Taiwan's Buddhist Nuns

Chapter 4: The Women of Ciji: Nuns, Laypeople, and the Bodhisattva Guanyin

Chapter 4 The Women of Ciji Nuns, Laypeople, and the Bodhisattva Guanyin As we saw in Chapter 2, Zhengyan emanates an androgynous multifaceted personality: Buddhist master, visionary, mother, patriarch, commander-inchief . In her youth she struggled with her mother and her family, rejected the roles of wife and mother, wandered in the wilderness of eastern Taiwan, and became a Buddhist nun. In all these acts, Zhengyan was a rebel, yet she became famous as a champion of traditional Confucian ideals of the primacy of the patriarchal family, filial piety, and “women-as-mothers” through her particular interpretation of Buddhism. From the 1960s to 1990, the Ciji organization grew primarily due to the efforts of Zhengyan, her nuns, Ciji’s volunteer female devotees, and a select group of female commissioners, major donors of time, skills, and money (Figure 4.1, next page). Men have always participated as volunteers, then as members of the Compassion Faith Corps founded in 1990, and as commissioners. In addition to its volunteer forces, Ciji also employs female and male professionals in the fields of medicine, medical technology, computers , education, media, publishing, engineering, and architecture. In 2004 the Ciji organization upgraded the male faith corps to the same organizational level as the (mostly female) commissioners.1 Although male participation is important and growing in Ciji2 this chapter argues that Ciji’s reinterpretation and propagation of so-called “feminine values” was and continues to be integral to its mission and worldview. There are numerous women’s groups, Buddhist groups, NGOs, and social welfare groups, but Ciji is the largest and most famous of these in Taiwan. Lu Hwei-syin (1998; 2000a,b); Huang and Weller (1998); Robert Weller (1999); and Yang and Zhang (2004a) argue that one reason for Ciji’s phenomenal success is that Ciji empowers women, as Ciji membership develops women’s identities and potentials. “Empowerment” is a term prevalent in current academic and popular discourse, but what does it actually mean for women, particularly Buddhist women, in Taiwan?3 How and to what extent 63 64 Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns does Ciji empower women, and what does this reveal about Taiwanese women and Taiwanese society? In order to explore these questions, this chapter discusses the following categories of “The Women of Ciji.” The first section introduces Zhengyan’s nuns and her expectations of them to become da zhangfu, “great men,” and notes how different this expectation is from the Woman-Mother-Bodhisattva ideal she demands of lay supporters. The second section makes the point that while Ciji as a lay organization shares certain aspects with traditional laygroups in Chinese and Taiwanese history, Ciji’s members comprise volunteer and professional women and men of diverse backgrounds, and the content and scope of Ciji missions is unparalleled in Chinese Buddhist history. The third section highlights another important “woman” of Ciji, the Guanyin Bodhisattva. (See Figure 1.1.) Ciji has successfully exploited the symbolism of the popular cult of Guanyin/Miaoshan to a greater extent than other Buddhist masters in Taiwan and Ciji’s valorization of “feminine” and “maternal” virtues makes a striking comparison to the circumscribed and/or negative view of the same values in Tibetan and Theravādin traditions. How does Ciji’s interpretation of a modern Guanyin both empower and delimit women? The chapter concludes that Ciji does not challenge or subvert traditional ideas about women’s nature and roles, but has extended women’s so-called nurturing and healing roles from home to society, and in the process has convinced many Taiwanese to empathize with and assist people beyond their immediate social circles of family and friends. This is a profound example of social transformation for Taiwan, as was the case historically in China: “It Figure 4.1. Master Zhengyan and the first Commissioners in Taipei (Ciji Foundation) 65 The Women of Ciji is widely held that an important legacy of Buddhism in Chinese society was that it fostered a ‘universalistic ethics’ vis-à-vis Confucian familism and led to a great increase in charitable activities.”4 Such a social transformation, this large-scale mobilization of citizens to undertake compassionate acts to relieve suffering, is an achievement seemingly beyond reproach, but in doing so, the Ciji organization has taken for granted and reproduced essentialist notions of gender,5 though at the same time, other women and men in Taiwan are working assiduously to promote gender equality in education, law, political representation, and career...