Download Education, Invention Of Orthodoxy, And The Construction

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2012
Education, Invention of Orthodoxy, and
the Construction of Modern Buddhism on
Dharma Drum Mountain
Daniel Ryan Tuzzeo
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
EDUCATION, INVENTION OF ORTHODOXY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF
MODERN BUDDHISM ON DHARMA DRUM MOUNTAIN
By
DANIEL RYAN TUZZEO
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of Religion
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2012
Daniel Ryan Tuzzeo defended this thesis on March 30, 2012.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Jimmy Yu
Professor Directing Thesis
Bryan Cuevas
Committee Member
Joseph Hellweg
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
This work is dedicated to all who have made it possible—my advisor, professors, classmates,
friends, family, and Dharma Drum Mountain—and to the memory of Andres Chang.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful beyond words to my advisor, Professor Jimmy Yu, without whose guidance,
support, and grandmotherly kindness, this thesis and the development over the past three years
would not have been possible. Thank you for always pushing me, and helping me to achieve
more than I ever could have on my own.
I have been fortunate enough at Florida State to have two more professors whom I consider
advisors as well. Thank you, Professor Cuevas, for your tutelage, and for expanding my view
and awareness of the field of Buddhist Studies and my abilities in scholarship. Thank you,
Professor Hellweg, for guiding me through my fieldwork from the beginning, and for always
being available to talk to and brainstorm.
Lori Chung, thank you for your friendship and support. Without your help, in more than just
translation, I would not have been able to accomplish this.
To Cameron Bailey and Patrick Ley, your friendship, camaraderie, and support have been
instrumental in me making it through this alive.
To Bojun Liu and Yungchi (Thomas) Lai, my big sister and brother, I cannot possibly thank you
enough. To many more spicy hot pots in the future!
I am especially grateful to Dharma Drum Mountain, and all the associated fashi and pusa, who
are too numerous to name in entirety. However, I must give special thanks to Guo Dong fashi,
Guo Guang fashi, Guo Yuan fashi, Chang Xu fashi, Aming Du, Hsiulan Chen, Wen-Ren Liu, Pei
Yang, Marcus Bingenheimer, Bill Magee, and Simon Wiles. Thank you to everyone who was so
kind to fill out my questionnaires and take time out of your day to be interviewed. Thank you to
all who have treated me so well and made me so comfortable at DDM. Thank you for allowing
me the opportunity to live with you, learn from you, talk with you, and practice with you over
the past three years. I hope they won’t be the last.
iv
Thank you to the Sheng Yen Education Foundation, whose generous grant has allowed me to
focus on making this the best thesis of my abilities.
Finally, thank you, Mom and Dad, for always supporting me in doing anything I do, even if it
means traveling across the world for extended periods of time year after year. Thank you to
Mercedes and all of my friends and family, and anyone I have neglected to mention!
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
viii
Abstract
ix
INTRODUCTION
Dharma Drum Mountain: Its Physical Layout and Academic Programs
Shengyan and the Role of Education in Taiwanese Buddhism
Uplifting the Character of Humanity and Creating a Pure Land on Earth
Theories of Modernization and Notions of Decline
Theories of Buddhist Education and the Beginnings of Modernism
1
5
7
10
12
17
1. CHAPTER ONE: RHETORIC OF DECLINE AND REVIVAL
1.1. Tracing the Rhetoric of Decline and Revival in Chinese Buddhism
1.2. Persistent Emic Discourse of Anti-clericalism and Anti-Superstition
1.3. The Revivalist Turn of Yang Wenhui and Taixu
1.4. Interaction with Christian Missionaries and Establishing a Pure Land on Earth
1.5. Taixu’s Impact on Contemporary Chinese Buddhism
26
27
34
41
50
57
2. CHAPTER TWO: SHENGYAN AND HIS ASPIRATION FOR EDUCATION
2.1. Shengyan as Zhang Baokang
2.2. Shengyan as the Novice Changjin
2.3. Shengyan as a Soldier
2.4. Shengyan Returns to Monkhood
2.5. A Buddhist Doctorate Becoming An Educator
62
62
66
70
72
78
3. CHAPTER THREE: CONSTRUCTING MODERN BUDDHISM THROUGH
EDUCATION
3.1. Orthodoxy and Tradition at DDM
3.2. Dharma Drum’s Educational Philosophy
3.3. The Dharma Drum Worldview
3.4. Inheriting the Past and Inspiring the Future
3.5. Stage One: Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
3.6. Stage Two: Dharma Drum Sangha University
3.7. Stage Three: Dharma Drum Buddhist College
3.8. Stage Four: Dharma Drum University
3.9. Using Materiality to Negotiate Modernity and Tradition
3.10. Buddhism as Religion and the Supernatural
82
83
89
91
97
99
101
103
104
105
111
4. CHAPTER FOUR: IMPLEMENTING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
THROUGH EDUCATION
4.1. Dharma Drum Mountain’s Community of Practice
4.2. Dharma Drum Sangha University
115
118
120
vi
4.3. Dharma Drum Buddhist College
4.4. Ethnographic Methodology
4.5. Ethnographic Data and Analysis
124
129
138
CONCLUSION: RETHINKING MODERNITY
Buddhist Modernism
Comparing DDM with Islamic Education in Indonesian Pesantren
Residence Life, Cura Personalis and Service Learning at Jesuit Institutions
Secularization of Universities in the United States
Future Research
151
152
155
158
164
168
APPENDIX:
Figures for Chapter Three
Sample Permission and Informed Consent Form for Ethnographic Research
171
171
177
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
185
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
228
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
1. Figure 1. Shengyan’s childhood area of activity
79
2. Figure 2. Map of Jiangsu Province in China
80
3. Figure 3. Syncretism: A Night Photo of a Traditional Chinese Temple in Taiwan
107
4. Figure 4. Picture of a “Daoist” temple in Yilan
108
5. Figure 5. Contrast of Dharma Drum Mountain’s “orthodoxy.”
108
6. Figure 6. Shengyan’s references to Buddhism and education
111
7. Figure 7. DDM’s model of world-transformation
115
8. Figure 8. The overlaps of DDSU, CHIBS, and DDU
122
9. Figure 9. Altar with many divinities
132
10. Figure 10. Wall of lights
133
11. Figure 11. Digital lamp
133
12. Figure 12. Electric organ in a service
134
13. Figure 13. Results of Analysis, 1 (Reason for Coming to DDBC)
134
14. Figure 14. Results of Analysis, 2 (Most Important Activity at DDM)
174
15. Figure 15. Results of Analysis, 3 (Students’ Plans After Graduating DDBC)
177
16. Figure 16. Results of Analysis, 4 (Reported Weekly Time Allotment)
178
17. Figure 17. Results of Analysis, 5 (Student Satisfaction)
184
18. Figure 18. Buddhist Libraries in Taiwan
213
19. Figure 19. Buddhist Studies Courses in Taiwan
214
20. Figure 20. Buddhist Study Groups and Lectures in Taiwan
215
21. Figure 21. Comparison of Buddhist Libraries, Courses, and Groups/Lectures
216
viii
ABSTRACT
My research involves an ethno-historical study of Dharma Drum Mountain (Fagushan 法
鼓山), founded in 1989 by Venerable Shengyan 聖嚴 (1930-2009). Dharma Drum is currently
one of the most powerful, international Buddhist organizations in Taiwan, and has incorporated
the discourse of education with an aim to modernize Chinese Buddhism in response to a
perceived crisis and need for revitalization. Dharma Drum’s education campaign involves three
types of what the organization broadly defines as education, but for the purposes of this research
I focus solely on what the organization identifies as “education through academics,” namely
referring to educational and research projects such as those affiliated with Dharma Drum
Buddhist College, the Chung-Hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies, and the organization’s
monastic seminary, Dharma Drum Saṅgha University. The goal of this educational system is to
engage socially and transform the world by first transforming the self. On one hand, the effect of
this is to “uplift the character of humanity and build a pure land on earth.” On the other hand,
this practice-oriented approach of world-transformation is a modern technique used for
promoting DDM’s brand of orthodox Chinese Buddhism.
My research provides historical context around the conditions that led Dharma Drum
Mountain’s founder, Venerable Shengyan, to perceive of a crisis of survival for Chinese
Buddhism in the twentieth century and to determine education to be the solution to this problem;
translations of Ven. Shengyan’s written discourse on the need for education in order to combat
this perceived decline in Chinese Buddhism; and ethnographic examination of the current state
of Dharma Drum’s educational institutions, within which communities of practice and an
environment of situated learning are established, and an assessment of the organization’s success
in implementing Shengyan’s goals.
My thesis is that Shengyan’s goal of establishing Chinese Buddhist orthodoxy through
modern education aims to transform the way Buddhism is understood in contemporary Taiwan.
While this transformation is still undergoing continual change as it is mediated between
institutional goals and individual preferences, it is forming two different forms of modernity:
institutional and personal. DDM’s orthodoxy also mirrors the struggle that many contemporary
religious institutions face when balancing traditional values with modern sensibilities. In the case
ix
of DDM, such a balancing act can also be witnessed in its formulation and integration of practice
and study. This integration of practice and study is a tool for promoting and actualizing
Shengyan’s unique worldview, which recasts the self as interconnected with society and
humanity as a means of transforming the world while simultaneously promoting DDM’s brand
of Chinese Buddhism through practice rather than discourse. Shengyan’s design of the
community of practice at DDM to train clerics, laity, and secular scholars was intentionally
developed with an environment of situated learning that aims to close the practice-study divide.
It is still too early to discern the ultimate successfulness of his design, but it is possible to assess
its current state. While DDM’s aim is to nurture capable people to revitalize, disseminate, and
contribute to the greater appreciation of Chinese Buddhism, the individuals who are living on
DDM are often experiencing difficulties living up to this expected goal.
x
INTRODUCTION
Chinese Buddhist Studies as an academic field is predominantly focused on textuality over
actuality, doctrine over practice, and the past over the present. With few exceptions, research has
traditionally been conducted in the library, rather than in the meditation hall, the Buddhist
university, or on the ground living with practicing Buddhists. Until the past decade or so, little
attention has been paid to the socio-anthropological aspects of contemporary Chinese Buddhism.
This thesis aims to redress this lacuna. It contributes to a small, but growing, body of studies on
Chinese Buddhism from the nineteenth century to the present by examining one of the most
powerful and international of Taiwanese Buddhist organizations.
Dharma Drum Mountain (Fagushan 法鼓山), hereafter DDM, the subject of this thesis,
was founded in 1989 by Venerable Shengyan 聖嚴 (1930-2009).1 Shengyan designed DDM to
implement his vision for modernizing Chinese Buddhism through Buddhist education. Indeed,
DDM presents orthodox Chinese Buddhism as a form of education; it defines it in three distinct
ways: “Education through academics” (Da xueyuan jiaoyu 大學院教育), “education through
public outreach” (Da puhua jiaoyu 大普化教育), and “education through caring services” (Da
guanhuai jiaoyu 大關懷教育). These three categories are interrelated, and together redefine
traditional Buddhist teachings in a unique way that is harmony with the discourse of modernity,
while also challenging it. While each of these three campaigns is worthy of its own study, for the
purposes of this research I will focus solely on “education through academics.” Here,
“academics” or “institutional education” (xueyuan jiaoyu 學 院 教 育 ) refers not only to
educational and scholarly research projects, such as the independent DDM institutions
established on the same mountain site—Dharma Drum Buddhist College, the Chung-Hwa
Institute for Buddhist Studies, and the organization’s monastic seminary, Dharma Drum Sangha
University. The academic projects of these institutions are also absorbed into a larger normative
agenda of world transformation. Hence, academia is actually integrated as a means ultimately to
propagate Chinese Buddhism.
Some of the questions this research project examines are: How did Shengyan conceive of
Chinese Buddhist orthodoxy (zhengxin 正信)? What is the relationship between Buddhist
1
“Sheng Yen” is the Romanization system used by Dharma Drum for “Shengyan.”
1
practice and education at DDM? How are they defined differently? Why does DDM promote
“education through academics”? What are some of the social, cultural, and religious implications
of “academics” as defined by DDM in this context? Are there not other means to make
Buddhism more relevant in twenty-first century? I answer these questions by first providing a
historical context that led Shengyan to perceive of a crisis of survival for Chinese Buddhism in
the twentieth century and to determine education to be the solution to this problem. I translate
pertinent passages from Shengyan’s writings on the need for education and provide results from
my ethnographic data on DDM’s educational institutions, within which communities of practice
and an environment of situated learning are established.2 Lastly, I critically assess DDM’s
success in implementing Shengyan’s goals.
My thesis is that Shengyan’s goal of establishing Chinese Buddhist orthodoxy through
modern education aims to transform the way Buddhism is understood in contemporary Taiwan.
While this transformation is still undergoing continual change as it is mediated between
institutional goals and individual preferences, it is forming two different forms of modernity:
institutional and personal. DDM’s attempt at inventing orthodoxy also mirrors the struggle that
many contemporary religious institutions face when balancing traditional values with modernist
sensibilities. In the case of DDM, such a balancing act can also be witnessed in its formulation
and integration of practice and study. This attempted integration of practice and study is a tool
for promoting and actualizing Shengyan’s worldview, which recasts the self as interconnected
with society and humanity as a means of transforming the world while simultaneously promoting
DDM’s brand of Chinese Buddhism through practice rather than discourse. The Buddhist
scholar, Carl Bielefeldt, dissects the concept of “practice” into four types: a vocational
engagement or regular participation in a tradition; what is applied and practical, as contrasted
with the theoretical; preparation or training to make one adept at performance or skill; and
finally, actual behavior rather than an ideal or principle.3 While this shows the complexity of this
category, I find Bielefeldt’s second and fourth categorizations of practice as applied theory most
appropriate for discussing “practice” at DDM, as he notes, “practice is always driven by some
2
See Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
(Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The concepts of communities of
practice and situated learning will be discussed more fully in Chapter Four.
3
Carl Bielefeldt, “Practice,” in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 2005, 229-230.
2
theory, not just in the sense that theory informs and guides it but in the sense that its very
existence as a category is a product of theory.”4 This is precisely the kind of practice being
promoted at DDM, as Shengyan spoke of theory as the source of practice. Furthermore, in
DDM’s use of the term, “theory” is to be studied (e.g., Buddhist scriptures, teachings of Chan
patriarchs, and perhaps most importantly, Shengyan’s form of Buddhist orthodoxy), but also
implemented in daily life as a “practice”—not only in seated meditation, prostrations, or other
so-called traditional activities, but in all aspects of waking life. Thus, DDM’s discourse affirms
Bielefeldt’s claim that Buddhist practitioners (wholly disembodied throughout his discussion)
“want their practice to flow from some theory that makes it more than merely random
behavior.”5 Additionally, Shengyan’s design of what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger would
classify as a “community of practice” at DDM to train clerics, laity, and secular scholars was
intentionally developed with an environment of situated learning that aims to close the practicestudy divide. It is still too early to discern the ultimate successfulness of his design, but it is
possible to assess its current state. While DDM’s aim is to nurture capable people to revitalize,
disseminate, and contribute to the greater appreciation of Chinese Buddhism, the individuals who
are living on DDM are often experiencing difficulties living up to this expected goal.
Shengyan’s move to reinterpret Buddhism can be traced back to late-nineteenth century
responses to anti-clerical discourse in China, early-twentieth century Buddhist discourse of
“humanistic Buddhism” (renjian fojiao 人間佛教), and the mid-twentieth century Japanese
model of Buddhist higher education and scholarship without its shortcomings of secularization.
However, Shengyan’s reinterpretation appears to be incongruent with scholarly analysis of
contemporary organizations and thinkers’ notion of modernism, which privileges philosophy
over practice and secularization over religiosity. DDM’s programs of practice are injected with a
modernist sensibility that focuses instead on actualizing values and realizing religiosity of selftransformation in daily life. My use of the category, “Buddhist modernism” or “modern
Buddhism,” does not to refer simply to Buddhism(s) in the modern era, but rather to a specific
4
5
Ibid., 232.
Ibid., 235.
3
type of Buddhism characterized by “engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual
forces of modernity.”6
DDM’s promotion of education, even academic education, aims to accomplish the
organization’s goal of world-transformation through self-transformation. For DDM, educating
the self is to integrate the self progressively with the body, society, the natural environment
locally and globally, and ultimately humanity, with the aim of transforming the world into a
“pure land on earth” (renjian jingtu 人間淨土). Education is defined as a process of purifying
the world through first purifying one’s own mind. This notion of education is not a new
invention of Shenyan’s. The idea of transforming the world through transforming the self, which
is not limited to cerebral, institutional educational systems, can be found in ancient Buddhist
scriptures and even Confucian classics, such as the opening lines of Daxue 大學 or The Great
Learning of Confucius.7 In this sense, the notion of “learning” or “education” that Shengyan
espouses is quite traditional. What is unique, however, is Shengyan’s appropriation of these wellingrained Chinese values in learning and educating oneself in a modern educational discourse,
with all the potentials (seen by various religions traditions and cultures) it holds for a new,
progressive educational system that is human centered, holistic, and practical for the betterment
of humanity. This form of education challenges and pushes our current (Western, and essentially
modern) model of education by going beyond mere knowledge and skill acquisition. Because
DDM strategically defines education as a holistic, transformative system, this allows the
organization to reinterpret and preserve traditional Buddhist practices, while still incorporating a
variety of social and educational practices, including an institutionalized Western education
model, to work toward its goal of revitalizing Chinese Buddhism. In Shengyan’s own words,
what he is doing is “inheriting the past and inspiring the future” (chengxian qihou 承先啓後).
I will explore much further in Chapter Three DDM’s worldview focused on concentric
transformation, where I will also show that this concentric worldview has analogues in
contemporary Japanese New Religions. I will show in the Conclusion that DDM’s overall
education model also shares similarities with Western approaches of blending higher education
6
David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 6.
7
See Confucius, and James Legge, Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of
the Mean (New York: Dover Publications, 1971) 355-381.
4
and service learning, as promoted by Martha Nussbaum. This is despite an environment of socalled secularization in modern American higher education, which has led to calls for a revival of
religious values in the American university. I will also show in the Conclusion that DDM’s
education model is similar to the concept of care of the individual, or cura personalis, in
contemporary Jesuit higher education, as well as Islamic higher education in Indonesia,
providing an opportunity to rethink the role of education and religion in modernity, and examine
how models analogous to DDM’s have adapted with modernity.
Dharma Drum Mountain: Its Physical Layout and Academic Programs
DDM is a broad designation, under which various institutions exist. The physical
structure of these institutions can be roughly divided into two main wings: academic and nonacademic. The academic wing includes classrooms for the Dharma Drum Sangha University
(DDSU), a seminary for incoming monks and nuns, with three different tracks for up to nine
years of study; the Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC), a nationally accredited Buddhist
Studies college conferring undergraduate and graduate degrees; and the Chung-Hwa Institute of
Buddhist Studies (CHBIS), once DDM’s sole education institute, and now the organization’s
research institute responsible for publishing scholarly journals and hosting academic conferences
devoted to Buddhist Studies. DDM is currently in the process of constructing Dharma Drum
University (DDU), designed to be a secular, liberal arts college located on the same mountain as
the rest of the DDM complex. The non-academic wing includes the DDM monastery proper,
which includes the various practice halls and ritual space, as well as administration offices, two
separate living quarters for roughly 300 clerics, and living quarters for over 100 lay volunteers
and administrative staff. All of these separate institutions and halls exist on the same mountain
site on the northern coast of Taiwan, in Jinshan Township near the capital, Taipei. Thus, the
architectural layout of DDM also aims to promote the integration of the study and practice of
Buddhism.
In addition to DDM’s mountain site, there are also several DDM branch monasteries
throughout Taiwan and a Sheng Yen Education Foundation in Taipei city that provides grants
“for the promotion of Buddhist education, academic research on Buddhism, the publication of
5
(select) Buddhist works, and educational undertakings that seek to improve the wellbeing of
humanity and society.”8
The academic wing of DDM has a tremendous impact on the future of Chinese Buddhist
Studies. It is not only instrumental in developing tools for the academic study of Buddhism, such
as the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), which has become the standard
source for research on East Asian Buddhist texts in academia.9 It also has other large digitization
projects underway for Chinese Buddhist gazetteers, databases for all Chinese Buddhist journals
that date back to early twentieth century, and various maps and biographies of Buddhist monks
and nuns throughout Chinese Buddhist history. DDM also funds the study of Chinese Buddhism.
It is one of the only private Buddhist institutions to provide fellowships and grants for the study
of Chinese Buddhism at the Master’s and Ph.D. levels, and for book monographs written in
English in the United States and Europe.10
Other DDM academic programs include Buddhist conferences. In 2011, DDM hosted the
Sixteenth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), a renowned
international conference that gathers several hundred of the top Buddhist scholars from around
the world.11 DDBC and CHIBS also regularly hold national and international Buddhist studies
conferences on DDM. These endeavors are part of what DDM refers to as “education through
academics,” providing “comprehensive, humanistic education”12 and “training youth to become
individuals who excel in both morals and study… in accordance with international standards of
distinguished leaders.”13 This includes monastic training and academic Buddhist studies for laity
and clerics not affiliated with DDM, as well as secular scholars. Members of each of these
8
See Sheng Yen Education Foundation, “Sheng Yen Education Foundation,”
www.shengyen.org.tw/eng/eng.htm. Accessed March 14, 2012.
