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BUDDHISM IN TAIWAN: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

by Charles Brewer Jones

Durham, North Carolina

B.A., Morehead State University, 1980
M.T.S., Divinity School, Duke University, 1988
M.A., University of Virginia, 1992

A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Religious Studies
University of Virginia
May, 1996

Copyright by Charles Brewer Jones, May 1996

All rights reserved

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

     It goes without saying that an undertaking such as this cannot hope to see the light of day without the aid of many friends and helpers along the way. Although I cannot list all of the people whose time and assistance made this study possible, a few stand out prominently as having given crucial help at several points.

     I therefore wish to thank Prof. Chu Hai-yüan of the Ethnology Institute of the Academia Sinica, whose sponsorship enabled me to reside in Taiwan from 1993 to 1994. My classmates at the University of Virginia, Miss Yang Yih-feng and Miss Huang Yi-hsün, both opened doors and helped with perplexities on several occasions. I also wish to thank the monks and nuns of the Xilian Temple in Sanhsia, especially the vice-abbot, the Ven. Dr. Huimin, and the guest prefect, Ven. Huiqian, for their hospitality and willingness to answer my endless stream of questions. Special thanks go also to the teachers and staff of the Fa Kuang Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies for their help and compassion, especially the latter for allowing me to spend days on end in their storage facilities rooting through back issues of various Buddhist journals. The Ven. Dr. Heng Ch'ing of the National Taiwan University Philosophy Department provided much needed guidance, as did Profs. Lin Meirong and Lu Huixin of the Academia Sinica Ethnology Institute, the former for help in understanding zhaijiao and the latter for pointers in approaching the Compassion Relief Tz'u-Chi Association. The monks and nuns of the Nongchan Temple in Peitou also deserve mention, especially Ven. Guogu and the abbot, Ven. Dr. Sheng-yen, for their patience with me during the time I was struggling most with the language.

     This study also benefitted greatly from the expert language instruction offered by the Inter-University Programs for Chinese Language Study in Taipei. Xiexie nimen!

     I also benefitted from interaction with other western scholars working in the field of religion in Taiwan, and I wish to express my gratitude to Philip Clart, and especially to Dr. Marcus Günzel of Göttingen University for many timely cautions. Dr. John Shepherd of the University of Virginia Anthropology Department also steered me to many sources that helped enormously in contextualizing my study in terms of modern Western scholarship.

     Financial assistance came from several quarters during the research and writing phases. Funding for fieldwork came in the form of a Dupont Fellowship from the University of Virginia for the 1993-94 academic session, and from a grant (no. SC6811) from the Pacific Cultural Foundation. During the writing phase I was supported by a Skinner Scholarship administered through St. Paul's Memorial Church, Charlottesville, and a University of Virginia Graduate Arts and Sciences Dissertation Year Fellowship.

     I cannot begin to put into words the incalculable debt of gratitude that I owe to my advisor, Prof. Paul Groner, who has helped me in more ways than I

can number. His discipline, academic rigor, and high standards of scholarship set an example that I will spend the rest of my professional career seeking to emulate. I am also grateful that his patience, good humor, and friendship made the graduate school process enjoyable and rewarding.

     I would be less than filial if I omitted to mention my deep gratitude for my parents and my in-laws for their unstinting support, both material and moral, through the whole graduate school experience.

     And finally, there is my dear wife Brenda. Although dedications to spouses appear de rigueur in theses and dissertations, there are probably few who would have allowed themselves and their children to be dragged halfway around the world and back in pursuit of a dream, and so it is with all my love that I dedicate this work to her.

     Having said all that, I want everyone to know that I typed this dissertation myself.

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

Most letters in Hanyu Pinyin are pronounced as they are written. However, a few letters require explanation:

INTRODUCTION

     This dissertation is about the history of Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan from the mid-1600s to the late 1980s. Because religion in Taiwan has been the province of anthropologists and sociologists in the past, it is important to state that this study is not based either of these two disciplines, although it certainly makes occasional use of their results, particularly where the authors have drawn on historical source materials in their investigations. As a study of Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan, it also omits a few recent developments such as the small but growing presence of Theravāda Buddhism, and the current popularity of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism and the concomitant influx of Tibetan masters. More significantly than either of these two omissions, however, it also does not purport to examine the activities of Japanese Buddhists during the fifty-year period when Taiwan was a part of the Japanese empire in any depth, except as they impacted upon the lives of the Chinese Buddhist population.

