Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan by Chün-fang Yü (review)

clear signs that the protectorate was reaching its end. Young’s extensive work in archives throughout the world shows just how this movement came about. Thus, Ernest P. Young has magisterially narrated the story of the passage from a French-controlled church to a Chinese Catholic entity and in doing so has also opened up rich new vistas besides. The importance of this book to generalists and specialists alike cannot be over-emphasized and gratitude and congratulations are due in equal measure. FR. JEREMY CLARKE, SJ Boston College CHÜN-FANG YÜ, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan. Topics in Contemporary Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xi, 243 pp. US$29 (pb). ISBN 987-0-82483812 -6 The author is well known for her profound expertise in the history of religions, especially Chinese Buddhism.1 In her current book, she presents a case study of a contemporary Buddhist nunnery in Taiwan, the Xiangguang Temple (trsl.: Incense Light, Xiangguang Si 香光寺). By doing so, she not only fills a gap by delivering an ethnographic description of a nunnery that has considerable political and social impact in Taiwan, but she also sheds light on the role of nuns in Taiwanese and Chinese society in general, elucidates the history of the nuns’ order in China and Taiwan as well as the history of lay Buddhism in Taiwan after World War II, and contextualizes it within the frame of so-called Humanistic Buddhism.2 The study is organized into seven chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 provides a threefold study of the history of female Buddhist monastics: an overview of the various historical Lives of Nuns collections is presented as well as the situation in pre-communist mainland China and post-war Taiwan to the present day. The concept of Humanistic Buddhism is enriched through background information on the development of Buddhism in Taiwan. In between, Yü’s close acquaintance with the nunnery under focus becomes clear: Having met one of its members in 1997 and being invited to deliver an intensive course at the nuns’ college, Yü spent eight months in 1998 living in the temple and carrying out field work. She has maintained close contact with the community since that time, interviewed about a third of its members (about 143 in total, of whom 102 are actively present), including every nun with a leading function. She had access to the various magazines of the community, to the reports written in class, and to their textbooks. This natural familiarity of Yü with the community replaces a separate methodological chapter. 1 See, for example, her ground-breaking study Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokite svara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 2 In Chinese, renjian fojiao 人間佛教. On the history of this term see also Esther-Maria Guggenmos, ‘‘Engaged Buddhism in Taiwan,’’ in Buddhism in East Asia: Aspects of History’s First Universal Religion Presented in Modern Context, ed. Anita Sharma (Delhi: Saujanya Books, 2012), 232-253. 256 BOOK REVIEWS Yü starts with the early development of the location in which the nunnery later settled (chapter 2). This chapter reveals much about the folk religious background of the settlement and provides a basis for understanding the conflicts with the village community that the nunnery later faced. In 1974 a Buddhist nun, Xinzhi 心 志, became abbess and caretaker of the folk religious site, and since 1980 a Buddhist nuns’ community started to develop there. Another nun, Wuyin 悟因, joined the community at the invitation of Xinzhi and became the new abbess. Under her guidance and through the joint efforts of four highly educated young nuns, she started to build up a nunnery that was open to and experimented with new approaches. Xinzhi felt that she could not comply with this. Her departure in 1990 caused a major rift in the community. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of Abbess Wuyin and connects it effectively with the negative Chinese social connotations of being a nun and the history of nuns’ formal ordination. The first official twofold ordination in Taiwan took place as late as 1953. Before, women who committed themselves to a sincere Buddhist life often lived as ‘‘vegetarian...