9
See Huimin Bhiksu, “From CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association) Electronic
Tripitaka Collection to BIP (Buddhist Informatics Program) and IBA (Integrated Buddhist
Archives)” (Paper presented to the EBTI After 15 and CBETA at 10 Years: Joint International
Conference on Digital Buddhist Studies, Jinshan, February 15-17, 2008).
10
See Sheng Yen Education Foundation, “Sheng Yen Education Foundation.”
11
For reflections on IABS and DDM from some of the presenting scholars, see Humanity
Magazine, August, 2011.
12
Dharma Drum Mountain, “About,” Developing Three Types of Education,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=52. Accessed February 28, 2012.
13
Shengyan, “Dharma Drum’s Three Types of Education Fagushan de san da jiaoyu 法鼓山的
三大教育,” Fagu jiafeng 法鼓家風, in Fagu quanji, di 8 ji, di 11 ce, (Taibei Shi: Fagu wenhua
shiye gu fen you xian gongsi, 1999), 130-131.
6
groups are involved in DDM’s educational institutions as both instructors and students, and in
international academic conferences.
DDM also aims to fulfill a vision of a contemporary, orthodox Chinese Buddhism.
Shengyan first articulated this vision in 1989, but before it became concretized in actual physical
structures on the mountain site of DDM, it had already mobilized people to build smaller
organizations (which later became “branches” of DDM) throughout the world. DDM now has
nearly thirty branches in North America; six branches in Europe; one branch each in Bangkok,
Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia. In 2005, all of these branches came under the
umbrella of “Dharma Drum Mountain World Center for Buddhist Education,” a designation for
the DDM headquarters that oversees its educational programs.
One of the chief reasons why Shengyan was able to mobilize so many people in different
parts of the world to support his vision is because of his reputation as a Chan (Jp. Zen) master.
As a result, DDM is also popularly known (or perhaps better known) as one of the most
influential Chan monasteries in Taiwan. I return to Shengyan’s affiliation with Chan below in
Chapter Two.
Shengyan and the Role of Education in Taiwanese Buddhism
DDM is part of, and inseparable from, the landscape of Taiwanese Buddhism, which is
institutionally dominated by three Buddhist organizations: DDM, Buddha’s Light Mountain
(Foguangshan 佛光山) organizations, and the “Ciji” Compassionate Relief Foundation (Ciji
jijinhui 慈濟基金會). All three of these organizations are inheriting from the same repertoire,
which includes three aspects of the legacy of the twentieth century Chinese scholar-monks,
Taixu 太虛 (1890-1947) and his student Yinshun 印順 (1906-2005); the influence of Japanese
Buddhism as an exemplar of Buddhist modernization; and a response to Christian groups.14
However, the role of education is generally connected to DDM.
Each of these three major Buddhist organizations in Taiwan is modernizing Buddhism by
recasting different practices as the primary form of Buddhist cultivation in order to establish
what is rhetorically known as “a pure land on earth” (renjian jingtu 人間淨土), a movement first
14
Scott Pacey, “A Buddhism for the Human World: Interpretations of Renjian Fojiao in
Contemporary Taiwan,” Asian Studies Review 29 (2005): 445-461.
7
articulated by Taixu in 1930 that seeks to humanize and modernize Buddhism so that it can
engage with the society—that is, to recast Buddhism as relevant and involved with, as opposed
to removed from, the world. 15 Foguangshan is embracing popular media to proselytize
Buddhism, Ciji is engaging in philanthropy by building hospitals and networks of disaster relief
around the world to spread the Buddha’s message of compassion, and Dharma Drum is using
education to create a new Chinese Buddhist orthodoxy.16
In terms of DDM’s promotion of Buddhism as education, much has to do with Taixu,
Shengyan the person and his life experiences, and his appropriation of the Japanese educational
model of modernization in the late nineteenth-century to mid twentieth-century. Shengyan
himself exemplified what DDM aims to promote. Despite coming from a poor rural family in
mainland China and only receiving a fourth grade education, Shengyan became the first Chinese
Buddhist monk to go through the modern higher educational system to earn a Ph.D., which he
received in 1975 from Risshō University in Tokyo. Risshō is affiliated with the Nichiren school
of Japanese Buddhism, an offshoot of Japanese Tendai Buddhism. It represents a prominent
aspect of Japanese Buddhism, wherein sectarian scholars promote different aspects of their own
form of Buddhism in academic and normative circles. However, Shengyan was able to study
subjects related to Chinese Tiantai (Jp. Tendai) Buddhism, thereby circumventing Japanese
sectarian issues.
Japan has many sectarian universities which have produced a large body of scholarship
on their own traditions, and which have largely informed the field of Buddhist Studies
internationally today. What Shengyan took from his experiences in Japan was not so much the
sectarian scholarship but the positive impact of education that these sectarian universities has on
Japanese Buddhism in general and mainstream Japanese culture at large. His experience in Japan
clearly influenced his view of education and Buddhist practice and prompted him to create his
own system integrating both domains through a community of practice in Taiwan.17
15
For Taixu’s articulation of a “pure land on earth,” see Don Alvin Pittman, Toward a Modern
Chinese Buddhism: Taixus Reforms, (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), 223.
16
See Richard Madsen, Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political
Development in Taiwan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
17
See Jimmy Yu, “Master Sheng Yen and the Modern Construction of Chan Buddhism,” The
30th Anniversary of Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies: Flowering Fields and Fruitful
Harvest (2010).
8
Shengyan’s motivation for higher education can be explained in part by the inspiration of
the controversial Buddhist reformer and intellectual Taixu, whose reforms responded to the
many changes in wider Chinese society as a result of Western imperial powers and internal
turmoil. Many secular intellectuals during Taixu’s time saw Buddhism as a useless aspect of
traditional culture that was holding China back from taking its place as a modern nation state.
Thus, with changes in the ideology and education of wider society, Buddhism came to be
criticized for its ignorant monks and superstitious rituals. In response, Taixu’s teacher, the
layman, Yang Wenhui 揚文會 (1837-1911), established a school modeled on Japanese Buddhist
sectarian universities that gradually led to an ideological shift, borrowing from the Western
education model, within Chinese Buddhist circles: that texts and scriptures were not meant to be
chanted, recited, or memorized, but rather to be studied, analyzed, and compared.18
Taixu was later to establish his own schools or seminaries with the same emphasis as that
of his teacher’s school, where the curriculum gradually focused (away from the study of
scriptures) on treatises and commentaries, which Holmes Welch describes as a shift in emphasis
from sūtras to śastras, and from the religious to the secular.19
According to Welch, Taixu’s plans provided a token quantity of meditation, but at most
seminaries there was none. Welch states that Taixu himself rarely took part in meditation,
reciting the Buddha’s name, or any other daily devotions.20 The focus was primarily textual
analysis and intellectual learning. Despite the evidence that Taixu did not perceive of meditation
and academic learning of Buddhism as distinct, as Holmes Welch suggests,21 nevertheless Taixu
and his intellectual successors did place great emphasis on educating the monastic community
18
Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism (London; New York:
Routledge, 2007), 56-57. The rational analysis of texts was not the only response to this cultural
shift; Daoists countered the scientism of the times by rearticulating their meditation practices
through the lens of science; see Liu Xun, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the
Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 79.
19
Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968),
113.
20
Ibid., 202.
21
The advent of WWI caused Taixu to question his respect for Western learning and he went
into solitary retreat on Mount Putuo, at which time, influenced by his prior experiences, he
continued his cultivation of meditation. Later, he would incorporate meditation into his plans for
his seminaries; see Taixu, “Zhengli sengjie zhidu lun,” in Taixu dashi quanshu: Sengzhi, v. 9
(Beijing: Zhongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 1005), 123.
9
(Skt. saṅgha), in order to engage with the society. One of Taixu’s students was the monk,
Dongchu 東初 (1907-1977), who was one of the most prolific Buddhist writers and educators
who escaped from China to Taiwan in 1949, and later became Shengyan’s teacher and mentor.
I return to elaborate more on Taixu and Yang Wenhui below. For now, suffice it to
conclude that Shengyan was an intellectual successor to Taixu through his own mentor and
teacher Dongchu. As the only master with a Ph.D. among the three leading Taiwanese
organization leaders, naturally DDM is associated with education. Shengyan also further defined
and concretized some of Taixu’s ideas, such as notions of a humanistic form of Buddhism and
socially and spiritually transforming the earth into a “pure land.”
Uplifting the Character of Humanity and Creating a Pure Land on Earth
Much of DDM’s modernization discourse rests on the notion of building “a pure land on
earth.” Indeed, its overarching motto is, “Uplifting the character of humanity and creating a pure
land on earth” (tisheng rende pinzhi; jianshe renjian jingtu 提升人的品質、建設人間淨土).
This notion of building a pure land on earth or renjian jingtu as understood by Shengyan
originates with Taixu but can be doctrinally traced back to the Buddhist scripture, where the idea
of the pure land is not necessarily located in a distant realm (as espoused in certain “pure land
scriptures” promoted by Pure Land Buddhism). Instead, it is located in the awakened, pure mind
that is free from emotional afflictions and attachments. The aim of DDM and Shengyan’s vision
is to concretely actualize this reality from self-transformation to societal-transformation, making
the world into an enlightened, pure abode for all beings. As Scott Pacey explains, the notion of
“renjian jingtu involves the creation of a new society—one with Buddhist ethics and principles
at its core, and in which people’s lives and behaviour are guided by these principles.”22
The term “Pure Land Buddhism” or “Pure Land teaching” (Chn. jingtujiao 淨土教; Jp.
jōdokyō) has been part of the analytic repertoire of scholars of East Asian religion since at least
the end of the nineteenth century. In its most minimal sense, it can be defined as a devotional
orientation to Amitābha Buddha, with the attendant aim of rebirth in his Realm of Highest Bliss
to the West (Skt. Sukhāvatī), or simply, the Western Pure Land. There are three “Pure Land
22
Pacey, “A Buddhism for the Human World,” 448.
10
sūtras” that, from at least the late-fifth and early-sixth centuries, have served as the locus
classicus for Chinese Buddhist discussions of Sukhāvatī and its attendant soteriology of rebirth:
the Sūtra on the Buddha of Immeasurable Life (Chn. Foshuo wuliang shou jing 佛說無量壽經;
Skt. Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra); the Amitābha Sūtra (Chn. Foshuo Amituo jing 佛說阿彌陀
經; Skt. Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra); and the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Buddha of
Measureless Life (Chn. Foshuo guan wuliangshoufo jing 佛說觀無量壽佛經; no extant Skt
version). Although recent scholarship suggests that Amitābha and Sukhāvatī or the Pure Land
played a more important role in Indian and Central Asian Mahāyāna than previously thought,23 it
was not until the Amitābha and Sukhāvatī motif was introduced to China that it began to emerge
as a discrete point of devotional and soteriological concern.
Historically, practices that have a particular pure land valence have not been separate
from other Chinese Buddhist practices. However, when Chinese Buddhism was transmitted to
Japan, these practices became institutionalized and sectarianized into distinct Pure Land schools
of Jōdo shū (Pure Land School) and Jōdo shinshū (True Pure Land School) established by Hōnen
(1133-1212) and Shinran (1173-1262) respectively. 24 Even though these Japanese schools
focused on rebirth in an external realm of Pure Land or Sukhāvatī, it is not to say that Japanese
Buddhism never taught the notion of pure land as a result of a pure mind. In the thirteenth
century, Japanese esoteric monks like Nichiren (1222-1282) were advocating the concept that the
pure land is not another realm, but rather, this world, and that Amitābha is our mind.25
This interpretation had already developed fully in the Tiantai Buddhist concepts of the
pure land as early as the sixth century in China. However, in both China and Japan, this
interpretation never became the core principle of any movement within Buddhism until Taixu,
who advocated using Buddhism as a tool for social change through his ideas of “Buddhism for
the human realm” (rensheng fojiao 人生佛教) or “humanistic Buddhism” (renjian fojiao 人間佛
23
See Gregory Schopen, “Sukhāvatī as a Generalized Religious Goal in Sanskrit Mahāyāna
Sūtra Literature,” in Indo-Iranian Journal 19 (1977), 177-210.
24
The Jōdo shinshū tradition is arguably the best-known Pure Land tradition in the West, and its
influence reaches beyond its followers into the Buddhist academic field to the extent that
scholarly writings on the Pure Land tradition often tend to assume that Jōdo shinshū
interpretations of Pure Land history and doctrine are accepted by all devotees of Amitābha.
25
Jacqueline Ilyse Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval
Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), 91.
11
教). 26 Taixu, like Shengyan, advocated enacting this social change first through education.
Through education, these figures argue, people can purify their minds and engender a pure
environment. Shengyan explicitly stated that this concept of a pure land on earth is taken from
the first chapter of the Vimalakirtī Sūtra.27 Speaking at Zhongyang University in 1994, he
explained:
It says in the Vimalakirti Sutra: “As long as the mind is pure, then the Buddhaland is
pure.” The idea in this passage is that if your mind is pure, then the world you are living
in is pure.”28
Contemporary Buddhist groups in Taiwan all use the phraseology of “creating a pure land on
earth,” but none of them stress it to the same degree, and with the same focus on education, as
DDM. Thus, DDM’s project, while situated in a similar larger context, is employing the method
of recasting education as Buddhist practice in order to create a pure land on earth.
Theories of Modernization and Notions of Decline
DDM has consciously attempted to modernize and adapt Chinese Buddhism in response
to a perceived crisis of the decline of Chinese Buddhism. This perception, in part, comes from
narratives of the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Chinese intellectual and
foreign Christian missionaries. While this led some in the Chinese Buddhist intellectual
community to accept the unfortunate fate of Buddhism as they saw it, others, like Shengyan,
began to actively redefine Buddhism by weeding out notions of superstition and ritual practices
that resembled “popular religion” with the aim of making Buddhism accessible and attractive to
26
Don Alvin Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 348. See also Marcus
Bingenheimer, “Some Remarks on the Usage of Renjian Fojiao and the Contribution of
Venerable Yinshun to Chinese Buddhist Modernism” In Development and Practice of
Humanitarian Buddhism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Mutsu Hsu, Jinhua Chen, and Lori
Meeks (Eds.). Hua-lien (Taiwan): Tzuchi University Press, 2007, 141-161.
27
Shengyan, “Preface to the Six Teachings of the Vimalakirti Sutra,” Book Prefaces (Xushu 書
序), Fagu quanji, Vol. 3, bk. 5, (Taibei Shi: Fagu wenhua shiye gufen youxian gongsi 台北市 :
法鼓文化事業股份有限公司, 2005), 295-299.
28
Shengyan, “A Pure Land on Earth is Possible to Realize (Renjian jingtu shi keyi shixian de 人
間淨土是可以 現的),” Peace and Tranquility in Humanity (Ping’an de renjian 平安的人間),
Fagu quanji, Vol. 8, bk. 6 (Taibei Shi: Fagu wenhua shiye gufen youxian gongsi 台北市 : 法鼓
文化事業股份有限公司, 2005), 37-38.
12
a contemporary audience. Shengyan’s understanding of “modernization” reveals that a
contemporary Buddhist organization need not sever its ties with traditional values and that it
need not be philosophically oriented, as some scholarly analysis would lead us to believe. I have
also found that Shengyan’s modernization is complementary to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s
theory of communities of practice, which views learning as practice- and action-oriented. Thus,
serving to nuance further the theory of contemporary Buddhism as philosophically oriented, we
see DDM’s method of modernizing through education in an environment of situated learning as
fundamentally rooted in practice.
I go into further detail about the theories of Donald Lopez, David McMahan, and John
McRae in the following sections, but I will briefly provide some context here for my critique of
their focus on philosophy and secularization in Buddhist modernism, which DDM complicates.
The predominant theories of Buddhist modernism express a focus on philosophy rather than
practice as a dominant characteristic. Donald Lopez argues that “modern Buddhists” privilege
philosophy over practice, stating their focus is on “technical doctrine and philosophy, rather than
that of daily practice.”29 Similarly, David McMahan partially characterizes modern Buddhism as
focused on Western philosophy, namely “scientific naturalism and the tradition of rationalism
rooted in the European Enlightenment.” 30 John McRae also views the rise of Buddhist
modernism as rooted in philosophy, principally as a redefinition of traditional Asian religion in
Western philosophical and scientific ideas. 31 Pointing to the 1893 World’s Parliament of
Religions in Chicago as the beginning of modern Buddhism, McRae states:
the Asian representatives redefined traditional doctrines to fit the challenge of social
evolutionary theory and the world missionary movement. …the messages presented at
Chicago in 1893 were not fair and adequate representations of Asian religions, but
propaganda messages stitched together from a combination of traditional doctrine and
29
Donald Lopez, “Introduction,” Modern Buddhism: Readings for the Unenlightened, ed.
Donald Lopez (New York: Penguin, 2002), xiii.
30
McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, 10.
31
John R. McRae, “Oriental Verities on the American Frontier: The 1893 World's
Parliament of Religions and the Thought of Masao Abe.” In Buddhist-Christian Studies
11,(1991): 7-36.
13
Western social and philosophical theory, tailored according to Western measurements of
the standard ideology of human progress.32
Although he uses Lopez’s “modern Buddhist” construct as a foundation, Scott Pacey
more accurately describes the complex situation of Buddhism in contemporary Taiwan, noting
that all three major Buddhist groups in Taiwan are working to negotiate modernity and tradition
through applying traditional Buddhist philosophy to modern social welfare via the “pure land on
earth” ideology, which is often practice-oriented.33 Indeed, these contemporary Buddhist groups
are trying to be innovative and “remake” Buddhism, but the way these groups are redefining
Buddhism appears to be much more nuanced than what we are led to believe. For one thing, the
claim of philosophy over practice is ungrounded in any of these three organizations.
Furthermore, scholars like McMahan contend that modern Buddhism, in order to stay
relevant and competitive, has been secularized and divorced from more “religious” elements.34
But it is not the case that contemporary Buddhist groups in Taiwan have moved away from
“religious” elements. Rather, I believe they are recasting traditionally non-religious practices as
religious. Thus, these Buddhist groups in Taiwan are reinterpreting Buddhist history and doctrine
and engaging with the society in order to create new Buddhisms. 35 DDM recasts secular
practices, namely education, as being equally religious, that is a practice which is equally
important for progress along the path of spiritual cultivation as DDM promotes it, as traditional
Buddhist rituals. This is due to its construction of a holistic learning system, which draws on
modern Western-style classroom education as well as experiential learning, wherein students
absorb DDM’s brand of orthodoxy through daily living. DDM expands on the concept of
communities of practice first set forth by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,36 by showing how
students, faculty, and staff—whether clerics, laity, or scholars of Buddhism—are involved in a
community of praxis, whereby all involved are not only learning through instruction and action,
but are learning to actively embody the idea of education as Buddhist cultivation as set forth by
32
McRae, “Oriental Verities on the American Frontier,” 30.
Pacey, “A Buddhism for the Human World,” 446.
34
McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, 10.
35
Kawahashi Noriko and 川橋範子, “Feminist Buddhism as Praxis: Women in Traditional
Buddhism,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 30, No. 3/4 (2003), 291-313.
36
Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.
33
14
Dharma Drum. Thus, as Lave and Wenger argue, learning does not only occur through
“classroom instruction [or] tutoring,” but rather “learning must be understood with respect to a
practice as a whole, with its multiplicity of relations—both within the community and with the
world at large.”37
DDM’s notion of modernity also nuances theories of lived religion by offering a more
complete framework for understanding how private and public religious practices are negotiated.
Meredith McGuire defines “lived religion” as the process of “how religion and spirituality are
practiced, experienced, and expressed by ordinary people (rather than official spokespersons) in
the context of their everyday lives.”38 The community of practitioners is supposed to be living
out DDM’s idea by implementing its education religiously in daily life. Yet my ethnographic
research shows that a dichotomy does exist between individuals’ daily practice and the
institution’s official discourse. However, this dichotomy is a fluid one, and shows the
complexities of how personal religious practice within an institutional setting can be carried out.
There exist both internal as well as external origins of the prevalence of the “decline and
revival” narrative in Chinese Buddhism. However, the distinction between these two seemingly
mutually exclusive categories is fluid and hard to pin down. Viewing the situation today, the
internal and external discourses have been fully integrated into one another and fed through a
feedback loop to such an extent that an observer cannot easily distinguish which narrative has
caused the other to arise.
Internally, the Chinese elite have traditionally expressed anti-clerical and antisuperstitious discourse concerning Chinese religion, often aimed at Buddhism and the Buddhist
community. Since the introduction of Buddhism to China, monks and nuns have been persecuted
and reviled as being drains on society. This rhetoric became particularly pointed in the late Qing
Dynasty (1840-1911), when China and Japan were increasingly confronted with competition
from Western powers. This confrontation resulted in the Meiji Restoration (1868) reforms, which
embraced Western civilization and new ways of conceiving religion, including the categories of
religion (zongjiao 宗 教 ) versus superstition (mixin 迷 信 ), which originate in Japan as
translations of Western terms. This binary had not existed in East Asia until this time. Similarly,
37
Ibid., 114.
Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008); See also Robert Orsi, "Introduction," in Lived Religion in
America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
38
15
Chinese intellectuals, rulers, and increasingly, the Buddhist community itself, internalized
categories such as these, which resulted in a litany of modernization reforms decreed by the Qing
Dynasty in the latter half of the nineteenth century, many of which assailed the Buddhist
institution. This pressure from within the Chinese community amplified the traditional narrative
of Buddhism in decline.39
Externally, foreign Christian missionaries and scholars are also responsible for promoting
the ideas that were internalized by the Buddhist community. In their desire to proselytize and
convert the Chinese, missionaries like Lewis Hodous and Karl Ludwig Reichelt understood
Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism as compatible and quite similar to Protestant Christianity.40 These
missionaries particularly appreciated the ethical system of “original” Buddhism and saw in what
they deemed to be Chinese “Pure Land School” and devotion to Amitābha as a potential bridge
for converting the Chinese to Christianity. In addition to their own biases, these missionaries
were clearly influenced by Japanese Buddhist sectarian scholarship (Jp. shūgaku 宗学), which
tends to anachronistically project Japanese sectarian categories back onto the narrative of
Buddhism in China and thereby reify distinct schools of Chinese Buddhism as they exist in
modern, post-Meiji (1868) Japan. These missionaries also categorized Chinese Buddhism as a
degenerate tradition in decline since the Tang Dynasty (618-906)—also a sectarianized view of
Chinese Buddhism—and devoid of efficaciousness and its original meaning. Early scholars of
Chinese Buddhism, who were often missionaries themselves, too, began to internalize and repeat
this discourse. This led to what Anne Blackburn refers to as “textual reification of Buddhism”: a
feedback loop in which the etic discourse is based not on history but texts.41 This discourse is
39
The rhetoric of decline can also be seen most clearly in the medieval discourse on the decline
of the dharma (mofa ). However, the question arises: Did agents in the early Buddhist
communities actually believe this decline to be real, or was the discourse merely a rhetorical
marker used to make particular points to those with whom the rhetoric was in dialogue. Janet
Nattier argues the latter, claiming that the early Buddhist discourse of decline was actually in
response to what was viewed within the monastic community as “an all-too-prosperous Buddhist
community whose very comfort and complacency can lead to the watering down—and, in fact,
the eventual extinction—of the dharma”; see Jan Nattier, Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a
Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley, Calif: Asian Humanities Press, 1991), 250.
40
See for example, Lewis Hodous, Buddhism and Buddhists in China (Auckland: Floating Press,
1923); Karl Ludvig Reichelt and Kathrina Van Wagenen Bugge. Truth and Tradition in Chinese
Buddhism: A Study of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism (Shanghai, China: The Commercial Press,
Limited, 1927).
41
Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century
16
then internalized by the native culture, which proceeds to take this externally imposed
categorization of its own tradition as historical truth. The result is a constructed discourse that
new generations of practitioners and scholars believe to be reality. This has caused proceeding
figures in Buddhist and academic communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to
repeat these claims of “decline” and the corresponding need for “revival” in Chinese Buddhism.
From the Song Dynasty (960-1279) to today, Buddhists and Buddhist scholars have
perpetuated the narrative that Chinese Buddhism reached its zenith during the Tang Dynasty
(618-906), after which time the tradition began its “decline.”42 Peter Gregory highlights three
primary causes for this discourse on the “decline of Buddhism” in the Song: 1) the Chan school
rhetoric at the time; 2) later Japanese sectarian scholarship; and 3) the prejudices of traditional
Chinese and Confucian historiography, which has lingered into late-twentieth century Sinology
and Buddhist Studies. Of course, as many scholars have shown, Buddhism has had a vibrant,
engaged existence in Chinese society from after the Tang to the present day.43 Holmes Welch
directly saw this activity in mid-twentieth century China and referred to it as a Buddhist
“revival.” However his analysis saw this new form of modern Chinese Buddhism as becoming
increasingly secularized and predicted that this would lead to Buddhism’s “eventual demise as a
living religion,”44 which was also part of the missionary discourse. Welch’s prediction has no
doubt led figures like Donald Lopez to repeat the narrative of modern Buddhism privileging the
“secular” over the “religious.”
Theories of Buddhist Education and the Beginnings of Modernism
I see DDM’s model of education as negotiating modernity and tradition, as it engages
with progressive notions of education and compliments Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s theory
Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 199; see also
Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 25.
42
Peter N. Gregory, and Daniel Aaron Getz, Buddhism in the Sung, (Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, 1999).
43
See for instance, Gregory and Getz, Buddhism in the Sung; Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural
Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism; Wiedner, Marsha Smith, ed, Cultural Intersections in
Later Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu:University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); John Kieschnick, The
Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.)
44
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 264.
17
of “community of practice.”45 Existing scholarship on communities of practice presents a wideranging conceptualization of education, or in situ social learning. Both Lave and Wenger and
Shengyan argue that education or learning, is not limited to academics, but can be done through
school, home, or social settings. In this way, nearly every practice an individual is involved in is
“education” in some way, whether academic or social. Learning then is a social activity, a
practice of everyday life. Communities of practice, like DDM’s educational institutions, involve
a body of like-minded individuals who share a common concern, and work together to better
understand or implement it. Similarly, Anne Blackburn’s study of Buddhist monastic learning
and textual practice in eighteenth century Lankan communities provides a conceptual framework
of “textual communities” in which education is used as a way of binding a community.46 My
research tests these theories of “community” and “education” in a living, contemporary Buddhist
community, ultimately complicating these arguments.47
There is a history to when Buddhism actually became modern. John McRae looks to the
1893 World’s Parliament of Religion as a key moment in the development of so-called modern
Buddhism.48 Grappling with the imposition of Western imperialism and what amounted to forced
Westernization, religious figures from around the world came to the United States to argue the
relevancy of their own religious tradition’s role in the modern—that is, post-Enlightenment,
Protestant Christian—world. McRae highlights the tendency of these non-Western religious
figures to view their own traditions through a Western, non-native lens of modernism, stressing
science, rationality, and empiricism, then re-present their traditions back to a Western audience
in the audience’s own terms. The result of this “strategic Occidentalization” 49 is a new
formulation of traditions that appeal more to a Western, largely Protestant audience interested in
scientific, supposedly non-superstitious, and elite philosophical concepts, rather than “folk” or
“popular” elements. This model aptly applies to East Asian Buddhism.
45
Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.
Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice.
47
The Tibetan Buddhist education practice, as detailed by Dreyfus, offers a contrasting model of
Buddhist monastic education in which debate and logic exercises are predominant, yet still
community-oriented; see Georges B. J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The
Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2003).
48
McRae, “Oriental Verities on the American Frontier.”
49
James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its
Persecution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 137.
46
18
Since the late Qing (1840-1911) in China and the Meiji Restoration (1868) in Japan—
when both countries were facing confrontation with Western powers—East Asian Buddhism has
faced accusations that it is a dying, irrelevant tradition, largely due to its perceived emphasis on
funerary and death rituals and an otherwise idle monastic community which drains society of
precious resources. Buddhism in China has historically faced criticism from those in power,
those associated with competing traditions and Christian missionaries. 50 This anti-Buddhist
environment led late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century reformers such as the Buddhist lay
devotee, Yang Wenhui and his scholar-monk student, Taixu to advocate restructuring the
Buddhist saṅgha primarily through education reforms for monks and nuns.51
David McMahan distills Charles Taylor’s 52 theories on the construction of modern
identity into a three-tiered model of “discourses on modernity,” consisting of “western
monotheism; rationalism and scientific naturalism; and romantic expressivism.”53 In other words,
this refers to modern Western discourse. While McMahan is speaking to Buddhism worldwide,
these three discourses also respond to the critiques leveled against Buddhism in China
specifically by Christian missionaries (discourses of “western monotheism”), and a society
becoming more steeped in Western, post-Enlightenment thought (“rationalism and scientific
naturalism”) as well as Western conceptions of self-identity (“romantic expressivism”).
McMahan further argues that these three “broad domains of modern self-identity and morality”54
have shaped the way Buddhism is presented and understood in the twentieth century, that
modern Buddhist groups, in order to stay relevant and competitive, have chosen to psychologize
and secularize their teachings and practice, and separate from Buddhism’s more “religious”
elements.55 Similarly, Donald Lopez echoes the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century reconception of Buddhism as compatible with Western Enlightenment values of “reason,
empiricism, science, universalism, individualism, tolerance, freedom and the rejection of
50
Hodous, Buddhism and Buddhists in China; Reichelt and Bugge, Truth and Tradition in
Chinese Buddhism; Welch, Buddhist Revival in China; Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese
Buddhism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967).
51
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism.
52
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
53
McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, 10.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., 12.
19
religious orthodoxy,”56 and characterizes “modern Buddhism” today as “stress[ing] equality over
hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalt[ing] the individual above the
community.”57 Furthermore, both Lopez and Scott Pacey paint “modern Buddhism” as above all
else a technique of negotiating the conflict between modernity and tradition.58 This is certainly
the case with DDM, where Shengyan often spoke of “inheriting the past and inspiring the
future.”59 I have found in my preliminary research at Dharma Drum that a large portion of
participants there were attracted to the organization precisely because of the way Shengyan
makes Buddhism applicable to contemporary life.
These characterizations are useful theoretical models for understanding Buddhist
modernism. However, there are areas that need to be problematized. For example, Donald
Lopez’s contention that modern Buddhism rejects religious orthodoxy simply does not mesh
with DDM’s project of claiming to preserve “orthodox Chinese Buddhism” while still fitting
some of the other criteria of a “modern” Buddhist group. He also argues that a uniting feature of
all forms of modern Buddhism is their attempt to return to the “original” Buddhism as first
taught and realized by the founder, Śākyamuni. Modern Buddhists typically reject the most
recent forms of Buddhism, which immediately precede them historically in favor of aligning
themselves with original, “true” Buddhism, which modern Buddhism paints as perfectly
compatible with science, rationalism, and philosophy in the style of the European Enlightenment.
This leads modern Buddhists, according to Lopez, to reject ritual and magical elements, and
stress equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and the individual over the
community. 60 Specifically, Lopez notes the following ideals as representative of modern
Buddhist values vis-à-vis the European Enlightenment: reason, empiricism, science,
universalism, individualism, tolerance, freedom, and the rejection of religious orthodoxy.61
Following the European Enlightenment model, Lopez argues that modern Buddhists’
focus is on “technical doctrine and philosophy, rather than that of daily practice,” with Buddhism
represented as “an ancient and profound philosophical system,” rather than a method of practice
56
Lopez, “Introduction,” x.
Ibid., ix.
58
Pacey, “A Buddhism for the Human World,” 456-458.
59
This is a common motif which runs throughout DDM’s official literature, and which I first
learned of on the grounds of DDM in the Shengyan memorial hall.
60
Lopez, “Introduction,” xi.
61
Ibid., xii.
57
20
or a system of practices. 62 Lopez reiterates modern Buddhists’ focus on philosophy over
practice, remarking that modern Buddhists tend “to see Buddhism as above all a system of
rational and ethical philosophy, divorced from the daily practices of the vast majority of
Buddhists,”63 and highlighting that at the Chinese Metaphysical Society, founded in 1919 in
Nanjing, “Buddhism was represented as a philosophy rather than a religion.”64 This focus on
philosophy by modern Buddhists was a clear product of, and response to, Christianity and the
post-Enlightenment West (namely Victorian Europe and America). 65 The Buddha was now
represented as the “world’s greatest philosopher,” one who surpassed Jesus and was able to
know the truths that “Europe would only discover much later.”66 Furthermore, the Buddha was
portrayed as one who had developed “a complete philosophical and psychological system, based
on reason and restraint, as opposed to ritual, superstition and sacerdotalism, demonstrating how
the individual could live a moral life without the trappings of institutional religion.”67
Lopez’s discourse of modern Buddhism also highlights a form of ecumenical discourse
among modern Buddhists, yet one which still “does not preclude the valuation of one’s own form
of Buddhism as supreme.”68 This is true for DDM. The organization is indeed open to interschool and inter-faith dialogue, however preference is still given to promoting Chinese
Buddhism, specifically Chan practice. This is accomplished subtly, not overtly. For instance,
Dharma Drum Buddhist College’s curriculum includes study in Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan
schools of Buddhism. However, the community of practice that Shengyan has developed at
Dharma Drum ensures that students, faculty, and staff are learning experientially, outside of the
classroom, about what “true,” orthodox Buddhism is vis-à-vis their daily life at the complex,
where they live almost all week. Thus, while Shengyan would never have said that Chinese
Buddhism is the only true form of Buddhism, the education students at DDBC receive through
the community of practice—involving interaction with clerics, meditation practice, ritual
62
Ibid., xiii.
Ibid., xix.
64
Ibid., xxii.
65
See Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
66
Lopez, “Introduction,” xii-xiii.
67
Ibid., xv-xvi.
68
Ibid., xxi.
63
21
practices, upholding precepts and absorbing “proper” Buddhist etiquette—is absolutely in the
Chinese style as (re)interpreted by DDM.
Lopez also portrays modern Buddhism as trans-national, ahistorical, 69 and nonsectarian,70 often blending monastic and lay roles,71 and promoting individualism and open to
personal interpretation. 72 However, DDM does not meet any of these criteria. While the
organization—like most contemporary Buddhist groups—aims to be international, not bound by
limits of geography, culture, ethnicity, language, social classes, or sectarian divides, Dharma
Drum and Shengyan are in no way blind to historical and regional differences and developments.
Shengyan was a scholar, acutely aware of Buddhist history and culture, and students at DDM’s
educational institutes are trained in Buddhist history. Similarly, as noted above, the organization
does indeed identify as a specifically Chinese, Chan Buddhist group, and is not unaware of
differences among schools of Buddhism, nor do they aim to serve as syncretists, blending
together all forms of Buddhism into one new form of “world Buddhism.” This is not to say that
Dharma Drum rejects other forms of Buddhism; on the contrary, Shengyan did try to take the
best of what he observed from all schools. Still, DDM stresses its identity as a Chinese Buddhist
organization rooted in Chan practice with a Mahāyāna perspective to help all sentient beings in
modern times, rather than a trans-national, ahistorical entity. Furthermore, there remains a clear
distinction between clerics and laity at DDM, although there is certainly increased interaction
among the two groups, with the community of practice consisting of both clerics and laity.
However, perhaps because we are discussing an organization, there exists no promotion of
personal interpretation of what correct Buddhism is. Quite the opposite, DDM aims to constantly
show—if not stating overtly—what “true” Buddhism is by virtue of the organization’s close
adherence to monastic precepts and etiquette, as well as through, what the group hopes is, daily
implementation of the organization’s philosophy, which promotes “uplifting the character of
humanity and building a pure land on earth” through Buddhist practice and education. Moreover,
countering Lopez’s claim that this individualization of modern Buddhism shifts the focus away
from the monastic community, Lopez himself points out that leaders of modern Buddhist
69
Ibid., xli.
Ibid., xxxix-xli.
71
Ibid., xxxvii-xxxix.
72
Ibid., xxxix.
70
22
movements in Asia are often elite, educated monks.73 And in the case of DDM, the organization
is firmly rooted in its monastic community. One of its major undertakings is the training of
monastic members who are knowledgeable about Buddhist history and philosophy, and, most
importantly, have proper etiquette and uphold monastic regulations at all times.
The compatibility of Buddhist thought with modern scientific discourse is a major aspect
of Buddhist modernism, as are the active participation and visibility of women74 and a focus on
social welfare, including charitable work, establishing hospitals, and promoting education75 in
the form of “Engaged Buddhism” as the world knows it today.76 However, Lopez’s only
mention of religious practice (Lopez does not express the promotion of education as a religious
endeavor in the way that DDM does) in terms of modern Buddhist characteristics is that
meditation—namely through insight (Skt: vipaśyanā) and Zen methods—is opened up to more
people, including both clerics and laity.77 However, it is certainly a contestable claim to argue
that most Buddhists historically did not meditate and when they did they did not think
enlightenment was immediately attainable.78 For the purposes of my argument it is sufficient to
point out that, even taking Lopez’s claim at face value, this is the only mention of religious
practice (although many modern Buddhists argue that even meditation is not a religious practice)
in his modern Buddhist repertoire. Furthermore, as I will show in Chapter Four, meditation is
not the most dominant “practice” among individuals’ day-to-day activities on DDM.
The case of DDM offers a challenge to this construction of modern Buddhism,
particularly in the way that the organization focuses more on practice than philosophy.
Meditation is one aspect of this practice, but so too are other traditional Buddhist activities, such
as recollection of the Buddha (nianfo 念佛) and prostrations. Furthermore, DDM is recasting the
practice of education as an important element of Buddhist practice. Many of the characteristics
that Lopez identifies do in fact fit the model of modern Buddhism as carried out by DDM,
particularly the root element of locating their own style of Buddhism back to the Buddha’s
original teachings. However, unlike Lopez’s claim that modern Buddhist groups interpret this
73
Ibid., xiii.
Ibid., xxii.
75
Ibid., xxvii.
76
Ibid., xxxv.
77
Ibid., xxx, xl.
78
Ibid., xl.
74
23
original Buddhism as a philosophy, Dharma Drum perceives it as practice. For Shengyan, the
Buddha was not a philosopher; he was a practitioner. Therefore, it follows for Shengyan and
Dharma Drum that Buddhadharma is not meant only to be thought about, but to be put into
action. However, we will see that DDBC students do not all agree with this, and seem to fit more
closely with Lopez’s model of modern Buddhists. Thus, we ultimately see the emergence of two
kinds of modernity at DDM: institutional and personal.
There is also room to nuance the “strategic Occidentalization” model, which underlies
many theories of Buddhist modernism. This model does not necessarily apply at DDM and by
extension other contemporary Chinese Buddhist groups. Particularly, my ethnographic data
challenges the theory that such a move is a conscious effort, as opposed to a subconscious
survival technique or simply a genuine interest on the part of a Buddhist group to make the
Buddhist teachings more accessible to a contemporary audience.
Eric Hobsbawm defines “invented tradition” as “a set of practices, normally governed by
overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate
certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with
the past.”79 While I disagree with his overall representation of repetitive practices as being mere
ritual actions of pomp and circumstance, I do find his model very useful in thinking of
constructing a “continuity with the past” through practices that anachronistically project the
present back to an original tradition. In the case of DDM’s construction of orthodoxy and its role
within this narrative, this reformulation is achieved through recasting the role and meaning of
“education” in a Buddhist context. Hobsbawm further elaborates the effects of inventing
tradition in three ways, which I find particularly useful for looking at DDM.
These effects of invented tradition on the communities which create this discourse are: 1)
“Establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial
communities,” 2) “Establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority,” and
3) establishing “socialization, inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of
behavior.”80 However, instead of viewing these three traits as products of invented tradition, at
least in the case of DDM, they are the very elements that allow Dharma Drum to create
79
Eric J. Hobsbawm, and Terence O. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge
Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1.
80
Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 9.
24
orthodoxy in the first place. This threefold model should not be thought of as an end in itself, but
rather as a means for successfully inventing tradition. By creating a real community of Buddhist
clerics and laity, precisely held together by “socialization, inculcation of beliefs, value systems
and conventions of behavior” within an institution which implicitly claims the authority to
possess access to “true,” orthodox Chinese Buddhism, DDM is able to create that very orthodox
Chinese Buddhism, which the group claims to have access to. While it is too early to judge the
long-term effects of DDM’s promotion of orthodoxy, we can see already in Taiwanese society
that some popular religion temples have stopped the practice of burning paper spirit money out
of environmental concerns. This is almost certainly a product of DDM’s campaign to integrate
twentieth and twenty-first century-style environmentalism into their model of orthodox Chinese
Buddhism, as propagated throughout Taiwan. Moreover, DDM aims to provide a clear contrast
to other popular religion temples in Taiwan, which are loud (both in sound and color), bright,
smoky, and very active. DDM’s complex on the other hand is designed to be very tranquil and
calming. DDM’s monastery headquarters also provides a contrast to other temples by virtue of
its lack of syncretism. Based on my fieldwork, I know of no Daoist or folk religion deities at
DDM’s main campus or any of its branches. This is actually quite rare in Taiwan, where almost
every temple contains a vast admixture of deities from Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and other
popular pantheons. Lastly, DDM’s worldview, as an organization, is unique in its attempt to be
transformative, rather than manipulative, like perhaps the popular temples in Taiwan, which aim
to gain some worldly reward from their practices. Thus, I see DDM’s method of inventing
tradition, or creating orthodoxy, as what Lave and Wenger refer to as communities of practice
and situated learning, which I will discuss further in Chapter Four. First though, I would like to
turn to the historical backdrop for modernization in both East Asian and Buddhist circles.
25
CHAPTER ONE
RHETORIC OF DECLINE AND REVIVAL
This is why the modern layman, Yang Wenhui Renshan, promoted the printing of
Buddhist scriptures, the circulation of Buddhist texts, and the establishment of a
[Buddhist] institute to cultivate talented laypeople and clerics capable of propagating the
dharma. His student, Taixu, set out to promote “Buddhism for the Human Realm.”
Taixu’s student, Yinshun, continued to advocate “Humanistic Buddhism.” My teacher,
Dongchu, then established Humanity magazine, and in Taiwan I established Dharma
Drum Mountain, with the goal to “build a pure land on earth.” This is all done to save
the fate of Buddhist wisdom in [these] dire times, and [to undertake] activities for
returning to the original design of Śākyamuni Buddha.81
Shengyan
To begin an analysis of Ven. Shengyan and Dharma Drum Mountain’s efforts to “establish a
pure land on earth,” a brief discussion is needed first to explain the conditions that led Shengyan
to promote education as a method of modernizing and creating orthodoxy in Chinese Buddhism.