     Stated positively, the primary focus of this study is the history of Chinese Buddhism as an organized religion in Taiwan, and consequently it deals with the following: the transmission of Buddhism and its cousin zhaijiao (the "vegetarian religion") to the island; the development of institutions that were or are island-wide

in scope and function; biographies of significant figures; doctrinal negotiations that have helped shape the identity of Taiwan Buddhism; Buddhism's interactions with government authorities under the three regimes that have ruled the island during the period under discussion; and the legal environment with which Buddhism often had to contend.

     It sometimes appears that historical surveys such as this one, whose chief aim is to present the reader with a synopsis of events over a long period of time, lack an "argument" or a "thesis." They simply provide copious amounts of information and data organized chronologically and then consider their task done. However, this study does have a central thesis, one which is implicit in the very choice of the topic. That is that Taiwan Buddhism has its own development and identity, and its regional self-consciousness sometimes puts it into contention with Buddhist institutions it regards as allied with foreign regimes. This is particularly true during the periods of Japanese Viceregal and Nationalist Party rule. One sees examples of these conflicts and the strategies by which Taiwan Buddhism sought to preserve itself in the Buddhist associations that arose during the Japanese period in order to distance believers from seditious movements, and in the conflicts between Taiwanese clergy and refugee monks and nuns from the mainland over living quarters and material support during the early years after Retrocession.

     This is not to say that there is necessarily such a thing as "Taiwanese Buddhism" to be set over and apart from "Chinese Buddhism." While Buddhists

on the island may be aware of themselves as members of a particular cultural or ethnic group, they still hold to ideals common to Buddhists all over China, such as the desirability of maintaining a vegetarian diet, clerical celibacy, transmitting the precepts in an orthodox way within an orthodox lineage, and so forth. This has especially been true since the immigration of many eminent monks and nuns from the mainland in 1949, as a result of which many reforms were instituted which caused Taiwan Buddhism to conform even more to the models of Jiangsu Province. A question that the reader should keep in mind throughout this study is the degree to which one may see the development of a distinctively "Taiwanese" form of Buddhism, and to what extent any perceived distinctiveness may simply be due to the fact that these Buddhists are products of local culture. We will return to this question of how much of Taiwan Buddhism's uniqueness is due to local culture and how much is due to real factors of religious doctrine and practice in the concluding chapter.

     This study came into being in the wider academic context of the acceptance of Taiwan studies as a separate field of inquiry. During the period from 1949 to the mid-1980s, the Nationalist government actively discouraged scholarship that concentrated on Taiwan as a discrete politico-cultural entity, fearing that "Taiwan studies" might be a code word for Taiwan separatism.[1] Western researchers, who depended upon the government's good graces for visas and access to materials, were forced to adopt this viewpoint. Not only that, but during periods of severe anti-Nationalist criticism in the West, scholars who wished to concentrate on

Taiwan fell under their Western colleagues' suspicion of being Nationalist sympathizers or apologists.[2] Furthermore, the fact that researchers had no access to sites or materials located on the mainland prior to America's diplomatic recognition of the Beijing government in 1979 forced scholars to come to Taiwan for language training and field research on the subject of "greater China" as defined by both the Nationalist regime and their own academic communities. As a result, many researchers came to Taiwan to pursue the goal of understanding "Chinese society," "Chinese culture," or "late imperial Chinese history," a project open to very severe criticism.[3]

     Religious studies were not immune to the exigencies imposed by these conditions. The most massive study of Chinese Buddhism ever undertaken in Taiwan to date was that of Holmes Welch in the early 1960s. Although he did much of the research for his books The Practice of Chinese Buddhism and The Buddhist Revival in China on the island, his overall aim was not to understand Taiwan Buddhism as such, but to gather oral histories from refugee monks from the mainland so as to reconstruct what Chinese Buddhism looked like there prior to the Communist takeover.[4] As far as I can determine, he never once interviewed a native Taiwanese cleric, nor did he address any issues peculiar to Buddhism in

Taiwan, such as the lingering effects of the Japanese occupation, or the conflicts that ensued after the influx of the very mainland monks upon whom he depended for his research.

