Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990

Chapter 7. Conclusions

CHAPTER 7 Q Conclusions One of the projects that I had originally envisioned as an integral part of this study was to see if there was any intrinsic value in writing a regional history of Chinese Buddhism such as this.What would such a study reveal? Would it demonstrate any significant regional variations in Chinese Buddhism such that Western scholars would have to question their conception of “Chinese Buddhism” as a single, monolithic phenomenon? Or would the alternative viewpoint prove true, namely that there is nothing so very unique or remarkable about Buddhism in Taiwan, and that scholars are consequently free to generalize their findings about Buddhism from one part of the empire to another? My conclusion runs along the lines of the first assertion:Buddhism in Taiwan has developed along unique lines. To be sure, one can find similarities in some aspects of Taiwan’s historical circumstances with other parts of China.For example,Taiwan was surely not the only frontier area lacking in qualified clergy during the Ming/Qing period,and so we may conclude that nothing particularly new or different happened then.At a somewhat different level, developments in Taiwanese Buddhism exhibit a distinctiveness shared by Buddhism in all parts of 219 the Southern Fujianese cultural sphere. For example, when the HanTaiwanese first began staging monastic ordinations during the Japanese period, it followed the model of the combined public monastery/ hereditary temple found at theYongquan Temple on Gushan in Fujian province, described by Welch as atypical in Chinese Buddhism. Dongchu, in his report to the BAROC, lamented the lack of public monasteries such as he had been used to in his own home region, and also noted the construction of Buddhist temples in Taiwan as following traditional Fujianese architectural models. In these cases, what is unique is not Taiwan Buddhism, but Southern Fujianese Buddhism. But let us now turn our attention to aspects of Buddhism in Taiwan that are indeed unique to the island. Taiwan was not the only part of China occupied by Japan before and during World War II, but three factors distinguish the Taiwan experience from that of other occupied areas: First, China freely ceded Taiwan to Japan long before Japan overran other areas of China by force; second, Japan claimed Taiwan as an integral part of the empire (albeit with some ambivalence towards her native inhabitants) for fifty years; and third, by the time of Retrocession, very few of the Han-Taiwanese ever expected to be anything other than Japanese citizens. On the mainland, we read that Buddhists (especially Buddhist clergy),contributed greatly to the effort to oust the Japanese occupational forces. In Taiwan the resistance took a subtler form as the Buddhist establishment steered a path between the Scylla of complete Japanization with the concomitant loss of their Chinese Buddhist identity,and the Charybdis of asserting their heritage too much and risking repression. One can only marvel at the political and diplomatic skills of monks such as Benyuan, Shanhui, and Jueli as they instituted Chinese-style ordination ceremonies and maintained Chinese monastic discipline without incurring the suspicion of the governor-general even as they worked alongside Japanese Buddhist missionaries as members of the Sòtòshû and Rinzaishû. In addition to maintaining this “dual citizenship,” one must notice again that the Buddhists’ survival strategies also included joining islandwide religious organizations with zhaijiao. Given the hostility that the government-approved forms of institutional Buddhism have traditionally shown to any form of White-Lotus millenarian Buddhism, their cooperation in this period is quite remarkable. One possible explanation for this is that, with both branches of Buddhism living under a 220 conclusions non-Chinese regime,the distinction between “government-approved” and “seditious” became meaningless,especially since the governor-general took zhaijiao’s sectarian histories,which represented them as direct descendents of Southern Chan Buddhism,at face value.Another factor may be that institutional, monastic Buddhism had no umbrella organization such as the BAROC to give it a unified identity over lay Buddhism; the South Seas Buddhist Association was the only such organization available with Japanese approval, and it included both forms of Buddhism under its aegis. This alliance was undoubtedly remarkable, but was it unique? Before we assert an unqualified answer in the affirmative, more studies in regional forms of Buddhism are necessary.We must remember here that we are comparing the situation in Taiwan with what we know of Buddhism from previous...