Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan

Series Editor’s Preface

Series Editor’s Preface The large number of educated young women becoming Buddhist nuns in Taiwan is a striking phenomenon that has attracted the attention of several scholars. Historically , women became nuns to gain refuge from personal and social problems, but such a step was always drastic, requiring them to renounce not only their families but their own ordinary domestic lives as well. In modern Taiwan, becoming a nun still demands that serious level of renunciation, but for many women, ordination has shifted from being a last resort to a first choice. It is no wonder that nuns now outnumber monks in Taiwan. In this study, Chün-fang Yü, a historian of Chinese Buddhism, uses her ethnographic and literary skills to take us into Incense Light and allows us to meet and understand the nuns of this unusual all-female community. Yü focuses on the community’s primary mission of Buddhist education and practice, and she demonstrates that the relative lack of a preexisting Buddhist tradition at their temple allowed the nuns to create their own new tradition. Chün-fang Yü thus presents another striking case of Buddhists reinventing Buddhism as a contemporary religion. George J. Tanabe, Jr. SerIeS edITor ...