     A few scholars from Japan, notably Nakamura Hajime, Kubō Noritada. Yoshioka Yoshitoyo, and Kamata Shigeo, did write on Buddhism in Taiwan during this period, but their scholarship is largely unsatisfying on two counts. Studies such as Kubō's are overly dependent upon Nationalist government sources, such as the 1956 Draft Gazetteer of Taiwan Province or the 1971 Gazetteer of Taiwan Province, which he uses uncritically and often simply quotes verbatim.[5] Others, such as Yoshioka's, are impressionistic and lack documentation.[6] Perhaps the best of the Japanese accounts are those by Nakamura, who commissioned a Taiwan scholar, Zhang Mantao, to write the basic text which he then arranged to have translated into Japanese,[7] and Kamata's, since he has worked in the field for a long time and has come to a deep understanding of Taiwan Buddhism.[8]

     Many things have changed since the publication of these studies. The lifting of the Bamboo Curtain after 1979 meant that scholars interested in mainland China now had direct access to their sources, and no longer needed to rely on Taiwan as the sole source of information on China as a whole. The lifting of Martial Law in the 1980s did much to alleviate the threat of government sanctions should the scholar appear too much a partisan of Taiwan culture and possibly

Taiwan independence (although I would still counsel caution with regard to the latter). The Nationalist government itself has initiated wide-scale democratization, allowing local culture to find its own voice and make its own presence felt. Notably, the official government school curriculum now includes large sections on local history and culture.[9] Scholars in Taiwan itself, particularly those of Taiwanese heritage, are beginning to turn their attention to the study of Taiwan as a separate cultural and historical unit, and at the same time are involving themselves more with the international academic community, making their findings available on a wider basis.

     The academy in the West has responded to these changes. In 1992 the John King Fairbank Center at Harvard University set up its Taiwan Studies Workshop.[10] The Association for Asian Studies now has a Taiwan Studies Group, and the American Political Science Association has a Conference Group on Taiwan Studies.[11] Many academics, even if they consider themselves China specialists, are still paying more attention to Taiwan as a source of pressure and influence on the mainland. The government in Taiwan has further encouraged scholarly inquiry by opening up academic resources and funding. The result has been an explosion in publications in Taiwan area studies.

     I was personally unaware of these developments at the time I chose this topic, and indeed I have had no ready answer for those who ask me about my interest in Buddhism in Taiwan. It stems from an affinity for the island that I felt

even before I visited it for the first time, and this has led some of my Buddhist friends to remark (whether jokingly or not, I do not know) that I must have been a monk on Taiwan in a past life. Be that as it may, other scholars of Taiwan and of Chinese Buddhism have expressed an interest in this field of study, and the number of requests I have received for copies of this work has surprised me. It is surely a timely endeavor.

     At this point I want to say a few words about the aspects of Taiwan Buddhist history that make it distinctive, in order to press the point that it deserves its own study.

     Taiwan has been part of "greater China" for only four of the last hundred years (1945-1949). From 1895 to 1945, it was part of the Japanese empire, and Chinese Buddhism had to exercise caution in plotting its course. It had to make itself acceptable to the Japanese government in order to survive such catastrophes as the backlash against religious groups that resulted from local rebellions early in the colonial period, and it accomplished this by forming Buddhist associations with Japanese Buddhism under the aegis of the Viceregal government. The most important of these associations was the South Seas Buddhist Association, founded in 1922. The same circumstances forced zhaijiao and Buddhism to make common cause for mutual protection, and their institutional affiliation during this time constitutes the only instance in Chinese history where the "orthodox" Buddhist establishment recognized and worked together with a form of White Lotus-style folk Buddhism.

     Later, when the "Japanization Movement" [kominka undō] and its concomitant "temple renovation" [jibyō seiri] measures took effect most lineages of Taiwan Buddhism put themselves directly under the administrative control of Japanese lineages. All through this period, however, one finds the countervailing sentiment that Japanese Buddhism, in which priests drink wine, eat meat, and marry, was decadent and that its influence was to be resisted. Thus, at the same time that Taiwan's ethnic Chinese Buddhists were joining Japanese associations and subordinating themselves to Japanese lineages, they also brought "orthodox" Chinese Buddhist ordinations to the island for the first time and tried very hard to keep the Chinese sangha ideal alive.

     When the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949 in the face of the Communist victory on the mainland, it was accompanied by two kinds of Buddhist clergy. One kind consisted of clergy who came to Taiwan as refugees or as soldiers in the Nationalist army. These monks and nuns found themselves struggling for bare subsistence in a strange land which viewed them with great suspicion. The other kind consisted of eminent monks, men who had been high functionaries in the BAROC on the mainland and who readily found government patronage through preexisting connections. These monks gained quick ownership of Japanese temples that had been confiscated, and were able to set themselves up as the governing body administering the Buddhist establishment in Taiwan. Local clergy found themselves underrepresented in a legislative body that claimed to house representatives from all over China, just as the population at large

found itself outnumbered by mainland representatives in the Legislative Yuan. The consequent imposition of mainlander rule has occasionally been a source of tension within the Buddhist community. The need to cope with ill-feeling and resistance on the part of the local culture also colored the BAROC's mission and effectiveness, and probably contributed to the extreme cliquishness that hampered it in subsequent decades.

