Notes Introduction 1. I have been told the following estimates, from a scholar who wishes to remain anonymous until the figures can be proven: 1,500 fully ordained nuns in China; 9,805 fully ordained nuns in the world, excluding Taiwan. See Chapter 1 for more information about nuns in China, past and present. Korea has a long history of fully-ordained Buddhist nuns, beginning in the fifth century AD; Vietnam has had a tradition of fully-ordained nuns since the twelfth century. Both countries since the twentieth-century have experienced growth in education opportunities for nuns, and have seen the development of socially-engaged Buddhism in recent years. See Batchelor and Son’gyong Sunim 2006 and articles on Korean Buddhism in Tsomo 2006; Thich Nu Dong Anh, “A Survey of Bhikkhunis Sangha in Vietnam,” in Tsomo 2004a: 51–54. In Japan, the first ordained monastics were three young girls who were sent to the Korean peninsula for ordination in 590 AD, while ordination for monks in Japan was not established until the mid-eighth century. However, due to Meiji government policies of the late nineteenth century, male “monks” in Japan have married and raised families; alcohol and meat are not prohibited to them. Japan has a long and varied tradition of Buddhist nuns, many of whom were celibate, were fully or partially tonsured, and were scholars, teachers, administrators, and ritual specialists. Some lived in convents, some remained at home, some were itinerant. Full ordination never became the norm in Japan; nuns instead have taken Bodhisattva or novice vows or were “self-ordained.” Since the late nineteenth century, Japanese nuns, particularly from the Sōtō Zen sect, have fought to establish schools and institutes to provide Buddhist and secular education to nuns, and have succeeded in changing their sect’s regulations to allow nuns access to higher ranking, administration posts, and the right to perform certain rituals, all from which nuns were previously barred. However, lay models of Buddhist practice are more popular and numerous in Japan. See Arai 1999, Ruch 2002, and Faure 2003. In Theravādin countries and in Tibetan Buddhism, although many Buddhist laywomen, ten-precept nuns, and novice nuns practice devoutly and diligently, they suffer from limited resources, limited access to education, limitations in the ritual sphere, and low social status. Unless they are able to seek full ordination based on the Chinese vinaya of the Dharmaguptaka tradition, they practice as novices their entire lives. Due to the efforts of many Buddhist women and men (including Taiwan Buddhists) over several 119 120 Notes to Introduction decades, the Buddhist authorities in Sri Lanka restored bhikkhunī ordination in Sri Lanka in 1998; the order had disappeared in the tenth century AD. 2. Li Yuzhen (2000: 354. In this book, “Li 2000” refers to Li Yuzhen’s English doctoral dissertation, unless otherwise indicated. 3. Ibid. 4. Li, 2005: 6, quoting Ven. Chao Hwei. A representative at BAROC told me that there are around 30,000 monks and nuns in Taiwan at present. If nuns comprise about 75 percent, then the number would be 22,500. Phone call, May 7, 2008. 5. See Clart and Jones 2003 and Jordan in Harrell and Huang 1994. 6. According to the numbers reported by Buddhist organizations to the Ministry of the Interior, the number of Buddhists in Taiwan increased from 800,000 followers in 1983 to 4.9 million in 1995, and at the end of 2002 had reached 5.48 million believers, out of Taiwan’s total population of 22.5 million, while the number of “Buddhist temples” rose from 1,157 in 1983 to 4,037 in December 2002. See www. moi.gov.tw/stat, accessed on April 2, 2008. However, a strong caveat is in order: These numbers do not clearly specify what qualifies as a “Buddhist believer” or a “Buddhist temple,” and are probably inflated. As Yü 2003: 267 notes, a person may claim to be “Buddhist” without having formally taken the “three refuges” with a Buddhist master. To complicate matters further, when I phoned the Ministry of the Interior for the latest numbers (as of December 2006), I was told that this time the Ministry of the Interior asked cities and counties, instead of Buddhist organizations, to provide numbers of believers (165,049) and temples (2,262), numbers which the MOI representative admitted were too low. Phone call to MOI, Office of Statistics, April 3, 2008. A representative at the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China told...