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

Chapter 1. The Qing-Dynasty Period

CHAPTER 1 Q The Qing-Dynasty Period The Arrival and Development of Buddhism in Taiwan The history of Buddhism in Taiwan begins with the arrival of the Chinese people. There is no way to tell exactly when the first Han Chinese settlers migrated to Taiwan, but government records indicate that there was a Chinese presence on the island well before the Dutch colonists arrived in 1624.The 1971 Gazetteer goes on to state that there were Buddhist monks among the Chinese inhabitants. However, these monks maintained only the most minimal forms of Buddhist practice and were, in effect, mere caretakers of small temples built by the local Chinese people.The monks’ main function was to provide funeral and memorial services for the Chinese population (Kubo 1984:49–50). Whatever Buddhism existed in 1624 suffered from the Dutch law prohibiting the practice of any religion other than Christianity;the penalty for “idol worship” was a public flogging followed by banishment 3 (Zhang 1979b:59).Thus,a more substantial level of Buddhist presence and practice had to wait for the first large-scale wave of Chinese immigrants, who arrived with the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong (also known as “Koxinga”) in 1661 following the downfall of the Ming dynasty. Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662) had been carrying out a protracted rebellion against the Qing dynasty forces for many years when he decided to force the hand of the Manchu court by beseiging Nanjing.After his defeat at the hands of the Qing army on September 8 and 9, 1659, he grew less confident of his ability to maintain control over his base of operations along the southeastern coast of Fujian and Guangdong provinces, and decided to move his forces to Taiwan. He arrived toward the end of April 1661, accompanied by a fleet of warships carrying several thousand trained and battle-seasoned troops,and made landfall near the poorly manned and provisioned Dutch installation at Fort Provintia in what is now the town of Tamsui (danshui). By February of the next year,he had succeeded in taking the southern Dutch installation of Fort Zeelandia (in modern Tainan city), thus expelling the Dutch and putting the entire island under his control. However, it quickly became clear that his plans for retaking the mainland from the Qing court were unrealizable; and in his frustration he began to commit acts of madness and brutality against his own people, even his own family. Consequently, he soon lost the loyalty of his followers . He died in June 1662 at the age of thirty-eight (Mote and Twitchett 1988,7:717–724). The vast majority of those who followed Zheng Chenggong to Taiwan came from the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong; even after Zheng arrived with several thousand followers in 1661, people from these areas continued to migrate across the Taiwan Strait (Kubo 1984:51–52). Because all of the Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan were recent immigrants, Buddhism, and indeed all of the religions that they brought with them, exhibited both continuities and discontinuities. Migration involves tearing oneself away from home and family, and moving to a new environment in which one may feel quite isolated and vulnerable. Under these circumstances, immigrants will attempt to recreate as much of the life to which they are accustomed as possible, thus creating strands of continuity.(The existence of “Chinatowns” and 4 ming and qing dynasty “Little Italies” in many major American cities attests to this process.) However, immigrants must also adapt themselves and their lifestyles to their new situation, so discontinuities also result. Continuities and Discontinuities First, let us look at the continuities. During the early Qing period,the bodhisattva Guanyin was the most worshipped Buddhist figure in Fujian province among the common people (Hsing 1981:11).This has remained so in Taiwan to the present day. A 1959 government survey found that Guanyin was the second most popular deity on the island, with 441 temples dedicated to her (Lin 1976:42).(The first most popular was Wangye,a folk/Daoist divinity.) In the same survey,Ùâkyamuni Buddha came in fifth, with 306 temples. Another source of continuity lies in the connection between temples in Taiwan and their counterparts on the mainland. Frequently, immigrants to Taiwan brought with them either an image of a deity from their temple back home or some incense ashes to enshrine in new temples they built in Taiwan.Very often,these new temples simply took...