I will specifically examine why there was a perceived need for this change by focusing Shengyan
predecessors: Yang Wenhui and his student, Taixu. Their reforms are a central focus of this
chapter on which a historical context will be sketched. Specifically, I narrate the internal
(Buddhist and Chinese communities) and external (Christian missionaries) origins of the decline-
81
I have decided to translate this slightly differently from Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese
Buddhism, 284. While Pittman’s translation is accurate, and I have borrowed small portions of
his phrasing, my translation is more literal. Pittman translates this as: “The modern layman
Yang Wenhui promoted the printing of the Buddhist scriptures, distributing Buddhist literature
and establishing a school in order to educate both monastics and lay Buddhists for propagating
the Dharma. His student Taixu began to promote a “Buddhism for human life” [rensheng fojiao].
Taixu’s student Yinshun continued this by advancing a “humanistic Buddhism” [renjian fojiao].
My shifu, the Venerable Master Dongchu, published the magazine Humanity [Rensheng]. And
then, in Taiwan, I myself founded Dharma Drum Mountain, whose goal is the “establishment of
a pure land on earth” [jianshe renjian jingtu]. These are all measures for preserving the wisdom
of Buddhism that is in great peril and activities for recovering the original design of Sakyamuni
Buddha.” The passage in question comes from Shengyan, Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng ᮶ 聖嚴
法師學思 程᮷ , Fagu quanji, di 3 ji di 8 ce (Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian
gong si, 1999), 44.
26
and-revival narrative, and the emergence and legacy of reform and revitalization movements in
nineteenth and twentieth Century Chinese Buddhism. These historicities laid the foundation for
figures like Shengyan to continue to transform Buddhism for a contemporary audience.
1.1. Tracing the Rhetoric of Decline and Revival in Chinese Buddhism
Generations of Chinese Buddhists throughout history have always harkened back to a
glorious past and perceived their present age as in a state of decline. However, writings about
Chinese Buddhist decline, particularly by outsiders, which was exacerbated by the print media,
rise in literacy, and the presence of Western imperial powers in the turn of the twentieth century,
changed the way Buddhist decline was perceived and felt by many Chinese Buddhist
intellectuals. It gave rise to an urgency within the Buddhist community to revive and restore
Buddhism to its proper place in human society.
Christian missionaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries propagated
narratives of Buddhism in China as a degenerate, superstitious cult falling into decay, likely soon
to become completely extinct. The larger Chinese Buddhist community also possessed its own
narrative of Buddhism in decline, partially internalized from the missionary discourse, and in
part inspired by the need to modernize as a result of humiliating defeats at the hands of foreign
powers and the unrest of domestic uprisings. Of course these writings resonated with internal
Buddhist doctrine of decline, most clearly in the discourse on the decline of the dharma or the
age of final dharma (mofa 末法). However, this doctrinal discourse was far less consequential in
promoting the rhetoric of Buddhism in decline than the persecution and secularization
movements in late-Qing China, which aimed to confiscate temple property in order to build
public schools, as a wave of anti-Buddhist sentiment spread through the greater Chinese
populace. These conditions perpetuated the discourse of Buddhism in decline and led to the rise
of inspirational figures in twentieth century Chinese Buddhism. In particular, the reformers Yang
Wenhui and Venerable Taixu, would have an enormous and lasting impact on Chinese Buddhism
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In the nineteenth century, China—once seen as the world’s “middle kingdom” and
onetime powerhouse of East Asia—faced demoralizing military defeats, as foreign imperialist
forces chipped away at the falling Qing dynasty. In particular, the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and
27
1856-1860), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), and a series of unequal treaties from 1842
to 1901 granting concessions to foreign nations exacerbated increasing fears that the Chinese
empire would be divided up among foreign powers. In the wake of these ever-increasing threats,
both China and Japan began to embrace, and in some cases emulate, the West and its modernist
sensibilities in order to compete and surpass their Western rivals. Intricately embedded in these
modernization trends in both China and Japan was the question of religion.
In particular, it was the staggering defeat from the First and Second Opium Wars at the
hands of British and French forces that first jarred the Qing Dynasty into a state of concern over
the threat of Western imperialism and foreign encroachment. In an attempt to outcompete foreign
powers, Qing rulers began to unfold a host of reforms centered on importing Western paradigms
and technology while still aiming to maintain traditional Chinese, namely Confucian, values.
From 1861 through 1895, the Qing court and provincial officials throughout the empire
set into motion what came to be known as the Self-Strengthening Movement (Ziqiang yundong
自強運動, or Yangwu yundong 洋務運動), which focused on modernizing China’s military and
economic institutions. The aim of this movement was to borrow Western advances in technology
and civilization brought on by the Industrial Revolution in order to regain China’s power on the
world stage and, by virtue of the innately superior Chinese culture, surpass the West and the rest
of the world. Over the next thirty-five years, China would build arsenals, naval fleets, shipyards,
factories, and send students to study in the United States in hopes of modernizing China and
preventing a repeat of the shameful Opium Wars defeats.82
During this time, Japan was also grappling with encroaching Western Imperialism and as
a result was coming to similar solutions of modernization. 1868 saw the fall of the Tokugawa
Shogunate, ushering in the end of the Edo era (1603-1868) and the rise of the Meiji Empire
(1868-1912). The Meiji Restoration was a watershed moment in history, not only for Japan, but
for Buddhist culture and the academic discipline of Buddhist Studies around the world.
82
See Rebecca E. Karl, and Peter Gue Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political
and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge, Mass: Published by the Harvard
University Asia Center, 2002), 49-51; Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual
History of Modern China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); also Theodore Huters,
Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005).
28
Japanese modernity began with the Meiji Restoration. Abandoning the prior Tokugawa
approach of isolation from the West, the newly established Meiji Emperor (1852–1912), with
little other choice, fully embraced Western civilization, technology, and paradigms of modernity.
Much like the reforms of the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Meiji’s goal in embracing the
West was to learn from them in order to surpass them.83 However, Japan more eagerly emulated
their Western competition than their Chinese neighbors.
The Meiji Restoration also had drastic effects on religion in Japan. During the late
Tokugawa, Japan was under dual pressures from domestic and foreign forces to modernize, and
“religion” was seen as an important method of doing so. The West’s enforced isolation of Japan
and the emergence of the Western category of “world religions,” which established a clear
separation between science and religion—a category that did not exist in East Asia, among other
cultures around the world84—resulted in major changes in and perceptions of Buddhism in Japan.
It was in this environment that figures like Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863) argued that Japan
needed to defend herself not only militarily, but also spiritually, with the development of a
national religious tradition which the Western powers possessed.85 However, in Tokugawa
Japan, Buddhism faced a discourse of decline, and the tradition was popularly perceived as an
ethical, political, and economic drain on society. As Winston Davis explains:
Buddhism was seen as a useless, otherworldly religion, a cloaca of superstition, sloth, and
turpitude. Priests were attacked as parasites living off the poor and gullible, a charge that
became especially serious during the lean years of the late Tokugawa period. If people
were to spend all their time meditating or chanting the nembutsu, who would till the soil,
write books, pay taxes, or do good deeds?86
83
Winston Davis, “Buddhism and the Modernization of Japan,” History of Religions 28, no. 4
(May, 1989), 305. See also Shiping Hua, “The Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Late Qing
Reform (1898) Revisited: Strategies and Philosophies,” East Asia 21, no. 3 (December 2004), 322.
84
See Vincent Goossaert, ““The Concept of Religion in China and the West,” Diogenes 205
(2005): 13-20; and Jason Ānanda Josephson, “When Buddhism Became a ‘Religion,’ Japanese
Journal of Religious Studies 33, no. 1 (2006), 143–168.
85
Robert Kisala, “Japanese Religions,” in Paul L. Swanson, and Clark Chilson, eds., Nanzan
Guide to Japanese Religions (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), 3-13.
86
Davis, “Buddhism and the Modernization of Japan,” 310.
29
Japan’s desire—or lack of any other option—to modernize, compounded with this
rhetoric of Buddhism as a degenerate, parasitic system of superstition resulted in the Meiji
“Separation of Kami and Buddhas” (Jp. Shinbutsu bunri 神 仏 分 離 ) movement, which
established a division between Buddhist and indigenous Japanese religious practices, and created
Shinto as a national, indigenous tradition, which was specifically portrayed as a set of nonreligious beliefs and customs. 87 Meanwhile, Buddhism was still perceived as a foreign,
superstitious religion whose institution and community were drains on an increasingly
consciously “modern” Japanese society. As a result, Buddhism was severely persecuted through
the “Abolish Buddhism, Destroy Śākyamuni” movement (Jp: Haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈). Thus
what had begun as external pressure from the West to modernize Japanese culture resulted in
internal State pressure, and converting Buddhist temples and monks to the new “Shinto”
institution.
It was partially due to the narrative of Buddhism in decline that led to the modernization
and revival of the Buddhist institution in Japan. This narrative was then propagated by Japanese
Buddhist sectarian scholarship which became the standard discourse within the developing
international academic discipline of Buddhist Studies. Hashimoto Mineo and Tatsuo Murakami
argue that the only way for the Buddhist community in Japan to effectively carry out its own
modernization in the Meiji was to transform Buddhism into an academic discipline: “To put it
simply, Buddhism had to be accepted by modern intellectuals first in order to have the possibility
of shaking the foundation of their modernist consciousness.”88 One such way of academizing
Buddhism was for Buddhist sectarian institutions in Japan—sects were yet another concept
borrowed from the Western tradition of religious sects in order to compete with the West—to
establish sectarian universities. A major impact of this radical reorganization of the Buddhist
87
Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” The
Journal of Asian Studies 65 (2006), 311); Kisala, “Japanese Religions,” 8-10, cites Tetsuo
Yamaori, “Aum Shinrikyo Sounds the Death Knell of Japanese Religion,” Years of Trial: Japan
in the 1990s, eds. Masuzoe Yoichi (Tokyo: Japan Echo), which argues that Shinto and Buddhism
have historically coexisted in Japanese culture as a syncretic popular religion, and that the
Christian, Western, requirement to choose one-or-the-other has created a perplexing situation for
Japanese religiosity. When forced to view their own traditions “through Christian eyes,”
Yamaori argues, Japanese inevitably come to the conclusion that their beliefs don’t fit the
foreign category, and thus, they must not be “religious.”
88
Hashimoto, Mineo, and Tatsuo Murakami, "Two models of the modernization of Japanese
Buddhism: Kiyozawa Manshi and D T Suzuki," Eastern Buddhist 35, no. 1-2: 2003, 6-41.
30
institution in Japan was that seminaries in China and universities in the United States through the
1980s were using publications produced by Japanese Buddhist sectarian universities as
textbooks.89 Thus, as a result of the Meiji modernization reforms, and spawned in part from the
rhetoric of Buddhism in decline, scholars in Japan, China, and the United States were learning
about Chinese Buddhism through the lens of Japanese sectarian Buddhist sources.
If Japanese modernity began with the Meiji Restoration, we may date the beginning of
Chinese modernity with the Wuxu, or Hundred Days’ Reform and the 1898 temple confiscation
movement.90 Citing Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow,91 Vincent Goossaert posits, “the 1898 and
subsequent late Qing reforms constituted a first attempt to systematically formulate a Chinese
vision of modernity.”92 Despite over three decades of military and economic modernization
reforms undertaken during the Self-Strengthening Movement, China was summarily defeated by
the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War between 1894 to 1895. Following this, a wave of
scholar-officials, namely Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858-1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–
1929), began promoting yet another new restructuring of China’s administrative, educational,
and religious institutions.93 Fearing the collapse of the Chinese empire from encroaching foreign
powers, the twenty-four year old Guangxu emperor 光緒帝 (1871-1908)—installed by his aunt,
Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后 (1835-1908) in 1875 at age four 94 —set about enacting
sweeping reforms through forty-odd edicts decreed between June 11 and September 21, 1898.
This later came to be known as the Hundred Days’ Reform.
89
Jimmy Yu, “Pure Land Devotion in East Asia,” in Blackwell Companion to East and
Inner Asian Buddhism (forthcoming), 4-5 draft.
90
Goossaert, "1898: The Beginning of the End," 307-335.
91
See Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period.
92
Goossaert, "1898: The Beginning of the End,” 312.
93
Or as Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End,” 312, says, “attempts at creating a modern,
Western inspired educational system, military, and economic institutions, all designed to enhance
China's strength and chances at survival in an imperialist context.” See also, Ibid., citing Karl
and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: “Although issues of institutional reforms
(schools and examinations, army, political institutions, economic and industrial development)
were primary in the reform literature, recent research has shown that social and moral reform,
including gender issues, were also part of the reformers' projects.”
94
X.L. Woo Empress Dowager Cixi China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formitable
Concubine: Legends and Lives During the Declining Days of the Qing Dynasty (New York:
Algora Pub., 2002). See also, Zhan Zhang, “Cixi and Modernization of China,” Asian Social
Science 6, no. 4 (April 30, 2010), 154-155. Guangxu was later presumed poisoned to death by
Empress Dowager Cixi.
31
Gaungxu’s reforms involved restructuring administrative, economic, military, cultural,
and educational institutions with a Western, modernist bent. Specifically, this included ending
the shared power Chinese rulers held with the Manchus; streamlining national administration and
court bureaucracy; developing new Ministries of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce; training
and equipping military troops with Western tools; building large naval forces; replacing the
ancient Imperial Academy (Guozijian 國子監) with the newly established Imperial University in
Beijing (Jingshi daxuetang 京師大學堂); eliminating the “eight-legged” essays (baguwen 八股
文), which had been an integral part of the imperial civil service examinations, in favor of a more
modern, less formulaic essay system; providing classes in foreign affairs, foreign language,
economics, medicine, and science; building railways; simplifying legal codes; and providing
government protection of foreign, Christian missionaries.95
Among these reforms was the short-lived but highly influential temple confiscation
movement of 1898, known as the [Use] Temple Property to Increase Education (miaochan
xingxue 廟產 學) movement, and promoted primarily by Kang Youwei, Zhang Taiyan 章太炎
(1868-1936), and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837-1909). While these reforms, which called for
temple property to be repurposed as public educational facilities, were only minimally realized,
they reflect longstanding sentiments of anti-clericalism among the Chinese elite and the popular
view of Buddhism as a drain on Chinese society. 96 Furthermore, these reforms laid the
groundwork for early twentieth century educational-religious reforms.
These men were fully aware of and readily drew from the Meiji Restoration’s
modernization reforms, including religious reforms creating a new state religion and persecuting
the Buddhist institution.97 Each of these three Chinese scholar-officials was reacting to the everincreasing foreign encroachment on China, and aimed to reform and modernize Chinese society
95
Luke S.K. Kwong, “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days
Reform of 1898,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 3 (Jul., 2000), 663-95.
96
I follow the definition of anti-clericalism provided by Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the
End,” 311, as: “the rejection of the institutionalization of religion, especially monasteries and
professional clerics living off liturgical services,” referring mainly to “the rejection of the
Buddhist and Taoist clergies (but not Buddhism and Taoism as doctrinal systems or spiritual
traditions).”
97
Goossaert, “The Beginning of the End,” 311; also citing Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in
Meiji Japan.
32
through education and religious reforms, namely using monastic and temple property to establish
public schools.
These three figures each published a seminal essay in spring to summer 1868 that laid out
their plans for carrying out temple confiscation and education reform. To use Vincent
Goossaert’s phrasing, these figures were interested in, “transforming the most useless thing
(temples) into the most useful one (schools).”98 Zhang Zhidong’s influential essay, “Exhortation
to Build Schools,” (Quanxue pian 勸學篇), written during the third month of 1898, was focused
on educational rather than religious reform. Zhang Zhidong promoted confiscating only seventy
percent of China’s Buddhist and Daoist monasteries and their landed property, allowing the
traditions to continue to exist. Indeed Zhang Zhidong’s vision was not to destroy Buddhist or
Daoist institutions, but simply to trim their land holdings in order to establish public schools.
This idea quickly gained popularity and later that spring, another individual Zhang Taiyang
published his essay, “Sell the Temples” (Yumiao 鬻廟). Zhang Taiyang was much more
revolutionary than Zhang Zhidong and religious reform was an essential part of his plan,
explicitly stating, "now is not the time for performing rituals and following the way of the gods
anymore." 99 He promoted selling “improper temples” (yinci 淫祠) with the purpose of
repurposing some and destroying others outright. Specifically, Zhang Taiyang aimed to take over
Buddhist and Daoist monasteries,100 which Goossaert refers to as being viewed as the “repository
of all debaucheries.”101
Kang Youwei was the most radical of these three reformers, promoting a complete
takeover of private academies and what he labeled “improper temples” to be used for public
education. On July 10, 1898, he published the essay, “Memorial Requesting [the Emperor] to
Order that Academies and Improper Temples Be Changed into Schools Throughout the Country”
(Qing chi gesheng gai shuyuan yinci wei xuetang zhe 請飭各省改書院淫祠為學堂摺).102 In the
essay, Kang cast as “improper” any non-Confucian temple103 and writes that the government
should seize all landed property owned by these temples—regardless of their proclaimed
98
Goossaert, “The Beginning of the End,” 329.
Ibid., 314.
100
Ibid., 312.
101
Ibid., 312-314.
102
This is Goossaert’s translation.
103
That is, any temple not included in the registers of state sacrifices (sidian)
99
33
affiliation as either Buddhist, Daoist, or otherwise—and use it to build public schools in which
local children are educated. He closes his essay by attacking the “improper cults” (yinsi 淫祀)
who own these temples. The Gaungxu emperor quickly enacted an edict supporting Kang’s
suggestion, however its implementation was sparse, largely left to the governance of disparate
local provincial authorities.104
However, while opposed to what he perceived as superstitious traditions and the Daoist
and Buddhist clerics who upheld these improper practices in society, Kang was not at all antireligious. On the contrary, he was profoundly pro-Confucian and was largely influenced by both
Christianity as well as Meiji religious reforms to create a new state religion.105 Like the Meiji
reformers, Kang argued that one way for China to defend herself from foreign encroachment was
to maintain her Chineseness. This required, among political reforms such as abolishing imperial
rule in favor of a constitutional monarchy, establishing a Confucian-based state religion and
doing away with Daoism and Buddhism.106
The Hundred Days’ Reforms ended in September 1898, when the Empress Dowager Cixi
took control back from her nephew, Guangxu. Cixi reversed the temple confiscation edicts and
other reforms. However, many similar decrees would soon be re-enacted following the Boxer
Rebellion in 1900, which, in efforts to drive out foreign powers from China, resulted in an influx
of foreign armies who swept in to crush the rebellion and the year-long occupation and
destruction of Beijing and other major cities by the eight allied foreign armies. This led to yet
further humiliation for China on the world stage, and modernization efforts were redoubled,
including suppression of Chinese religion.107
1.2. Persistent Emic Discourse of Anti-clericalism and Anti-Superstition
As I have shown, the calls for both civic and religious reform were not unique to the final
decade of the nineteenth century. Earlier movements in China, particularly in late imperial China
104
Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End,” 307.
Ibid., 311.
106
Ibid., 313. Both Daoism and Buddhism were viewed as superstitious, while Buddhism was
also a foreign-born religion imported from India.
107
Ibid., 327. For more on the Boxer Rebellion, see: Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The
Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998).
105
34
and since the 1860s specifically, called for such restructuring, and a general sentiment of anticlericalism was pervasive throughout Chinese elite society. Furthermore ardent Confucians were
not the only figures calling for such reform. In 1892 Zheng Guanying, a practicing Daoist,
published a book calling for political, social, and economic reform, entitled Daring Words in an
Age of Abundance. One chapter of the book, entitled “Clerics” (sengdao 僧道), called for the
forced secularization of Daoist and Buddhist clergy in order to reform and “save” the religious
institutions in China. Zheng was not unique among the elite of the time, as anti-clericalism was a
prominent feature among Chinese intellectuals,108 many of whom wrote their own treatises and
novels promoting similar ideas about the state of religion in China at the time. However, given
the predominance of this discourse disparaging Chinese religion, it appears that most of the
attacks were merely rhetorical in 1898. It was not until the twentieth century, namely 1904, that
these destructive plans were physically carried out.
This tide of anti-clericalism did not die with the Wuxu Reforms. While the 1898 temple
confiscation movement fizzled out with the Empress Dowager Cixi’s “coup,” the discourse of
anti-clericalism continued to persist and was further developed in China through the early 1900s
into a wider tide of anti-superstition, which Goossaert refers to as “the rejection of so-called
irrational, backward ideas and practices as opposed to acceptable religion.”109 While the 1898
reforms were centered on anti-clericalism, the sentiment began to turn more generally toward
anti-superstition, which resulted in the effective destruction of temples throughout China
beginning in 1904 and the increasingly severe anti-superstition policies under the Kuomintang
between 1926 and 1937. In 1901 the scholar Liang Qichao popularized the terms “religion”
(zongjiao 宗教) and “superstition” (mixin 迷信), which were borrowed from Japanese and used
to express Western terms that did not exist in East Asia prior to the mid-nineteenth century.
Indeed, it is this same environment of so-called “superstition” that DDM is trying to correct
through promoting “orthodox” Buddhism in Taiwan today.
