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

In the three decades since Holmes Welch wrote his pioneering studies of the formal organization and political history of Buddhism in China's Republican and Communist periods, few scholars have pursued this institutional focus.¹ It was therefore with a sense of keen anticipation that I began reading Charles Jones' study of Buddhism in Taiwan, the subtitle of which had caught my eye. I was rewarded with a fascinating account of the evolution of Buddhism in Taiwan over the course of the Qing, Japanese colonial, and Nationalist regimes.

The study's underlying premise is crystal clear: "Buddhism in Taiwan has a unique history derived from a unique set of historical and environmental circumstances" (p. xv). The introduction posits a lucid explanation for the dearth of scholarship on the uniqueness of Taiwan's Buddhism and, more generally, its culture and society. The Nationalist Party long discouraged "Taiwan only" scholarship as diluting its claim to govern all of China, while Western scholars avoided it for fear of being labeled Nationalist sympathizers. Also, the lack of relations between the United States and the People's Republic before 1979 led many scholars to go to Taiwan with the intention of gathering data for insights on a greater Chinese society and culture while ignoring Taiwan's specific situation. For example, although much of Welch's study of China's Buddhism was researched in Taiwan, "he never once interviewed a native Taiwanese cleric, nor did he address any issues peculiar to Buddhism in Taiwan, such as the lingering affects of the Japanese occupation, or the conflicts that ensued between native clergy and the very mainland monks upon whom he depended for his research" (p. xiv). Buddhism in Taiwan is a big step toward filling this void.

Among the study's plethora of themes, the most persistent is the pronounced role of the laity in Taiwan's Buddhism that appears variously under different regimes. Chapter 1 describes the introduction of monastic and zhaijiao Buddhism to Taiwan by Fujian immigrants during the Ming-Qing period (1660-1895). Monastic Buddhism became less orthodox than elsewhere due the weakness of state and public institutions in the frontier society. The private construction of temples gave laity much influence in temple administration, the lack of public temples helped foster an ill-trained and only partly ordained clergy of caretakers and funeral specialists, and temples served such nonreligious functions as meeting and guild halls. Zhaijiao Buddhism, distinguished by its rejection of the monastic clergy's supervision of the laity and not looking to it for teaching or supporting it financially, also took root. It lacked formal organization and was characterized by adherents' observance of the Five Lay Precepts and refraining from bad and antisocial behavior.

The next two chapters examine how these two kinds of Buddhism moved closer together during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945). An organizational structure was imposed on zhaijiao Buddhism when the Japanese state incorporated it into the Sōtō sect of Japanese Buddhism. Also, the Japanese included both Buddhist clergy and laity in such new pan-island Buddhist associations as the South Seas Buddhist Association and the Patriotic Buddhist Association. This enhanced the familiarity and understanding between the laity and clergy while eroding the distinctiveness of zhaijiao from monastic Buddhism.

Buddhism's evolution in Taiwan's post-retrocession politics is described in the next three chapters. After fleeing to Taiwan, the Nationalist state, eager to legitimize its claim to rule over all of China, encouraged mainland monks to assume leadership posts in such national associations as the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China in order to enable the fiction that these associations represented Buddhism all over China. Native Taiwanese clergy and laity were sidelined from these national associations and began to focus on local temples and activities more attuned to their needs. Movements emerged, headed by charismatic clergy, that emphasized social welfare and, with the gradual easing of martial...