I Believe in Buddhism and Travelling”: Denoting Oneself a Lay Buddhist in Contemporary Urban Taiwan by Esther-Maria Guggenmos (review)

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, religious groups and organizations in Taiwan have taken advantage of new freedoms to increase in number and grow in size. The majority of these new and expanded religious groups draw from Buddhist teachings and practices. Several monographs have now been published which explore lay and monastic members of the largest modern Buddhist organizations in Taiwan such as the Tzu Chi 慈濟 Foundation, Foguang Shan 佛光山, and Dharma Drum Mountain (Fagu Shan 法鼓山). However, up until now, little attention has been given to the many self-denoted Buddhists in urban Taiwan who exist outside of these organizations in smaller groups or simply as isolated practitioners. Esther-Maria Guggenmos’s detailed and wide-ranging study takes an important first step in examining the beliefs, practices, and motivations of urban lay Buddhists at large. Guggenmos frames her study around urban Taiwanese who self-describe as Buddhist, regardless of whether or to what degree they affiliate with any formal Buddhist organization or have taken the refuges (guiyi 皈依) to formally convert as lay Buddhists. This criterion enables her to develop a person-centered approach that compares and contrasts the interests and motivations of a wide range of Buddhist-inspired persons. Guggenmos justifies her focus on the urban environment through her analysis of the 2004 Taiwan Social Change Survey which found that urban Taiwanese are far more likely to denote themselves as Buddhist than their rural counterparts.

The book is organized into two parts preceded by an introductory section which examines the scope and aims of the study. The book concludes with a section called “Reflections” in which Guggenmos relates her key findings to major works on the sociology of urban religion and other recent studies on Chinese urban lay Buddhism. Each of the two parts examines one subset of self-denoting urban lay Buddhists in Taiwan. Drawing from the Social Change survey, Guggenmos labels the groups in these two parts as Conventional Buddhists and Intense Believers/Practitioners.

The introductory section, which takes up the book’s first four chapters, first discusses the history of lay Buddhism from its beginnings in India to Taiwan, noting the contingent nature of the category. Guggenmos then explains in detail her research methodology, which focuses on a detailed analysis of interviews with a very small handful of interlocutors. Large sections of these transcripts are reproduced in the book in both Chinese and English, including pauses and restarts.

The first part begins with a discussion of the results of the Taiwan Social Change Survey and an analysis of the types of Buddhists that Guggenmos chooses to categorize as “Conventional Buddhists” (p. 48), that is, those Buddhists who do not specify an affiliation with a specific Buddhist sect and refer to themselves only as “believing in or venerating the Buddha [xinfo 信佛; baifo 拜佛]” (p. 7). These Conventional Buddhists make up the majority of those who claimed some engagement with Buddhism on the survey. Guggenmos categorizes this group as comprising those whose Buddhist practice is largely one of veneration (baibai 拜拜) and who often employ karmic explanations for misfortune and to justify a socially stabilizing set of moral norms. Guggenmos analyzes in detail five of these “conventional Buddhists”: a taxi driver who belongs to a suburban popular Buddhist temple; a woman who claims to have saved her son’s life after praying to the bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音; a young man who turns to a small Buddhist organization for social support; a company boss who acts as a key patron in the outreach activities of another Buddhist organization; and a retired journalist who emphasizes the relationship between Buddhism and science. The part ends with a detailed comparison of the five Buddhists.

The second part of the book concerns the “Intense Believers and Practitioners,” whom Guggenmos characterizes as having more “intense and specific forms of Buddhist belief” than the Conventional...