     Even before the advent of Japanese rule, Taiwan was a unique territory within the Chinese sphere. It was an island on the Chinese frontier, far away from the centers of power and completely dominated by the aboriginal Polynesian tribes right up into the 17th century. The Dutch and Portuguese ruled it as colonial powers during the first half of that century until Zheng Chenggong (or Koxinga) drove them out in 1662. Even after the Qing court asserted control over Taiwan in 1683, the island remained at the periphery, with the Chinese population small, poor, and overshadowed by the aborigines. Real integration into the Chinese empire was slow in coining, and was achieved only by the end of the 18th century. During that time, the ethnic Han inhabitants lacked a real consciousness of themselves as citizens of the empire; instead, they identified themselves in terms of their clans, home provinces, counties, and towns. This manner of self-identification was intensified as immigrants from Fujian province waged wars with immigrants from Guangdong Province or even from other areas within Fujian Province over land and trading rights.

     The above remarks should make it clear that Buddhism in Taiwan has a

unique history derived from a unique set of historical and environmental circumstances. The author hopes that the present study will fill a need yet to be addressed in the current boom in Taiwan studies: the need for an examination of Buddhism as an organized, institutional religion on the island of Taiwan.

TECHNICAL NOTE ON ROMANIZATION

     The scholar whose research area is Taiwan faces a real dilemma when choosing a romanization system. Western sinologists for the past several decades have cut their linguistic teeth on the pinyin system which is the standard on the mainland and in international journalism. However, the ROC government on Taiwan has only recently acknowledged the fact that this system is the international standard, and English materials produced in Taiwan itself make a very inconsistent use of Wade-Giles. Religious studies as a discipline has also been very slow in accepting pinyin as the standard.

     However, when the 1992 edition of the Far East Chinese-English Dictionary came out in Taiwan, it dropped Wade-Giles altogether and adopted pinyin as its system of romanization and indexing.[12] Thus, I have decided to utilize pinyin as my primary system of romanization. (The reader should note, however, that both systems ignore the fact that many of the personages discussed in the following pages spoke only Hokkien, and may have lived their entire lives without ever hearing their own names pronounced in Mandarin!)

     I have made exceptions to this in two cases: 1) geographical names that are already well-known under a certain non-pinyin spelling (i.e., Taipei instead of Taibei, Kaohsiung instead of Gaoxiong, etc.); arid 2) Chinese authors who have published in English under their own romanizations of their names (i.e., Chu Hai-yuan instead of Qu Haiyuan).

     In the case of Sanskrit words and names, I have attempted, within my limited knowledge of the language, to ensure that they are romanized with the correct diacritical marks. There are, however, a few words that I deem to have become English words and so have presented them without diacritics. These words are samsara, nirvana, Mahayana, Hinayana, and sutra.

Footnotes

[1] Vuylsteke 1994, p. 14. [back to text]

[2] Vuylsteke 1994, p. 8. [bact to text]

[3] See, for example, Murray and Hong 1991, p. 273-299. Murray and Hong call into question the notion that American researchers in history and anthropology could look at Taiwan for examples of Chinese society and Chinese culture from the late Qing period when the Japanese Viceregal government had done all it could do to destroy Chinese culture on the island for fifty years. Most especially, they fault most (though not all) researchers for not recognizing the fact that Taiwan itself is a cultural unit that deserves study on its own terms.[bact to text]

[4] Welch's own statement of the aims, methods, and sources of his research may be found in his "Preface," Welch 1967, p. v-x.[bact to text]

[5] Kubō 1984, p. 47-71. [back to text]

[6] Yoshioka 1974, pp. 31-45. This work is primarily an account of Yoshioka's trip to Taiwan in the early 1970s. [back to text]

[7] Nakamura et al ed. 1976, p. 129-188. [back to text]

[8] See his various works listed in the Bibliography. [back to text]

[9] Vuylsteke 1994, p. 12-14. [back to text]

[10] Vuylsteke 1994, p. 10. [back to text]

[11] Chang 1994, p. 29. [back to text]

[12] This book neatly side-steps the political implications of adopting the pinyin system by railing it the "United Nations phonetic transcription system." [back to text]

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