By the twentieth century then, no longer was the traditional distinction between
orthodoxy and heterodoxy the major binary that allowed oppositional groups to establish
religious and political authority. Goossaert argues that this was a conscious move by those who
employed the binary, which separated religion and superstition in order for these individuals to
108
109
Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End,” 319.
Ibid., 308-9
35
distance themselves from the construct of contemporary Chinese religion.110 With the help of
figures like Yang Wenhui and Taixu, Buddhism would emerge from this period having
appropriated and moved Buddhism past this discourse by casting Buddhism as zongjiao, opposed
to mixin. However, it was this persistent anti-superstition movement, which helped rekindle the
call for using temple property to establish public education again in the first decade of the
twentieth century.
However, the discourse of religion’s superiority over superstition, with Buddhism
popularly being classified in the latter category in the late Qing, did not come solely from
internal, Chinese voices. External, Christian missionaries and pressure from the West also played
a large role in propagating this rhetoric in China. Goossaert summarizes Kang Youwei’s project
as “a wild hybridization of Confucian fundamentalism and Christianity under the influence of,
notably, the Scottish Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845-1919).”111 Indeed, Christian
missionaries played a heavy hand in propagating the rhetoric of Chinese religion, including
Buddhism, as a degenerate, superstitious cult. As Goossaert notes, “Kang exhibits a strong
sensitivity to the Western perspective on Chinese religion and evinces what will be a major
characteristic of Republican-period writings on religion, that is, a desire to remodel Chinese
religion on a Christian-based model of what a religion should be.”112
In addition to the vigorously anti-superstitious discourse against Chinese religion
traditionally promoted by the Chinese elite, incoming Christian missionaries’ rhetoric of Chinese
religion and Buddhism as degenerate traditions in decline further exacerbated the increasingly
lowly status of these religious traditions in the popular imagination. This held even among those
who did not belong to the intellectual class or identify as Christians. After the 1898 reforms, the
constant discourse found in Chinese texts is of Chinese religion as the cause of China’s inability
to develop and advance in the modern world.113 Goossaert notes that even those who were
“resisting Christian influence, agreed with the Christian missionaries that Chinese religion was
mere idolatry… Seeing Christianity as the main spiritual threat to China, they tried to engage the
110
Ibid., 320-21
I follow Goossaert’s definition of Confucian fundamentalism as “the rejection of all ideas and
practices absent from the Confucian canonical scriptures.” See Ibid., 308.
112
Ibid., 314.
113
Ibid., 325.
111
36
missionaries in a debate on the religious situation in China and, thereby, adopted many of the
Christian notions and categories, most importantly, the religion-superstition dichotomy”114
Christian missionaries had established a presence in China since the first Jesuit missions
in the sixteenth century. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Jesuits established a strong
presence in Nanjing 南京 (known then as Jiangning 江
), which served as the second capital of
the Ming and Qing dynasties, and were able to gain access into the Ming and Qing courts,
sharing Western, modern scientific knowledge and instruments with the Chinese. Still, through
the first half of the nineteenth century all foreign missionaries were isolated to coastal areas
along the mainland’s periphery. It was not until the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which followed the
First Opium War, that China’s interior was opened up to foreign missionaries. As a result, a vast
number of mission organizations from around Europe and the United States flocked to China
over the remaining century. The entrance of China by these foreign missionaries was relatively
slow at first, with only seven of eighteen provinces housing Protestant missionaries in 1865.
However more organizations, including the world’s largest, the China Inland Mission,115 began
to establish churches throughout China’s interior, and by 1906 more than seventy independent
Protestant mission organizations, with nearly four thousand foreign missionaries, were active in
China.116
The sudden increase of foreign missionaries gaining entrance and influence to China’s
mainland in the twentieth century played a large role in maintaining and ratcheting up the
rhetoric of the baseness of Chinese religion and specifically Buddhism. The majority of these
missionaries were Protestants, who saw Chinese religion and Buddhism as full of the same
problems that they saw in Catholicism: an overemphasis on inefficacious, empty ritual and a
monastic clergy who offered nothing to society. Chinese religion as a whole was viewed by these
missionaries as idolatrous, superstitious, ineffective and antiquated, and was accused of “blind
114
Ibid., 327.
For more on the China Inland Mission, see Leslie T. Lyall, A Passion for the Impossible: The
China Inland Mission, 1865-1965, Chicago: Moody Press, 1965.
116
Don A. Pittman, “The Modern Buddhist Reformer T'ai-hsü on Christianity,” BuddhistChristian Studies 13 (1993), 75-76. For missionary statistics, see Arthur H. Smith, "Statistics of
Protestant Missions in China," in The Uplift of China (New York: Young People's Missionary
Movement of the United States and Canada, 1908) appendix I.
115
37
adherence to the superstitions and ideas of centuries long remote in the past.”117 Regardless of
affiliation, nearly every missionary account that I have found reference consistent themes in their
critiques of Chinese religion and people: the Chinese are ignorant and backward; Buddhism is a
foreign tradition, consisting only of empty, inefficacious, unnecessary, and costly rituals, which
are often indistinguishable from the substratum of vernacular Chinese religion, which includes
Confucianism and Daoism; the Buddhist monastic community is drawn from the lowest classes
of society, and is corrupt, nihilistic, idle, ignorant, and isolated from and parasitic on society,
thus the Chinese populace does not respect the Buddhist community or Buddhism itself;
Buddhism has no future in China, and bound to die out soon. Each of these traits was not only
reflections of these individuals’ views, but rather they were strategic tool used to undermine
Buddhism and Chinese religion by fostering such rhetoric.
In 1888, Reverend James Johnston was commissioned by the Presbyterian Church of
England to write a history of the organization’s mission activity in China and Formosa
(Taiwan).118 Johnson expresses the missionary view of Buddhism and the Chinese plainly, as he
describes the Chinese populace as “ignorant and sensuous.”119 Similarly, in 1911, D.W. Fisher,
an individual “in hearty sympathy with the cause of foreign missions,”120 wrote a biography of
the missionary, Calvin Wilson Mateer. Again, the Western perspective of China and the view of
Chinese religion generally is clear. Fisher describes China thusly: “all around is a mass of
strange people, saturated with ignorance, prejudice, and the debased morality consequent on
idolatry.”121
As is made clear in most missionary texts, Johnston also stresses that Buddhism is a
foreign religion, a “full-blown system” from India that is part of the eclectic religious landscape
of China, where the Chinese cannot distinguish between Confucianism, Daoism, and
Buddhism.122 But both Buddhism and Daoism, from most missionaries’ perspective, were
117
D. W. Fisher, Calvin Wilson Mateer, Forty-Five Years a Missionary in Shantung, China: A
Biography (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1911), 244.
118
James Johnston, China and Formosa: The Story of the Mission of the Presbyterian
Church of England: With Many Illustrations Prepared for This Work and Four Maps (Taipei:
Ch'eng Wen Pub. Co., 1972) (originally published 1888).
119
Johnston, China and Formosa, 61.
120
Fisher, Calvin Wilson Mateer, 13.
121
Fisher, Calvin Wilson Mateer, 82.
122
Johnston, China and Formosa, 61.
38
merely conveyors of empty ritual that are wholly unsatisfactory as true religions, as the Chinese
themselves demonstrate by bouncing between different traditions.123 We also see emphasis on
the negative view of Buddhist (and Daoist) rites as unnecessary and expensive.124
Arthur H. Smith, a missionary who published a self-proclaimed text-book125 for other
foreign missionaries in 1907, also stresses that Buddhism is a foreign religion with an
“appallingly extensive” canon, translated and transliterated from the non-native, antiquated
Sanskrit.126 So too did F.L. Hawks Pott, who also published a handbook for missionaries,
remind his fellow missionaries of Buddhism’s non-Chinese origins. Pott follows the same
organization as Hodous’ work in attempting to provide historical details of the evolution of
Chinese religion, starting from animism and ancestral worship and appropriating and completely
changing the foreign “original cult” of Buddhism from India.127 Pott too, like Rev. James
Johnston and Arthur H. Smith, points to the “three religions” of China and “eclecticism” among
the Chinese as signs of confusion and dissatisfaction with the state of religion in China.128
While anti-superstition is certainly a salient theme among missionaries, of the criticisms
laid against Buddhism in China into the twentieth century, anti-clericalism still dominates. The
predominant discourse of Buddhism in China in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries
was one of degradation and decline, with an inadequate monastic community and a tradition
largely outside of society. Buddhist clerics were seen as parasites who did no more than
“perpetually drone through their routine rituals,” 129 lived outside of society while offering
nothing back, and were ignorant of their own scriptures and practices, preferring only to cut off
their own desires and “natural affection and human ties,”130 while still profiting off of rituals for
the masses. Kenneth Latourette, another Protestant missionary who in 1929 published a manual
to help fellow missionaries convert the Chinese to Christianity, summarizes plainly:
123
Johnston, China and Formosa, 63.
Johnston, China and Formosa, 61.
125
Arthur H. Smith, The Uplift of China (New York: Young People's Missionary Movement,
1907), 21.
126
Smith, The Uplift of China, 107.
127
F. L. Hawks Pott, The Emergency in China (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1913), 5.
128
Pott, The Emergency in China, 199.
129
Smith, The Uplift of China, 108.
130
Bertram Wolferstan, The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907 (London: Sands
& Co., 1909), 109, citing a woman from the Christian Inland Mission criticizing Buddhism’s
similarity to Catholicism
124
39
In later days it lost some of its vitality and although it still had many monastic
communities, the life in these usually became decidedly formal. Meditation, where it
existed, was as a rule a matter of ignorant routine. Few came into the monasteries in adult
life or from a deep sense of religious or moral need, and the mass of the monks were
recruited in childhood from the poorer classes and grew to manhood knowing little
outside the cloister and with the haziest appreciation of the inner significance of the
scriptures they chanted."131
Johnston too is vigorous in his criticism of Buddhism as corrupt “in creed, in ritual, and in
practice” rooted in extinguishing “all desire, even of that of happiness,” and points to the
monastic community, “drawn largely from the lowest classes of society,” as responsible for
Buddhism’s “hold on the people.”132
Similarly, Smith reiterates the narrative that Buddhism “has long since degenerated into a
mere form” with priests who are “idle, ignorant, vicious parasites on the body politic,”133 and
who possess a “mystic certificate of membership in the ranks of those who in any temple are
entitled to support.”134 Smith also quotes fellow missionary James Dyer Ball (1857-1919),
claiming that Buddhism “excites but little enthusiasm at the present day in China; its priests are
ignorant, low, and immoral; addicted to opium; despised by the people; held up to contempt and
ridicule; and the gibe and joke of the populace. The nuns likewise hold a very low position in the
public estimation.”135 Even Timothy Richard, the figure who befriended and worked with Yang
Wenhui to translate the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna into English, wrote in 1916 of the
“idleness of the Buddhist priests.”136 As I will show in the following chapter, Shengyan would
grow up in this environment in China, where Buddhism was indeed viewed as corrupted with an
ignorant and idle community of practitioners. It was precisely this that he would aim to change
by creating orthodoxy at DDM.
131
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan,
1929), 16.
132
Johnston, China and Formosa, 61.
133
Smith, The Uplift of China, 107.
134
Ibid., 108.
135
Ibid, 84.
136
Timothy Richard, Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences. New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1916, 138.
40
As a result of this discourse of Buddhism in decline, it was widely assumed that
Buddhism was seeing its final days in China. Smith wrote in 1907, that Buddhism was
“powerless to uplift the people morally,” as “evidenced by the prevalence of deceit, dishonesty,
lying, mutual suspicion, and the total eclipse of sincerity,”137 and that, “The religion, like many
of its temples, is in a condition of hopeless collapse.” Smith, among many others, believed that
Buddhism had no future in China, as “both Taoism [sic] and Buddhism would within the next
fifty years have very little external expression, albeit the superstitions which they represent might
perhaps remain latent but persistent.”138 Six years later, Pott reiterated this sentiment, writing,
that Buddhism was “so debased by superstition that it will be impossible to resuscitate it.”139 Of
course this rhetoric was not limited to the foreign, Christian missionary community. On the
contrary, it was pervasive throughout China and was internalized by the Buddhist community. It
was in no small part due to this rhetoric that figures like Yang Wenhui and Taixu were quick to
come to the defense of Buddhism and actively challenge claims such as Potts’ that Buddhism
was beyond resuscitation in the twentieth century.
1.3. The Revivalist Turn of Yang Wenhui and Taixu
A result of this narrative of decline was a corresponding revival from within the Buddhist
community. The layman Yang Wenhui and his student, the scholar-monk Taixu, mark the
genesis of what would come to dominate twentieth and twenty-first century Buddhism in China
and Taiwan. Through reinterpreting the roles of Buddhist scripture, clerics, and laity, and an
emphasis on education and social engagement, these figures played an enormous role in the
creation of modern Chinese Buddhism. Here, I will show the life’s work and impact of these two
Chinese Buddhist revivalists, focusing on their work in Buddhist education and social
engagement.
Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank enumerate three primary reasons for the rise of revival
movements in Chinese Buddhism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1) the
destruction caused by the Taiping Rebellion, 2) Western paradigms of science and rationalism
137
Smith, The Uplift of China, 110.
Ibid., 108.
139
Pott, The Emergency in China, 199.
138
41
imported through imperialism, which painted religion as incompatible with science, and
Buddhism’s
“passive
and
detached
attitude”
as
partially
responsible
for
China’s
“backwardness,”140 and 3) competition with Christian missionaries who derided Buddhism and
proved effective in gaining support through their proselytization techniques, which included
being well-versed in Christian doctrine.141 Meanwhile, Wu Jiang points to Holmes Welch’s 1968
characterization of the rise of Buddhist revivals in modern China, explaining, “It is clear that,
according to Welch, the impetus for Buddhist revival came from outside the Buddhist world,
started with Buddhist publishing as a lay movement, and then was followed by the clergy
themselves reforming monastic education and organizing national Buddhist associations.”142
Neither of these characterizations is wrong. However, they need to be blended together and
nuanced to show how the rise of the modern Chinese Buddhist reforms came about through each
of the factors mentioned.
Among the group of revivalists and reformers who were directly influenced by these
circumstances were many conservative and progressive figures. However, the unifying trend
seen in each of these reformers is their focus on education as a manner of institutionally
modernizing Chinese Buddhism. Among the more “conservative” camp, as Ashiwa and Wank
categorize them, were Hongyi 弘一 (1880–1942), Yuanying 圓瑛 (1878-1953), Xuyun 虛雲
(1840-1959), and Tanxu 倓虛 (1875-1963). These figures concentrated more on “personal
cultivation, textual study, and retreat from the world.”143 Yang Wenhui, Ven. Taixu, and Ouyang
Jian (courtesy names zi 字: Jinghu 鏡湖, Jingwu 竟無) on the other hand, represented a more
progressive approach to reforming Buddhism, focusing on social engagement and appropriating
the techniques of Christian missionaries in order to help Buddhists proselytize globally. Of these
figures, Yang Wenhui is often cited as the progenitor and pioneer of the Buddhist revival in
modern China, and his impact cannot be overstated.
Yang Wenhui (courtesy name zi 字: Renshan 仁山) was born in 1837 in Anhui, China.
140
Ashiwa, Yoshiko and David L. Wank, “The Globalization of Chinese Buddhism: Clergy and
Devotee Networks in the Twentieth Century,” International Journal of Asian Studies 2 (2005),
222.
141
Ashiwa and Wank, “The Globalization of Chinese Buddhism,” 222.
142
Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in SeventeenthCentury China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 283. Emphasis added.
143
Ashiwa and Wank, “The Globalization of Chinese Buddhism,” 222.
42
His family moved to Beijing in 1838 after his father passed the metropolitan exams, and at the
onset of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), they moved to Hangzhou.144 In adulthood, Yang
was a civil engineer, a staff member of the Qing legation in London,145 and a scholar before
becoming a committed Buddhist lay devotee after encountering by chance the Awakening of
Faith in the Mahāyāna (Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論) in a bookstore at age twenty-six.146
Yang was a seminal figure in the history of modern Chinese Buddhism as well as modern
Chinese history and culture. The scholar, Liang Qichao who also possessed an interest in
Buddhism wrote “I have nothing special to say about monks in the Qing period…. There were
only some laymen worth mentioning, among whom the most recent was Yang Wenhui.”147
Indeed, Yang was so influential that a portion of his own writings were later included in the
Dainihon Zokuzokyo 大日本續藏經, the supplementary volumes added to the Taisho Buddhist
canon used in East Asia.148 A predecessor to Shengyan by two generations, Yang “advocated the
‘development’ (zhenxing 振
) of Chinese Buddhism by borrowing methods from Christian
missions, Meiji Japanese Buddhists, and various other organizational models to propagate
Buddhism in Chinese society and even abroad.”149
Yang lived in an age of unrest and social change in the face of foreign powers and
Western paradigms encroaching on Chinese soil. During Yang’s life, China saw a rash of social
unrest and foreign and domestic calamities, not the least of which included the First (1839-1842)
and Second (1856-1860) Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the SelfStrengthening Movement (1861–1895), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the Hundred
Days’ Reform (1898), and the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901). Yang passed away on 1911 just
before the Xinhai Rebellion which brought about the fall of the Qing Dynasty and reigned in the
Republican Era in modern China.
It was the Taiping Rebellion that had a great impact on Yang’s desire to preserve
Buddhist texts. The Rebellion was led by a Chinese Christian millenarian, Hong Xiuquan 洪秀
144
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 2.
James Brooks Jessup, “The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 1920-1956,”
(Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley: 2010), 5.
146
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 40.
147
Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism, 53.
148
Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism, 53.
149
Jessup, “The Householder Elite,” 5.
145
43
全 (1814-1864), who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Hong established his
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing and led a rebellion against the Manchu Qing rulers as
well as Confucian and Buddhist institutions. The Rebellion was eventually squashed with aid
from French and British forces,150 but not before numerous Buddhist libraries were decimated by
the Taiping rebels. 151 The widespread destruction of these libraries and the loss of many
Buddhist texts during this period led Yang to establish a private publishing house in his own
Nanjing home in 1866. The Jinling Scriptural Press (Jinling kejingchu 金陵刻經處) was devoted
entirely to publishing Buddhist scriptures. The explicit purpose of the press was “to replace
[Buddhist sutras] destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion.”152
Holmes Welch noted in 1968, “It is a significant coincidence that 1866, the year Yang
began his printing venture was also the year when the first party of the China Inland Mission
took advantage of the newly won right of Europeans to live in the interior rather than in the
treaty ports. Letter-perfect in the Gospel, they expounded it not intramurally to other clerics, but
on street corners to audiences of common people.”153 It was in this chaotic environment of
change and competition from foreigners that Yang saw Buddhism as providing a way for China
to defend itself and regain its dominance on the world stage. However, he was looking outside of
China for ways to uplift Chinese Buddhism and by extension the standing of China herself.
In 1878, Yang travelled to England to serve in China’s legation in London, where he met
150
For more on the Taiping Rebellion, see James Chester Cheng, Chinese Sources for the
Taiping Rebellion, 1850-1864 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1963); Youwen Jian,
The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Franz H.
Michael, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1966); Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong
Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Youzhong Shi, The Taiping Ideology; Its Sources,
Interpretations, and Influences (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967); Jonathan D.
Spence, The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836-1864 (Waco, Tex: Markham Press Fund,
Baylor University Press, 1998); Ssu-yu Teng, The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers: A
Comprehensive Survey (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971); Rudolf G. Wagner, Reenacting the
Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian
Studies, University of California, Berkeley),1982.
151
Robert Gimello, “Ch'eng-kuan on the Hua-yen Trinity,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal, no. 09,
(1996), 364.
152
Welch, The Buddhist Revival, 20, citing The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna Doctrine:
The New Buddhism, trans. Timothy Richard (Shanghai: Christian Literature Society, 1907), ix.
Yang explained this to Richard in 1884.
153
Welch, The Buddhist Revival, 21.
44
the German philologist and scholar of religion, Max Müller (1823-1900), and his Japanese
graduate student, Nanjō Bunyū 南修文雄 (1849-1927), who was studying at Oxford at the time.
Nanjō discussed Japanese Buddhism with Yang, and Yang was excited to learn that many
Buddhist texts that had been destroyed in China were still preserved in monasteries in Japan and
Korea.154 It was also during this time that Yang developed an interest in studying Western,
modern science and was exposed to advances in Western technology and civilization.155
Following his return to China in 1888,156 Yang would befriend foreign missionaries and
Buddhists alike, including the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845-1919), with
whom Yang worked on an English translation of the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, as
well as the British missionary Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) who served as translator for the
Theravādin monk Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) from Ceylon. Following the 1893 World
Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in September of that year, Dharmapala visited China to
advocate that Buddhists from around the world travel to his newly established Maha Bodhi
Society in India to be trained as global Buddhist missionaries.157 In December, it was Richards,
along with a representative from the German consulate, Otto Franke, who arranged a meeting
between Dharmapala and Yang Wenhui. At that time, Yang proposed his own alternative to
Dharmapala’s suggestion that Chinese monks should travel to India, arguing that foreign monks
should come to China to learn about Buddhism in order to more effectively proselytize
Buddhism around the world.158
Yang was inspired by advances he saw in Western civilization and academia, in Japanese
Buddhism, and in Christian missions. He argued that in order to uplift Chinese Buddhism and
effectively spread Buddhism throughout the world, particularly in Western counties, Buddhists
needed to take up missionary and educational activities. This would increase knowledge of
Buddhism in China among both clerics and laity, and provide Buddhist clerics with working
knowledge of the Buddhist sutras as Christians had successfully accomplished for their own
154
Esther Bianchi, “The Tantric Rebirth Movement in Modern China: Esoteric Buddhism ReVivified By The Japanese And Tibetan Traditions,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hung 57, no. 1 (2004), 84; and Gimello, “Ch'eng-kuan on the Hua-yen Trinity,” 364.
