observed hundreds of Taoist ceremonies all over northern Taiwan, and got to know a sizable number of Taoist priests, one of whom became his teacher, The Way and Its Powerschallenges influential views pertaining to religious authority and efficacy. Its central questions, as stated in the first lines of the introductory chapter, are: “Why do people put their faith in religious specialists?” and “Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?”

The answers to these questions are presented in a logical sequence of six chapters (not counting the introduction and the conclusion), the first of which outlines the religious context and elucidates what it means to belong to the specific group of religious specialists called “Northern Priests.” These Northern Priests claim to represent the Zhengyi 正一—branch of Taoism, or rather “ Cheng-it”—Menheere consistently uses the transcription of the Taiwanese pronunciation. What sets them apart from other religious specialists is that they do not perform funerary rites but focus solely on exorcisms and offerings, and that they share their own specific ways of conducting two complementary sets of rites known as Tō( dao道, said to originate with the Celestial Master tradition) and Hoat( fa法, coming from another ritual tradition called the “Three Ladies branch” or sannaipai 三奶派).

The following two chapters focus on the history of the Northern Priests, from the Qing dynasty, which controlled parts of Taiwan from 1684 to 1895, and the period of Japanese colonization (1895–1945), to the postwar years, and on the work and training of the Northern Priests. In the historical overview, special consideration is given to the impact of the presence of Zhang Enpu 張恩溥 (1894–1969), the sixty-third Celestial Master, who visited Taiwan for the first time in 1947 and took up permanent residence there after the formation of the People’s Republic in 1949, and to an important change in the nature of Zhengyi ceremonies (pp. 56–64). With the development of a cheap and effective system of medical care, Taoist healing ceremonies went into decline, whereas offerings gained in importance. In the chapter on work and training, the focus is on the central role of altars, the formation of groups for ceremonies that cannot be conducted by a single priest, and the transmission of knowledge. Furthermore, Menheere shares important insights as to what it means to be judged a competentpriest by one’s peers (pp. 79–81). Competency is a highly complex phenomenon, comprising the knowledge of a large repertoire of rites and the ability to conduct them in the “correct” way—“correct” meaning that “the right way to perform a rite was the way a priest had been taught to perform it by his master” (p. 79). Other factors include a priest’s skills or kanghu( gongfu功夫), his experience, his musical proficiency, and even the reputation of his apprentices. Here as in the introduction (p. 7), Menheere stresses that being familiar with Taoist doctrine as expounded in the classical “philosophical” texts was of no importance in either the training of a priest or in the judgment of his competency.

The importance of orthopraxy (the “correct” performance of rites being dependent upon the degree of fidelity to one’s master’s teaching) notwithstanding, Taoist ritual is not immutable. This is one of the central topics of the chapter “Authority and Ritual Change: The Chioof the Northern Priests,” which features detailed descriptions of several three-day or five-day jiao醮 (most of them organized by...