155
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 42.
156
Ibid.
157
Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute, 283; and Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 6-8.
158
Welch The Buddhist Revival in China, 8, citing Otto Franke, “Eine neue Buddhistische
Propaganda,” T’oung Pao 5 (1984), 306.
45
missionaries’ knowledge of Christian scriptures.159 Holmes Welch argues that this proposal was
a reaction to competition at home: “as the educated public became more and more concerned
with the improvement of education, it became increasingly critical of the saṅgha and perhaps its
criticism was exacerbated by the contrast with the Christian missionaries, whose educational
activities were so conspicuous.”160
While hoping to uplift Chinese Buddhism through missionary activity and education,
Yang still viewed both the Buddhist community as well as the academic study of Buddhism in
China a the time as in a state of decline, having lost its footing to scholars in Japan and Europe.
Scholars in China were not schooled in Buddhist foreign languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, or
Tibetan,161 and the Buddhist institution had fallen victim to a narrative of Buddhism as an
antiquated, degenerate, superstitious cult for the dead.162 Yang played a role in this narrative as
well, but he perceived that the problem lay with the saṅgha, not Buddhism itself. Yang had so
internalized the discourse of Buddhism in decline that he “issued a scathing critique of the
contemporary monastic community as ignorant of the very teachings of their own tradition, not
to mention the new Western learning, and therefore not only unwilling but also unable to
effectively propagate Buddhism in educated society.”163 Furthermore, Yang felt that most clerics
in China were ill-informed on Buddhist scriptures, and eminent monastic teachers were few in
number.164
To combat this perceived low status of the Buddhist community, Yang promoted
Buddhist education for not only monastic members, but for laity as well. He envisioned a twofold education system wherein monastic property was utilized as an academic environment: one
branch of education, called “outer studies” (waixue 外學), for all members of society to focused
159
Darui Long, “An Interfaith Dialogue between the Chinese Buddhist Leader Taixu and
Christians,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000), 171; Tarocco 53.
160
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 14.
161
Long, “An Interfaith Dialogue,” 171.
162
See Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End.”
163
Jessup, “The Householder Elite,” 10.
164
Ibid., 24. Although he internalized the pervasive rhetoric of Buddhism in decline, Yang was
in reality living at a time when Buddhism was flourishing, not declining at all, with monasteries
being rebuilt and the Qing persecution of Buddhism behind him. However, as Welch, The
Buddhist Revival in China, 21, notes: “if Yang and his friends had little reason to consider
Buddhism decaying, they must have become increasingly aware of the contrast offered by
Christianity, more and more of whose evangelists they could see about them after the treaties of
1858 and 1860.”
46
on general educational topics such as English, Chinese, and science, as well as Buddhist
curriculum; and a second branch of “inner studies” (neixue 內學) for Buddhist clerics to
primarily focus on Buddhist scripture before developing knowledge of the general subjects.165
In 1908 Yang followed through on his thought and successfully established the Jetavana
Hermitage (Zhihuan jingshe 祇洹精舍), in his same Nanjing home which housed the Jinling
Scriptural Press. Here, a total of twelve monks and twelve Buddhist laymen enrolled to learn
about Buddhism from Yang and other lay teachers.166 Welch wrote that Yang developed a threeyear curriculum of fulltime studies focusing on Buddhist scripture, history, literature, and foreign
languages.167 However, Otto Franke details a more thorough plan for the Jetavana Hermitage,
which was in fact designed to have three levels of education leading to an eight-year curriculum
consisting at each of the three levels of “Buddhist textual studies, modern Chinese literature, and
English language and literature, with a minimum of forty-two hours of class time each week,”
where “[a]ll those selected for admission were to have as their ultimate goal the propagation of
Buddhism throughout the world.”168
Despite such rich plans for the school, Yang was only able to fund the Jetavana
Hermitage for two academic years from 1908-1909. Yet during this short time, a host of
influential figures, including Taixu and Ouyang Jian, who would become leaders of Buddhist
reform in their own right, happened to pass through the school’s doors as students.169 Taixu
would become the face of the Buddhist revival in modern China for the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, and Ouyang Jian would go on to become a reformer in his own right. It was also
during this time, between 1909 and 1910, that Yang founded the Buddhist Studies Research
Society (Fojiao yanjiu hui 佛教研究會), where he served as president and chief instructor,
lecturing twice weekly on Buddhist scripture,170 namely the Śūraṅgama Sūtra which he felt
meshed especially well with modern science.171 The Buddhist Studies Research Society was an
important meeting place for the Buddhist community to congregate frequently for lectures and
165
Significantly, Ven. Shengyan would put a similar two-tiered education model with separate
educational academies for laity and clerics in place at Dharma Drum Mountain.
166
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 9.
167
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 44.
168
Pittman Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 70.
169
Long, “An Interfaith Dialogue,” 170.
170
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 9.
171
Pittman Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 70.
47
discussions of Buddhist doctrine and practice.172
Yang Wenhui passed away on October 8, 1911, two days before the start of the Xinhai
Revolution which brought an end to the Qing Dynasty and heralded in the age of the Republicans
in China. To this day, he is remembered as “the father of the Buddhist revival,” 173 a
groundbreaking publisher of Buddhist texts, a pioneer in Buddhist education, and the teacher of
the revolutionary scholar-monk Taixu.
Taixu was ordained as a monk in 1904, at age fourteen. Around 1908 he was greatly
influenced by the works of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and other scholars who promoted
political and social reform in order to modernize China. It was at this time that Taixu first
believed that Buddhism could be the best tool for carrying out this social reform and took up the
role of “revolutionary monk.”174 Thus, throughout his life Taixu aimed to reform Buddhism in
order to reform society, grounding these reforms in “Mahāyāna scripture and traditional
paradigms.”175 Building on Yang Wenhui’s groundbreaking work as a Buddhist revivalist, other
Buddhist reformers in Taixu’s generation promoted varying approaches for carrying out reform
in the early twentieth century. For instance, Taixu’s classmate at Yang Wenhui’s Institute,
Ouyang Jian (1890-1943)—a layman like Yang—maintained an anti-clerical perspective and
promoted completely stripping Buddhism of its monastic body in favor of a strictly scholastic
“Buddhist Studies” (foxue 佛學).176
While Taixu was not as extreme, he was still perceived by the mainstream Buddhist
monastic community as promoting too radical of changes to the Buddhist institution in China by
calling for a “Buddhist revolution” (fojiao geming 佛教革命). Taixu recast the popular Buddhist
trope of the pure land as an attainable reality on earth rather than an otherworldly paradise in
favor of a “Buddhism for the human life,” which was a clear opposition to the “funerary
Buddhism” that had come to popularly characterize Buddhism in China.177 In promoting his
reforms, Taixu borrowed proselytization tactics from Christian missionaries, saw compatibility
between Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine and Western modern scientific theory, and promoted
172
Jessup, “The Householder Elite,” 5-6.
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 9.
174
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 80.
175
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 3.
176
Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, 80.
177
Ibid.
173
48
revitalizing Buddhism through institutional reorganization, social action, global mission,178 and
focusing “principally through educational reforms.”179
Taixu was born in 1890, coming of age in the final decade of the Qing dynasty, during
the period between the Boxer Rebellion and the Xinhai Revolution that finally ended the Qing
and Chinese dynastic rule. Taixu had studied with Yang Wenhui at the Buddhist Institute and his
influence on late-twentieth and early-twenty first century Buddhism in Taiwan cannot be
overstated. However, during his own life and into the latter half of the twentieth century, Taixu’s
importance was not easily recognizable. His confrontation with Western concepts of modernity
and Christian missionaries especially would come to shape his own views on Buddhism in the
modern age, and Taixu would become a staunch advocate of revitalizing Buddhism in the face of
accusations of decline, primarily through restructuring the Saṅgha and promoting monastic
education.
Taixu grew up in an age of increasing Western influence, Christian missionaries, and
Japanese imperial power flooding into China. The humiliating military defeats, domestic
uprisings, and aggressive anti-clerical and anti-superstitious campaigns, institutionalized by a
series of unsuccessful reforms, brought about the close of a tumultuous nineteenth century,
further exacerbating the narrative of Buddhism in decline in China. Accordingly, the twentieth
century was ushered in by equally devastating unrest with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, followed
by 1911 Xinhai Revolution ending the Qing dynasty, the subsequent anti-Confucian and promodernization New Culture Movement culminating in the 1919 May Fourth Movement, and
increasing aggression from Japanese imperial power and forces through the start of the Second
Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In particular, the first decade of the twentieth century saw the
fulfillment of some of the drastic anti-superstition reforms set forth in the late nineteenth century.
Monasteries and temples were confiscated and used for school property and religious festivals
were banned. This was part of the “reform the customs” movement during 1905-1906, in which
anti-superstition was a growing sentiment among Chinese elites and the Buddhist establishment
underwent further persecution.180
178
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 2.
Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), 121.
180
Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End,” 321.
179
49
In the twentieth century, Kang Youwei and other reformers voiced embarrassment from
Western narratives of the lowly state of Chinese religion. The increasing propaganda against
Chinese religion and Buddhism coming from domestic and foreign sources brought the debate
over religion in China to a fevered pitch to the build up to 1904.181 During the first decade of the
twentieth century, largely in response to the Boxer Rebellion the floundering Qing government
again enacted sweeping reforms, this time called the New Policies (xinzheng). From 1901-1911,
and throughout the Republican period, “probably more than half of the million Chinese temples
that existed in 1898 were emptied of all religious equipment and activity.”182
In January 1904, the Qing government re-established temple confiscation decrees, and
over the coming years the anti-superstition and anti-clerical sentiment continued to grow among
the elite, resulting in figures like a young Hu Shi, who would later become an eminent scholar
and advocate of liberal reform in China, to advocate in 1908 destroying temple statues and
driving out or even killing clerics.”183 Still, “such attitudes were not the norm, but they were,
nonetheless, very influential in shaping discourse and opinion,” 184 particularly during the
Revolution, Republican, and later Communist periods in which this iconoclastic discourse
developed into very real violence.185 Thus, it was in this chaotic environment that Taixu arose as
a soaring figure in the Chinese Buddhist revival.
1.4. Interaction with Christian Missionaries and Establishing a Pure Land on Earth
As I have shown, by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century,
Chinese society was deeply entrenched in a general anti-clerical and anti-superstition discourse,
which perpetuated and intensified the narrative of the Buddhist monastic community and
institution as a drain on society and a dying, irrelevant tradition. This was due to many factors,
including internal Chinese moves by intellectuals and the Qing court to modernize Chinese
society, including borrowing a page from Japan’s Meiji Restoration, which had created and
separated the categories of “religion” and its antithesis, “superstition” and persecuted the
181
Ibid., 327.
Ibid., 308.
183
Ibid., 326.
184
Ibid., 330.
185
Ibid., 326.
182
50
Buddhist institution. Externally, foreign Christian missionaries in China played a significant role
in propagating this discourse, and their influence only grew in the twentieth century. However,
as we have seen, not all Christian missionary activity was entirely detrimental to Buddhism in
China.
Yang Wenhui befriended and worked closely with missionaries such as Timothy Richard.
Taixu too, while an outspoken critic of Christianity, clearly drew inspiration from the efforts of
Christian missionaries and, like Yang, developed a relationship with some of these figures. In
particular, Christian missionaries had become quite successful at not only openly deriding
Chinese religion and Buddhism, but they were also gaining popularity among Chinese for their
social engagement and public welfare work, such as building “Christian hospitals, orphanages,
schools, and so on.”186 Connecting Taixu’s reforms to Protestant Christianity, Goossaert and
Palmer note that Taixu’s “vision of modern Buddhism was text-based, ethical, socially engaged,
and ‘humanist,’”187 wherein his focus on promoting textual study “was partly an answer to
Christian criticism that Buddhists did not even know their canonical texts.”188 Don Pittman
describes Taixu’s critique of Christianity as essentially a defense mechanism, masking his desire
to emulate their work and “wrest from the Christians their assumed role as the primary advocates
of religiously informed social action for the reform of Chinese society.“189 Appearing to echo
Zhang Zhidong’s call for “Chinese learning for essential values, Western learning for practical
values,” Taixu gave a talk in 1938, titled “China needs Christianity and Europe and America
need Buddhism” (中國需耶教
歐美需佛教 Zhongguo xu yejiao yü Oumei xu fojiao)190 in
which he argued for the Buddhist community to imitate the Christian ability to engage in society
and enact real social reforms. Pittman explains that, “From his perspective, one had to recognize
that the technological accomplishments of the West were intrinsically related to elements within
the Christian tradition that had developed since the Middle Ages, elements that were not present
to the same degree within the Buddhist heritage.”191
186
Pittman, “The Modern Buddhist Reformer,” 76.
Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, 81.
188
Ibid., 81.
189
Pittman, “The Modern Buddhist Reformer,” 76.
190
See Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 16.
191
Pittman, “The Modern Buddhist Reformer,” 78.
187
51
In the summer of 1923, Taixu and Yan Shaofu 嚴少孚 initiated the World Buddhist
Federation (Shijie Fojiao lianhe hui 世界佛教聯合會) in Dalin Temple (dalinsi 大林寺) on
Mount Lu (Lushan 廬山). Originally designed to be a “collaboration between Chinese and
Japanese Buddhists in spreading the dharma in Europe and America,” the World Buddhist
Federation was a two-summer lecture series focused on uniting Buddhists around the world and
included. In the first year (July 23 - August 11, 1923) Taixu did most of the lecturing but also
invited friends, including the Christian missionary Karl Reichelt, to speak to audiences of up to
one hundred people.192 The conference Federation faded away after two years, as Japan hosted
the following year’s incarnation as the East Asian Buddhist Conference (Dongyan fojiao dahui
東亞佛教大會). In addition to the success of the Federation’s two series marking Taixu’s ability
to organize and call people together, particularly Christians. Welch recounts what Taixu told
Reichelt concerning the first session of the World Buddhist Federation in 1923, saying “Many of
them [the Christians] only come in contact with ignorant and immoral Buddhist monks strolling
about in the streets. They think all Buddhists are of this type and that we are all given over to
dark superstitions and do not really cultivate religion. We have started this conference movement
to show you that it is not true.”193 Indeed, Taixu consistently tried to rebuke the persistent
narrative of Buddhism in decline.
Indeed, into the twentieth century, Buddhists in China were able to appropriate the
techniques of social engagement, which the Christians had so successfully carried out. The
Bohemian-born American missionary Lewis Hodous observed in 1923:
Social work is a prominent feature of some of these Buddhist societies. They have raised
money for famine stricken regions, have opened orphanages, and assist in Red Cross
work. One of the largest Chinese institutions for ministering to people who are sick and
in trouble is located at Hankow. Around a central Buddhist temple is a modern-built
hospital, an orphanage and several schools for poor children. It may not maintain western
standards of efficiency, but it certainly represents the outreach of modern Buddhism.194
192
Ibid.
Ibid., 58; I use Welch’s translation here for lack of the original Chinese.
194
Hodous, Buddhism and Buddhists in China, 62.
193
52
A major part of this push for Buddhist social engagement came from Taixu’s reinvention
of the pure land trope in Chinese Buddhism. Instead of the popular conception of the pure land as
an otherworldly paradise, Taixu recast this concept, arguing that this world, this plane of human
existence, is a potential pure land. He argued that a this-worldly paradise could be actualized
through the work of diligent practitioners who actualize Buddhist practice in daily life. As
Pittman notes:
For those struggling along the bodhisattva’s path toward full enlightenment, Taixu
emphasized that wisdom could not be attained apart from compassionate actions in the
world. This was a truth, he asserted, that far too many Mahāyāna Buddhist practitioners,
both monastic and lay, seemed to have forgotten, to their peril.195
Taixu called his reconception of the pure land as a “pure land on earth” (renjian jingtu 人
間淨土), which—like nearly all of Taixu’s philosophies—was grounded in traditional Mahāyāna
doctrine. In contrast to the idyllic Pure Land of Sukhāvatī, Mahāyāna doctrine also teaches that
Śākyamuni decided to be born into an impure buddhafield, the Saha world. This is the world here
and now, complete with suffering, afflictions, and defilements. Taixu criticized both those who
were complacent and content in their place in this world and thus had no desire to improve it, as
well as those who believed that no amount of work could improve the conditions of life and thus
turned to escapism and/or devotional practice in order to be reborn in Sukhāvatī in the next
life.196 Instead of looking to a source of assistance outside of this life and realm, Taixu instead
wanted immediately to establish a pure land on earth.197 Taixu envisioned a pure land on earth
created by the masses of China purifying their minds and carrying out good deeds198 Thus,
Taixu’s idea of purifying the mind lay in following the traditional bodhisattva path of practicing
the precepts and perfections, or pāramitās, “while seeking practical ways to work toward the
ultimate goal of buddhahood.”199 It is this practicality that rooted much of Taixu’s philosophies
195
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 8.
Ibid., 223-24.
197
Ibid., 224.
198
Taixu, “Jianshe renjian jingtu lun” (On Establishing a Pure Land on Earth), in Taixu dashi
quanshu (Complete Works), 14:47.5: 426 [translated provided by Pittman, Towards a Modern
Chinese Buddhism, 224.]
199
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 225.
196
53
for reforming China through a dual-pronged approach of reforming both the Buddhist saṅgha as
well as the Chinese government and culture at-large.
Taixu’s concern for establishing a pure land on earth was not as radical as it may first
seem. However, his emphasis on a modern, western-style education system to do so was
revolutionary. This particular emphasis on using education to reform society and build a pure
land on earth, while never fully realized at the time, had a lasting effect on Chinese Buddhist
figures to come.
In 1914 Taixu took up a three-year period of sealed confinement at Mount Putuo, in
which he devoted significant time to reading, thinking, and writing about Buddhist doctrine and
the state of Buddhism, in addition to his meditation practice. Significantly, in 1915 the
Nationalist government implemented the Monastery Control Regulations, which prompted Taixu
to develop a system for restructuring and reforming Buddhist monasteries and the monastic
community. Taixu would continue to reformulate this plan, titled in 1915, “The Reorganization
of the Sangha System,” until his death in 1947, yet none of his seven different distinct variations
on this was implemented.200 Welch notes that “Among T’ai-hsü's main objectives in reorganizing
the sangha was to win it a higher status. ‘Monks are always religious recluses,’ he said, ‘taking
no interest in the affairs of the community or the country and they are in turn slighted by the
government and the ruling classes.’”201 One of the most prominent and substantial ways that
Taixu aimed to go about reviving the status of the monastic community was through education.
Each educational institution he created or headed was theoretically part of his “World Buddhist
Institute,” including the Wuchang Buddhist Institute in Hebei province, the South Fujian
Buddhist Institute in Xiamen, and the Sino-Tibetan Institute in Chongqing, Sichuan.202
In 1922, Taixu helped found the Wuchang Buddhist Institute (Wuchang foxueyuan 武昌
佛學院) in Wuchang, a city in east-central Hubei province in central China. Pittman refers to this
as Taixu’s greatest success in monastic education.203 The school was China’s first “Buddhist
Institute” (foxue yuan 佛學院)—a new, modern term (foxue 佛學) to note its more academic and
philosophical in nature. The Wuchang Buddhist Seminary would train many important Buddhist
200
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 52.
Ibid., 54.
202
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 96; Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China,
62.
203
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 96.
201
54
monks in China through 1937. The school was built in a secular building, housing classrooms,
service departments, and living quarters for faculty and students. 204 The curriculum was
borrowed from a Japanese Buddhist university,205 and implemented courses in Buddhist studies
and languages, as well as history, literature, and psychology. Courses were taught by monastic as
well as lay teachers, who employed modern education techniques and instruments, such as
blackboards and the western lecture-and-discussion model of classroom interaction. 206 The
school also possessed a library “renowned for a collection that eventually included more than
forty thousand books,”207 which Taixu named the “Library of the World Buddhist Institute.”
Taixu left the school in 1924, although it continued to exist and remained highly influential until
the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
Taixu continued to develop Buddhist Institutes beyond the Wuchang Institute. In 1921
the government confiscated monastic property at Nanputuo Temple 南普陀寺, in Xiàmén 廈門,
in order to establish a university. Following this the abbot decided to start a school at the temple,
the Jingxian Buddhist Study Society (Jingxian fojiao she 景賢學佛社). In 1927, the abbot retired
and Taixu took over as head of the school, which he renamed the South Fujian Buddhist Institute
(Minnan foxue yuan 閩南佛學院).208 Taixu implemented the same formula he had devised for
the Wuchang Institute, focusing on a modern, western education system in which instructors,
many of whom were laymen, behaved more like academic rather than dharma teachers. Students
were expected to take notes and answer questions on the spot in class using their own words.
Instructors used blackboards, like at Wuchang, which Welch notes was “particularly important:
the Chinese language has so many homophones and Buddhism has so many technical terms that
verbal instruction was at best inefficient and often incomprehensible.” 209 The curriculum at the
South Fujian Institute was rigorous. Again, according to Welch:
Each day, students spent five hours in classes on Buddhist texts; three hours a week on
the history of Buddhism, and eighteen hours a week on secular subjects, with one hour of
204
Ibid., 97.
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 113.
206
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 97; Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China,
111.
207
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 97.
208
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 111.
209
Ibid.
205
55
homework to be done each morning and evening. The secular subjects were traditional
literature (six hours a week), Japanese (five hours), history and geography (five hours),
and psychology (two hours). There was no course in mathematics.210
The school also implemented an additional three-year specialization curriculum, which
was later canceled in the mid-1930s, due to lack of students. However, it was replaced with a
separate school, called the "Institute for Fostering the Orthodox" (Yangzheng foxueyuan 養正佛
學院), which offered courses in literature, history, geography, and Buddhist texts.211 This latter
course enrolled around fifty students in the late 1930s, while the former had around thirty. In
both schools, students were also expected to attend morning and afternoon services and formal
meals in the dining hall. However, Welch notes that there was no meditation or reciting the
buddha's name. “The goal,” wrote Welch, “was to stimulate, not to still, their minds.” In further
attempts to modernize, the school calendar took Sunday as the day off, rather than the traditional
Chinese lunar dates of the eighth, fifteenth, twenty-third, and thirtieth of the lunar month, and
students could play ping-pong, which would never have been allowed in a traditional vinaya
hall.212 Both schools closed in 1939, again due to the War.
The Sino-Tibetan Buddhist Institute (Han-Zang jiaoli yuan 漢藏教理院),213 was cofounded by Taixu and became the first Buddhist school in China to receive government funds
and a government mandate.214 Closely bound up with the Nationalist government, the school was
founded in 1932 at the Wuchang Buddhist Institute, and focused on training Chinese monks in
Tibetan language and Buddhism. Taixu’s disciple and the school’s principle, Manzhi, wrote an
article stating that the Institute “bore the mission to unite in good faith China’s races.” Gray
Tuttle contends that this was the first time a Buddhist institution embraced rhetoric of a national
racial identity. Manzhi’s article goes on to explain that the school also “bore the mission to
develop and expand all Buddhist teachings.”215 Staff to teach Tibetan language and religious
culture at the Sino-Tibetan Buddhist Institute was originally limited due to a lack of qualified
210
Ibid.
Ibid., 111-112.
212
Ibid., 112.
213
Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China, 125.
214
Ibid., 126.
215
Ibid., 177.
211
56
instructors in China.216 However, Taixu’s school was the first in the country to recruit teachers
who had been to Tibet to study the language, religion, and culture. By 1936, the Institute had
hired a full staff of qualified teachers, knowledgeable in Tibetan cultural and religious matters.217
Monks ran the daily affairs of the school; however, local and provincial security and military
forces controlled the overall activities.218 The academic curriculum consisted of training in
Tibetan and Buddhist culture and focused on language skills, while also teaching history,
Chinese and Tibetan literature, doctrinal study, and natural science. The school’s curriculum
states that the main course of study for both “undergraduate” and “graduate” programs was
Chinese and Tibetan literature and Buddhism.219 The institute became very popular during the
Second Sino-Japanese War, as monks fled west, before closing in 1949.
Despite the many ideas and institutions that Taixu helped develop, the degree of actual
influence he held was negligible, as only one to two percent of Republican monks were
involved.220 As Welch questions, “There is no doubt that the seventy-odd seminaries established
in the first half of the twentieth century raised the educational level of the sangha. The question
is, how much? …Some seminaries were sloppy (ma-hu) as one alumnus put it. The teachers
knew little more than the students, and the range of subjects was limited.”221 Still, the legacy that
Taixu left on later Buddhists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is inestimable,
particularly in regards to his attempts at promoting monastic and Buddhist education in general. I
will show in Chapter Three how DDM is taking up Taixu’s legacy, particularly through using
education to create a pure land on earth and re-establish orthodoxy in Chinese Buddhism, in
order to correct the “heterodoxy” as perceived in popular Chinese religion in Taiwan.
1.5. Taixu’s Impact on Contemporary Chinese Buddhism
Taixu has clearly left an indelible mark to this day on Chinese Buddhism and so-called
“humanistic Buddhism.” Welch writes, “Just as Yang’s career exemplifies the early phases of the
216
Ibid., 195.
Ibid., 196.
218
Ibid., 197.
219
Ibid., 199.
220
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 56; Welch 116
221
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 116.
217
57
Buddhist revival, its middle and later phases can be seen through the career of T’ai-hsü.”222 In
Taiwan today, the three major Buddhist organizations of Foguangshan, Ciji, and DDM all trace
their history back through Taixu in some way. Like Taixu before him, Shengyan saw Chinese
Buddhism and society at-large facing a threat of degradation, and advocated this-worldly action
and applications of Buddhist teachings. 223 Despite owing an obvious debt to precedents
established by Taixu, Shengyan also points out that he was not interested in implementing the
former’s specific reforms and ideals, 224 explaining that “I am not one who espouses or
implements in practice Taixu’s particular theories, yet I am one who reveres his spirit.”225 Thus,
while Shengyan, like the other Buddhist leaders in Taiwan, was certainly inspired by Taixu’s
reforms, he saw Taixu’s shortcomings as being a dreamer more than a doer; an idealist more than
a realist. Specifically, Shengyan criticized Taixu for a lack of organization and an inability to
actualize and sustain the lofty goals that he set forth.
In particular, Taixu’s concept of “Buddhism for human life” and “establishing a pure land
on earth” have made an enormous impact on contemporary Chinese Buddhist groups today,
thanks largely in part to Taixu’s student, Venerable Yinshun (1906-2005), who in one way has
surpassed his teacher in influence among Chinese Buddhist communities in Taiwan today,
particularly through his writings. A highly respected scholar-monk, Yinshun worked as a
biographer of Taixu as well as an accomplished Buddhist scholar and commentator throughout
his long life. He articulated on Taixu’s concept of “Buddhism for human life” (rensheng fojiao
人生佛教) and rebranded it into its more popular conception today as “humanistic Buddhism.”
Yinshun is also largely responsible for the twentieth century popularity of shifting pure land
cosmology and soteriology to a human-centered philosophy and practice as seen in the Chinese
Buddhist circles in Taiwan today.226 Yinshun spoke against an overemphasis on rebirth in
Sukhāvatī, fearing that, as Taixu had argued, overemphasis on death and the next life would lead
to a sense of detachment and escape from this life. Rather, Yinshun argued that Buddhists should
222
Ibid., 15.
I refer here not only to doctrine, but also commentaries and precepts.
224
This is likely due to the fact that Taixu’s reforms and theories ultimately failed to get off the
ground and be implemented in the end.
225
Shengyan, Xuefo zhijin (The Ferry for Learning Buddhism), (Taipei, 1995), 261, 263-266.
Tranlslation provided by Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 285.
226
Particularly DDM and Buddha’s Light Mountain.
223
58
model themselves on the buddhas and bodhisattvas who posses their own pure lands or
buddhafields due to their vows and actions.227
Taixu and Yinshun’s humanistic Buddhism has taken on special significance in twentieth
and twenty-first century Buddhism not only in Taiwan. Stuart Chandler traces the origination of
the English term, “Engaged Buddhism,” to the Vietnamese Thiên (Chan) monk, Thich Naht
Hanh, who used the term “nhap gian phat giao” as part of his anti-war movement in Vietnam
during the 1960s. Citing Hunt-Perry and Frine’s claim that Taixu’s reforms in China in the 1930s
had a direct impact on inspiring Vietnamese Buddhist political movements, Chandler concludes
that “[i]t is therefore likely that the Vietnamese Buddhist phrase is a direct translation of
‘Rensheng Fojiao.’”228
Chandler points out that while the term “Engaged Buddhism” is popular in Southeast
Asia and the United States, Buddhist leaders in Taiwan such as Shengyan, Xingyun, and
Zhengyan, use the term “Humanistic Buddhism” in much the same way. He goes on to define
“Engaged Buddhism” as referring “to those individuals and organizations that have explicitly
applied Buddhist values in the attempt to influence contemporary political and social issues.”229
Marcus Bingenheimer emphasizes Engaged Buddhism’s impact on society, as the concept
promotes social and political involvement, missionary activities, and the evolution of monastic
communities into large, corporate entities, in which Buddhist institutions are modeled on secular
institutions,230 such as universities, publishing houses, and hospitals, and a distinct likelihood of
being involved in political matters. 231 Bingenheimer makes an important distinction here
between the normative and the descriptive uses of renjianfojiao. He cites Venerable Yinshun as
defining renjianfojiao descriptively as “emphasiz[ing] that the three treasures of Buddhism exist
227
Stuart Chandler, Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: the Foguang Buddhist Perspective
on Modernization and Globalization (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004), 57-8.
228
Ibid.
229
Ibid., 78.
230
While modeled on secular institutions, these groups often still maintain their religious
foundation
231
Marcus Bingenheimer, “Some Remarks on the Usage of Renjian Fojiao and the Contribution
of Venerable Yinshun to Chinese Buddhist Modernism,” Development and Practice of
Humanitarian Buddhism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Mutsu Hsu, Jinhua Chen, and Lori
Meeks (Eds.). Hua-lien (Taiwan): Tzuchi University Press, 2007, 143.
59
or at least originated in the human realm,” and goes on to say that it is the human realm which
will benefit most from this type of Buddhism.232
From its inception, the term renjian fojiao has been intimately linked to an agenda, if
perhaps without connection to a specific cause. Taixu used it to promote his ideas of reform in
China in the 1930s and Thich Nhat Hanh used the term to promote his antiwar movement in
Vietnam in the 1960s. Therefore, it must be understood that renjian fojiao cannot be divorced
from its political connotations, and that contemporary Buddhist leaders in Taiwan—namely
Venerables Shengyan, Xingyun, and Zhengyan—are also using the concept, if not the term
explicitly, of renjian fojiao to promote their own respective agendas. I would expand this to also
include the “pure land on earth” trope so popular today.
The spirit of Taixu and Yinshun’s pure land on earth, particularly through education and
purification of the mind, clearly live on in contemporary Chinese Buddhist organizations in
Taiwan. Dharma Drum’s overarching goal and mission statement, “to uplift the character of
humanity and to create a pure land on earth,” is clearly not a passive concept. As Pacey explains,
“renjian jingtu involves the creation of a new society—one with Buddhist ethics and principles
at its core, and in which people’s lives and behaviour are guided by these principles.”233
However, each group approaches the accomplishment of this goal by recasting a particular
practice. While none of these practices are exclusive to any one group, each group does favor
one practice over others. Buddha’s Light Mountain is using proselytization, Ciji is using
philanthropy, and Dharma Drum is using education.234 Chandler argues that the founder of
Foguangshan, Xingyun, is trying to modernize Buddhism by blending the sacred and the secular,
which is also what Ciji and Dharma Drum are involved in. On the surface, this would seem to
confirm McMahan’s contention that modern Buddhism, in order to stay relevant and
competitive, has been secularized and divorced from more “religious” elements.235 But it is not
the case that contemporary Buddhist groups in Taiwan have moved away from “religious”
elements. Rather, they are recasting traditionally non-religious practices as religious. Indeed,
Pittman describes Taixu as an “ethical pietist,” characterized by emphasizing “transformation
through normative activities—that is, the doing of truth. For them, being religious primarily
232
Ibid., 142.
Pacey, “A Buddhism for the Human World,” 448.
234
Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma, 2007.
235
McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, 10.
233
60
means acting according to prescribed rules and roles. Regardless of the ethical norms
emphasized, what are highlighted are those aspects of the tradition’s vision that undergird such
practices without apparent contradiction or unnecessary complication.” 236 Following this
definition, Shengyan too could be considered an ethical pietist, emphasizing self-transformation
and cultivation through normative practices, such as a western model of academic education. It is
to this method of recasting normative activities as Buddhist practice that I will turn in the
following chapters.
236
Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 6.
61
CHAPTER TWO
SHENGYAN AND HIS ASPIRATION FOR EDUCATION
Because of the decline of modern Chinese Buddhism, I engaged in the study of Buddhist
history in the hope of finding inspiration to develop Buddhism in the future.237
Shengyan
Shengyan was a negotiator between Buddhist tradition and modernity. He represents the second
generation of Buddhist leaders in Taiwan, following the end of Japanese rule in October 1945,238
who succeeded to formulate new norms of modern Chinese Buddhism. What were the conditions
that led Shengyan to his later success? Why was he so adamant about education, especially when
he was afforded very few opportunities for education as a child. In this chapter, I explain how his
lack of education in youth and his religious experiences caused him eventually aspire to high
education, to learn from the strengths and weaknesses of his predecessors, and to establish his
own vision of education in Taiwan. The background provided here will serve as a historical
context to situate subsequent chapters on the focus on education and his community of practice
on DDM, and his desire to create orthodoxy in Chinese Buddhism as a means of correcting
popular religious practices, such as elaborately decorating temples with bright colors and electric
lights, and burning paper spirit money in order to receive some benefit from deities.
2.1. Shengyan as Zhang Baokang
The first stage of Shengyan’s life, childhood along the Yangzi River in China’s Jiangsu
Province, was marked by misfortune: sickliness, natural calamities, and the ravages of war. A
slow learner, Shengyan was afforded very few opportunities for education during this period of
childhood, and was able only to attain a formal fourth grade education. This formative period
would come to influence Shengyan’s religiousity as well as his vision and desire for Buddhist
237
Shengyan, Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng 聖嚴法師學思 程, 88-9.
Charles B. Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan: A Historical Survey". Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Virginia, 1996, 399. Jones later published his dissertation as the monograph, Buddhism in
Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999).
However, his dissertation actually contains more information about Dharma Drum and its
educational endeavors.
238
62
education. Here I will provide a background context for the boy who would become Shengyan,
highlighting the role of education, or lack thereof, in his childhood.
Shengyan was born Zhang Baokang 張 寳 康 in 1930 near Young Maiden Harbor
(Xiaoniang gang 小娘港), across from the Wolf Mountain (Langshan 狼山) region in Nantong
County 南通縣, Jiangsu province 江苏省. The name Baokang means “Precious Health,” and
refers to the young boy’s sickly and frail state as an infant. Baokang was the youngest of six
children, and born into a poor farming family who lived along the banks of the Yangzi River, the
longest river in Asia, an historical major thoroughfare for trade, and a prime location for
agriculture. Months after his birth, a series of massive floods from the Yangzi River forced the
Zhang family, which included Baokang, his five older siblings, and their mother, age 42, and
father, age 41, to move slightly north, putting distance between themselves and the immediate
banks of the Yangzi. The family settled around Nantong 南通 and finally took up residence in
Changyinsha 常陰沙 in 1931.239 Shengyan writes:
My birthplace was near Young Maiden Harbor, across from the Wolf Mountain region in
Nantong County, Jiangsu province. [I was born on] the fourth day of the twelfth month of
the nineteenth year of the Republican Era [1930 in the Western calendar). However, I
have no impression of the location of my birthplace, because in my infancy, that is the
twentieth year of the Republican Era [1931 in the Western calendar), the Yangzi River
flooded and completely covered my birthplace and swept up everything. Not only the
things on the ground were engulfed by the Yangzi River, even the soil alongside the
Yangzi’s shoreline went under—the southern part swelled up while the northern part
collapsed. Ever since I had memory, I was told that my birthplace had been consumed by
the Yangzi River several li’s distance from its banks.240
239
Shengyan, Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng, 9-10.
Shengyan, “Part One: Carefree Childhood,” (Yi: Wuyou de tongnian 一、無憂的童年),
“Childhood and Youth” (Tongnian he shaonian 童年和少年), in Master Shengyan’s Study and
Thought Process (Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng 聖嚴法師學思 程), Fagu quanji di 3 ji di 8 ce,
(Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999), 9-19.
240
63
Figure 1. Shengyan’s childhood area of activity. Jiangsu Province, China. (Map, c.1911-1949.)
Figure 2. Map of Jiangsu Province in China. The red region represents the area of Jiangsu.
64
Baokang received little education as his early life was marked by calamities and suffering.
In addition to frequent flooding in the region, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937,
lasting through 1945, and the boy was frequently exposed to death, as well as atrocities
committed by the occupying Japanese forces. He was also exposed to a host of religious
traditions, namely folk religion, Daoism, and Buddhism in the form of Buddhist monks
performing rites for the dead and devotionalism to the Bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin 觀音
菩薩.241 This tumultuous social and natural environment further exacerbated the state of the
Zhang family, who was forced to frequently migrate looking for temporary work, while Baokang
stayed home to help his mother. As a result, the young Zhang received very little education, able
only to acquire a fourth grade level education at a local grammar school and infrequent tutoring
in the traditional Chinese model focused on rote memorization of Confucian classics. His own
family was not educated, and Baokang frequently had to help the family to survive. He
infrequently attended private tutoring sessions, and did not formally enter primary school until
age twelve, where he began in the second semester of third grade and had to leave after
completing the fourth grade when his family was forced to move further south on the Yangzi for
work.242
When Baokang was thirteen, a neighbor and family friend referred the boy and his family
to a new abbot at the nearby Guangjiao Monastery (Guanjiaosi 廣教寺), who was looking for
young novices. Baokang desired to take the opportunity and his parents obliged, in part because
it would ease the family’s finances to have one less child economically dependent on them.
Baokang left home for Wolf Mountain (Langshan 狼山) in 1943 (the thirty-second year of the
Republican Era),243 receiving the monastic name Changjin 常進 (lit. “Always Advancing”) from
the master, Venerable Liantang 蓮塘.244
241
Sheng Yen, Footprints in the Snow: The Autobiography of a Chinese Buddhist Monk, Tr. by
Kenneth Wapner and Rebecca Li, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 17-18.
242
Shengyan, “Part One: Carefree Childhood,” 9-19.
243
Shengyan, Guicheng, (Taipei: Dongchu chubanshe, 1993), 13.
244
Lee Chih-fu, Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, "Appendix: A Short Introduction to
the Life of Ven. Sheng-yen," 636. http://www.chibs.edu.tw/ch_html/chbj/13/chbj1329.htm
(Accessed 9 February 2012).
65
2.2. Shengyan as the Novice Changjin
During the second period of Shengyan’s childhood, he first entered the monastery.
However, as a novice in a traditional Chinese monastery, modern education was lacking,
although he did receive some tutoring in traditional Chinese education. However, during this
period, the young Shengyan would have a transformative religious experience that
simultaneously established in him great faith in Buddhism and allowed him to learn easily for the
first time in his life. This was later followed by the opportunity to study at a Buddhist seminary
near Shanghai established by Taixu’s student. Here the young Shengyan would finally
experience modern education as well as more opportunities to practice meditation. This was a
watershed moment for Shengyan, but it would come to an end in 1949, ushering in a new era of
his life.
At Wolf Mountain, Baokang was able to receive tutoring in the Confucian classics.245
However, his daily duties involved executing basic chores, practicing traditional rituals, and
memorizing liturgy for recitation in Buddhist services, which included the Amitābha, Lotus, and
Diamond Sutras.246 This would come to influence Shengyan’s desire to purge Buddhism of
rituals that had infiltrated, in his view, from popular and folk religion. However, his lack of
education earlier and malnutrition, sickly body and mind thwarted his mental abilities to
remember any of the liturgy. It was during this time that he experienced a miraculous religious
transformation. This experience allowed him the ability not only to develop a fabulous memory
for everything he read, but also gave him the ability to critically reflect on the world around him,
to see through the veil of what he considered a sad state of affair in Chinese Buddhism.
Moreover, it instilled in him a love for learning.
In the beginning, Changjin was considered a “slow,” young novice who showed no signs of
progress. His inability to memorize basic liturgy troubled not only him but his master, Langhui.
He said that Changjin’s mental block was caused by karmic obstructions and so suggested that
the novice to perform repentance prostrations to Guanyin Bodhisattva.247 For three months
245
Sheng Yen, Footprints in the Snow, 32.
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind: On the Practice of Chan Retreat, 2nd ed, Trans. by
Ming Yee Wang, Paul Kennedy, and Karen Swaine, (Elmhurst, New York: Dharma Drum
Publications, 2005), 21.
247
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 3.
246
66
Changjin would wake up before and retire to bed after the rest of the monks at Wolf Mountain,
in order to perform one thousand prostrations to Guanyin every day. He did this until one
morning he had a breakthrough experience. His body drenched with cold sweat, he suddenly feel
a light ease overwhelming him. His mind became clear and open. After this experience he could
miraculously memorize and learn anything he came across very quickly, He was also instilled
with great sense of responsibility towards the Buddha’s teachings. Later in life, Shengyan would
still credit Guanyin Bodhisattva for this transformation, 248 and would maintain devotion to
Guanyin throughout his life, and promote the practice for others to take up.249
This religious experience is considered in Chinese as ganying 感應 or sympathetic
resonance or “stimulus response” between humans and divinities.250 It is thought of as a cosmic
pattern that orchestrated the seen and unseen worlds not only for Chinese Buddhism but also for
the whole of Chinese religion. It is called sympathetic resonance because this pattern is built on
the idea that that which is similar in the cosmos attract one another. So if a human being acts
virtuously in one plane of existence, his act would stimulate (gan 感) a response (ying 應) of
divine beings in another plane of existence. Two planes of existence resonate with one another.
This religious experience was a turning point for Changjin. As his mind became clear and
perceptive, he was able to reflect on the Buddhism around him. Shengyan would later write that
even at the age of thirteen, he became acutely aware of the shortcomings of the contemporary
Buddhist institution in China at the time, laying the blame almost solely on a lack of education:
I felt that Buddhism was on the way to extinction. Most Chinese had little understanding
of the Dharma. Teachers were very rare, and what I knew came only from memorizing
the scriptures. Chinese Buddhism did not provide a systematic education for monks. A
monk’s training was usually completed gradually and imperceptibly through the
248
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind, 21.
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 3.
250
For ganying, see Feng Youlan 馮友蘭, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30; Dong Zhongshu
(ca. 179ry of Chinese
Philosophy, vol. 2 (Princet
ed. D. C. Lau (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1994), 13.2;
Robert Sharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store
Treatise (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 77–133; also Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-Yin:
The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000),
154.
249
67
experience of everyday life. There simply was no planned education.251
Changjin’s frustration was ameliorated when he was give the opportunity to study at Guangjiao’s
satellite temple, Dashengsi 大聖寺 or Great Sage Monastery near Shanghai, in order to raise
funds by holding Buddhist funerary services.252 While living there, he was able to attend a
nearby seminary established by one of Taixu’s students.
In 1945, the instability and trepidation of the past eight years had ended with the
conclusion of the Second Sino-Japanese War, only to be replaced by hostilities from the
mounting Communist forces. As a result, Changjin and other young, novice monks were sent to
Dashengsi. During this period, Changjin’s sole role was to carry out ritual services, namely
funerary rites (foshi 佛事). Changjin and his fellow young monks from Dashengsi were sent
from house to house, from day to night, performing services for laity two or three times per day.
Although these monks chanted scriptures, there was rarely any opportunity to study, let alone,
penetrate, their meaning.253
As fortune would have it, however, in the same year that Changjin had relocated to
Shanghai, a student of Taixu established the Jing'an Buddhist Seminary 静安佛學院 near
Shanghai.254 Changjin, finally seeing an opportunity for a systematic Buddhist education, desired
to enroll at the seminary. However, this was met with resistance from his mentor, who depended
on him to help with the maintenance of the aforementioned menial monastic tasks. Changjin was
conflicted, and unsure if entering the seminary was the correct choice. This was further
complicated by pressures from his master, who relied on Changjin to do ritual services.255
Nevertheless, Changjin decided to leave Dashengsi, and, due to his connection with an instructor
at the Jing’an Seminary who had previously been a monk at Wolf Mountain, he was permitted to
take the entrance exam and enroll in the Jing’an Buddhist Seminary in 1946.256
The Buddhist seminary was another major turning point in the young monk’s life, as he
experienced systematized Buddhist education in both theory and practice for the first time.
251
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind, 22.
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 21.
253
Ibid.
254
Ibid., 4.
255
Shengyan, Guicheng, 1993, 121-122.
256
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 4.
252
68
Founded by a student of Taixu, and with most courses taught by his students,257 the seminary
was developed in line with Taixu’s non-sectarian approach to Buddhist textual studies, and
Changjin was afforded the chance to study the history and doctrines of all the major schools of
thought. These included: Huayan, Tiantai, Weishi (Consciousness-only), Madhyamaka, Pure
Land, Vinaya, and Chan schools of Buddhism.258
Jing’an Buddhist Seminary’s pedagogy was based on a modern, Western academic model
for classroom teaching, where instructors used blackboards, gave grades, and issued diplomas,
while students sat taking notes and were expected to respond in their own words when asked a
question by the instructor.259 This was all revolutionary for a Buddhist seminary, and Shengyan
experienced it firsthand at Jing’an. For the first time, the young monk had encountered modern,
Western-style education, and in a Buddhist context no less. We can say with some certainty that
this must have been a formative experience that would have a deep impact on Shengyan’s later
thought regarding not only the need, but the real possibility, of modern Buddhist education.
Significantly, Buddhist practice was also a feature of Jing’an’s curriculum, which
included seated meditation as well as what we may consider “modernized” repentance rituals
(chanhui 懺悔), which recast the practice on self-cultivation, rather than the traditional purpose
of raising money from families of the deceased.260 Given Taixu’s interest in textual analysis, it is
not surprising that the meditation practice offered at the seminary did not go beyond outward
appearance. No real instructions were given. Shengyan would later write that while in the
meditation hall, he would simply mimic the external posture of other monks, and that “When I
asked them about practice they would say, ‘Oh, it’s easy. Just sit there. Once your legs stop
hurting it’s fine.’”261
These instructions would not satisfy the young novice. He knew the power of religious
experiences and was able to perceive the flaws of Taixu’s seminary. In fact, most of the Chinese
monasteries during this time, according to Welch, placed emphasis on the practice of meditation
but offered little instructions. Spending time in the meditation hall was sometimes a way to climb
257
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind, 23.
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 4; however, Shengyan in Getting the Buddha
Mind, 23, writes that he only studied the Vinaya, Weishi, Tiantai, and Huayan schools.
259
Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 111-113.
260
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 4.
261
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind, 23.
258
69
up the ladder of success in the monastic institution.262 Understanding derived from meditation
practice came after many years of personal experience and interacting with the presiding Chan
master at large Chan monasteries, which clerics would travel to in order to be admitted to its
Chan hall. In this sense, instructions and learning were very different from the modern (Western)
educational system. These two important elements, learning of Buddhism through modern
educational system and the training of traditional Chan practice, would come to consume
Shengyan’s efforts later in life.
2.3. Shengyan as a Soldier
The third major period of Shengyan’s life involved disrobing and leaving the monastic
life in order to escape from Communist hostilities in mainland China. In 1949, Shengyan would
join the resistance youth army and relocate to Taiwan. This was part of a mass exodus,
particularly of Buddhist leaders, including those who possessed a higher degree of renown and
were thus able to flee China without being forced to take such drastic measures as many of the
younger generation had to do. Ironically, it was during this time as a layman in the army that
Shengyan began to come into his own as a Buddhist thinker—writing and even publishing essays
on Buddhism, and learning of a monk, Ven. Dongchu, who he would later reordain under upon
leaving the army.
Changjin would stay at Jing’an Monastery until 1949, when the Communists were poised
to overthrow the Nationalist government. Many prominent Buddhists were able to find exile in
Taiwan, but less fortunate, unconnected young monks like Changjin were not so fortunate. As a
result, many of these monks renounced their monastic positions and enlisted in the Kuomingtang
(KMT) youth army, which was fleeing to Taiwan. Changjin became one of these monks to join
the KMT, and he arrived in Taiwan in the spring of 1949, whereupon he assumed the lay name,
Zhang Caiwei 張採薇. While enlisted in the army, from 1949-1960, Zhang Caiwai was afforded
the opportunity to pursue further education and moved up the ranks. He also continued to
practice meditation, contemplate the Buddhist teachings, and write prolifically both books and
articles for publication in Buddhist periodicals.
262
Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 47.
70
In 1957, at age 29, Caiwei published the article, “Literature and Buddhist Literature,”
became close friends with Venerable Qingsong 青松, whose own academic accomplishments
and educational vision had a great impact on Ven. Shengyan. During his time in the military,
Caiwei feared for the future of Buddhism, and in 1957 began contributing under the pen name
“A General who Awakens the World” for Humanity Magazine, which had been established by
Ven. Dongchu 東初 (1907-1977). Shengyan would later become Dongchu’s disciple, reordaining under him upon leaving the army, and inheriting the master’s academic vision for
Buddhism.263 It was Dongchu, an accomplished scholar-monk originally from mainland China
and a student of Taixu, with whom Caiwei would re-novitiate in 1960 after obtaining leave from
the army, and who would become the primary teacher for the newly re-ordained Huikong
Shengyan 慧空聖嚴 (lit., “Wisdom and Emptiness, Adorned with Holiness”).
Dongchu was in many ways the monk Shengyan would become, and ultimately surpass
in accomplishments. Diligently focused on both the study and practice of Buddhism, and
promoting Buddhist education in order to correct what he perceived as a nation in which most
people claimed to be Buddhist but had little understanding of the correct teachings, Dongchu was
dharma-heir to both surviving lineages of the Chan tradition in China, the Caodong and Linji
transmissions. This was a rare credential which Shengyan himself would also come to acquire.264
Dongchu also inherited the tradition of Buddhist revivalism and reform through his studies with
Taixu at the Southern Fujian Buddhist Seminary (Minnan foxueyuan 閩南佛學院) and his
mentor Zhiguang 智光 (1889-1963), who had studied at Jetavana hermitage with Yang Wenhui.
Shengyan lived with and learned from Dongchu for two years, during which time the young
monk was put through grueling methods of instruction, which led to his receiving dharma
transmission from the master in 1976.265
Dongchu had become a member of the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China
(BAROC) in 1947 and relocated to Taiwan in the spring of 1949 in order to set up a BAROC
263
Master Sheng Yen, “Gallery, 1959,” Image 1,
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/photo/PhotoDisplay.aspx?sid=7&MType=1&SType
=5 (Accessed 9 February 2012).
264
Shengyan held Dharma transmission from both the Caodong lineage from Venerable
Dongchu, which he received in 1976, as well as the Linji lineage from Venerable Lingyuan 靈源
(1902–1988), which he received in 1978.
265
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 7-8.
71
office in Taipei. Perhaps due to the emphasis on humanistic Buddhism that his teachers
promoted, Dongchu founded Humanity (Rensheng 人生) magazine in 1949, at the time one of
only three Buddhist journals in Taiwan, in company with Sound of the Sea Tide (Haichaoyin 海
潮音), which Taixu had founded, and Taiwan Buddhism (Taiwan fojiao 台灣佛教). He founded
the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Culture (Zhonghua fojiao wenhuaguan 中華佛教文化館)
in 1955 in order to promote cultural activities and social welfare work. Thus, by the time
Shengyan was poised to leave the army, Dongchu had developed a strong reputation in China
and Taiwan for his work in integrating Buddhism with academia and social engagement.
2.4. Shengyan Returns to Monkhood
The fourth stage of Shengyan’s life marks the beginning of the monk known as
“Shengyan.” In this stage of his life, Shengyan would leave the army and reordain under
Dongchu, whose own academic vision for Buddhism would greatly influence Shengyan’s goals
for revitalizing Chinese Buddhism. Shengyan continued to develop as a Buddhist practitioner
and intellectual during this time, continuing to write about the state of contemporary Buddhism
and highlighting its shortcomings—namely, a lack of structure for Buddhist education. It was
with this drive to establish such a structure in Taiwan that Shengyan would travel to graduate
school in Japan in 1969, and return a changed man with a further elaborated plan for reviving
and maintaining Chinese Buddhism for contemporary times.
Upon re-ordaining under Dongchu, Shengyan continued to develop his approach of
remedying what he perceived as the lowly state of contemporary Chinese Buddhism. Early on,
Shengyan looked to implement systemized Buddhist education as one solution to this problem,
fearing that if this were not done the tradition completely die out and the Buddhist institution
face imminent collapse. Jimmy Yu characterizes this period of Shengyan’s thought, as expressed
in the latter’s written discourse, as the “Early Formation” period. From 1956-1969, Shengyan’s
thought, as traced through the eleven books he published during this period, draws almost
exclusively from the Āgamas, the early Pāli Buddhist texts, and vinaya texts, centered on
precepts and proper monastic conduct, with two books comparing Buddhism and Christianity
and defending the former from Christian attacks. Here we see evidence of a young monk—and
for the first four years of this period, still a layman enlisted in the army—“reflect[ing] and
72
examin[ing] the foundation of the Buddhist teaching as a whole,” based on his close study of
these foundational Buddhist texts. It is during this period that Shengyan wrote two books that
represent the foundation of his understanding of Buddhist doctrine, which is rooted in upholding
precepts and staying true to what he defines as “orthodox” Chinese Buddhism.266
It is also during this period that Shengyan is very direct in his writing, proffering biting
criticisms, and showing evidence of a man set on reforming the Buddhist institution. Shengyan
increasingly voices his dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary Chinese Buddhism, often
pointing to the lack of a systemized education system for clerics and a widespread
misunderstanding of the Buddhist teachings among the laity as the reason for, reminiscent of the
historical situation and discourse of Buddhism’s “decline” in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
century China, the subsequent poor treatment of Buddhists and the Buddhist institution in
popular culture, and the exodus of young Buddhist talent to foreign countries where Buddhist
education did exist. A prime example of this early discourse is found in the June 1961 edition of
Humanity Magazine, for which he had become editor-in-chief two years prior after having just
left the military and re-ordained under Master Dongchu. Here, Shengyan speaks of his
relationship with Venerable Qingsong, and laments the state of Chinese Buddhism in the article
titled, “The Despair of Chinese Buddhism: Reflections From Seeing off Master Qingsong as He
Travelled East” (Zhongguo dangdai fojiao de kumen—Song Qingsong fashi dongdu you gan 中
國當代佛教的苦悶──送青松法師東渡有感).
This is one of the earliest texts articulating Shengyan’s concerns regarding the perceived
"decline” of Chinese Buddhism and the need for Buddhist education, and was written during the
first year of Shengyan’s six-year solitary retreat, which he specifically designed to focus equally
on Buddhist practice as well as doctrinal study. As Daniel Stevenson notes, during this time
Shengyan was engaged in “gradually working his way through the most important sutras and
treatises of the Buddhist canon.”267 In this article, Shengyan pinpoints what he sees as the
problems and reasons for the decline of Chinese Buddhism: out-of-touch Buddhists of the older
266
Jimmy Yu, “Master Sheng Yen and the Modern Construction of Chan Buddhism,” The 30th
Anniversary of Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies: Flowering Fields and Fruitful Harvest
(2010), 157. These two books, according to Yu, are Essentials of Monastic Precepts and
Regulations (Jielü xue gangyao 戒律學綱要) and Orthodox Chinese Buddhism (Zhengxin de
fojiao 正心的佛教).
267
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 10.
73
generation, unable to adapt to modern times; a younger generation of Buddhists lacking the
needed direction and means needed to carry out meaningful reforms, and turning to foreign
countries for Buddhist education; only superficial progress in contemporary Buddhism, lacking
real substance; all due to the fact that the Chinese Buddhist institution lacks a systemized method
of cultivating educated, talented individuals capable of representing “orthodox” Buddhism,
defending it from internal and external attacks, and ensuring its preservation for generations to
come. Shengyan casts a dire warning, in this crisis mentality, that if nothing is done then the
tradition will surely die out, and proposes a solution that must be enacted: Develop systematized
Buddhist education in Taiwan, and make that the source of authority among Buddhists
worldwide:
On the afternoon of May 25th, I returned from bringing Master Qingsong to the Songshan
Airport and seeing him board a plane travelling east [to Japan]. Facing the [state of affairs
in] contemporary Chinese Buddhism, I became overwhelmed by a surge of thoughts and
feelings and a profound sense of deep sorrow! …
Recently, the Chinese national situation has been in a state of internal turmoil and
external pressure, creating trouble endlessly. Buddhism is unable to gain ground because
it is under the dominance and invasion of Christianity, with its [discourse of] Western
scientific knowledge. [Even] our own countrymen take Buddhists, who are unable to lift
themselves up, and add [insult to injury] by even going so far as to burn down
monasteries and drive out monks and nuns. Thus, Buddhism is under dual pressures. The
older generation is admittedly embarrassed and at a complete loss in facing this perverse
new situation. The younger generation has an abundance of will and determination, but
lacks the means to do anything. All the original infrastructures and conditions [of
Buddhist institutions] can no longer adapt to the needs of the modern era. They want to
establish new rules and regulations that suit modern times, but at the same time there are
so many layers involved and they do not know where to start. Even when they begin to
engage in these tasks, they will encounter many practical issues and limitations of the old
system.
74
[Take] for example, the modern Buddhist luminary, Master Taixu. Although he aimed to
transform the old with the new and [essentially] replace the old with the new, rushing
about calling on [others for support] and exerting great effort throughout his entire life,
yet he still did not achieve much. Consequently, [we have] the formation of Buddhism’s
current situation: it seems to be bustling with activity, but in fact it is [merely like]
bubbles of soap; the institution of Buddhism, its education, and its philanthropic
endeavors, all completely lack structure and genuine power.268
Here we see Shengyan critiquing, quite bitterly, Taixu. Masked in a polite tone,
Shengyan is essentially saying that for all of Taixu’s work he was unable to accomplish anything
meaningful. Looking at the state of Chinese Buddhism around him at the time, and feeling this
sense of despair, Shengyan appears disheartened by what he perceived as the mere illusion of
activity in Chinese Buddhism. However, Shengyan’s despair was not without insight, as he
plainly sees the reason for this problem: a lack of structure. Thus, Shengyan was aware of his
forbearers’ shortcomings and possessed the vision to see what was needed to make sure that he
didn’t make the same mistakes. An institutional structure must be implemented, Shengyan
believed, in order to bring up Buddhist talent capable of picking up the Chinese Buddhist
tradition, in order to restore and maintain it for future generations.
What is perhaps even worse for Shengyan is the fact that the young Buddhists who do
exist in China and Taiwan have no infrastructure to hold them up in their desire to study and help
revive and preserve Chinese Buddhism. Instead, these individuals end up leaving to study
abroad, primarily to Japan, yet even when they go abroad they are incapable of learning anything
valuable. Thus, in Shengyan’s view at this time Chinese Buddhism lacks both a system for
educating young Buddhists, and it even lacks young Buddhists capable of learning anything.
This kind of rhetoric characterizes the young, caustic Shengyan. Looking back on this today,
Shengyan was remarkably resolute in carrying out the solution to these problems he voiced in
1961. What is particularly telling is what Shengyan writes that Qingsong told him as he left for
Japan:
268
Shengyan, “The Despair of Contemporary Chinese Buddhism” (Zhongguo dangdai fojiaode
kumen 中國當代佛教的苦悶), Humanity Magazine (June 1961), 43-47.
75
Master Qingsong is an outstanding figure among today’s young monks, so his insight is
superior to theirs. Before departing, he said to me: My aspiration is to become a bridge to
for others to cross over, not seeking the support of Japanese Buddhism as our way out,
but to turn towards Europe and America. Thus I wish this for him, to emulate
Kumarajiva’s coming from the west and Saicho (687-763) and Yinyuan’s (1592-1673)
going to the east [i.e., Japan]. However, I would also like China to be able to open
Buddhist universities and allow our youth to form their own universities and lead Europe
and America, and allow Europeans and Americans to come here to study Chinese
Buddhism and bring it back to the West. Otherwise, Chinese Buddhism’s momentum will
forever be in despair.269
Indeed, this was exactly what Shengyan would aim to do with Dharma Drum Mountain: to make
Taiwan an international authority on Buddhist Studies, drawing people from around the world to
the island, rather than seeing his fellow countrymen and women travel to foreign countries to
receive an education. By establishing himself and his organization as the authority on the
intellectual study of Buddhism, Shengyan could then claim access to orthodoxy in Chinese
Buddhism, which he would later create in a modernist model, largely reacting against popular,
non-Buddhist practices that had become part of “traditional” Buddhism in Chinese culture.
However, before Shengyan could even begin establishing a system capable of doing this, he
himself would have to be one of the many monks he speaks of who travel east to Japan.
Later, in 1967, Shengyan continued to critique Buddhism in Taiwan, delineating four
reasons that the existing Buddhist educational institutes and seminaries were internally unable to
be successful: 1) lack of a clear educational mission, 2) lack of lay patronage, 3) lack of interschool cooperation, 4) lack of unified curriculum.270 Charles Jones notes that a 1993 article in
Chinese Buddhism Monthly voices the same problems still existed, save for Shengyan’s ChungHwa Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Faguang Institute of Buddhist Culture (Faguang fojiao
wenhua yanjiusuo 法光佛教文化研究所).271 Jones also highlights possible external reasons for
the instability of these Buddhist institutes in Taiwan which also lasted into the 1990s: 1) lack of
269
Ibid.
Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan," 403-405.
271
Ibid., 405.
270
76
jobs for graduates of these programs, partially due to the fact that Ministry of Education did not
accredit diplomas at the time, as well as the general job market in Buddhist Studies;272 2) a lack
of preparation on part of incoming students, for which Jones, citing the scholar and Buddhist
educator Lan Jifu, points to Buddhist Studies as a new discipline and the subsequent lack of
resources available for students to learn canonical languages, resulting in students either having
to learn these languages when they enter the Buddhist institute if those institutes even offer such
courses. These results in "scholars of Buddhism trained in Taiwan find it difficult to engage in
academic exchange with the international scholarly community. This lack of preparation also
hampers efforts to study abroad."273 These were precisely the problems that Shengyan would
continue to strive to overcome and correct for the rest of his life.
Thus, while Shengyan’s thought continued to develop as he aged, his goal of establishing
systemized Buddhist education in Taiwan and making it the source of authority for Buddhists
around the world never faltered. Upon completing his solitary retreat in 1969, Shengyan
travelled to Japan, at the urging of Dongchu, to pursue higher education at a Buddhist
university.274 With only a formal fourth-grade education, Shengyan was accepted to Risshō
University in Tokyo, admitted based on his skillful writings over the past two decades and his
reading proficiency in Japanese, which he had acquired during his six-year solitary retreat.275 In
two years, Shengyan completed his master’s degree under the mentorship of the widely respected
scholar of Chinese Buddhism, Sakamoto Yūkio, who Dan Stevenson calls “one of the most
respected scholars of Chinese Buddhism.” 276 Shengyan’s master’s thesis, “A Study of the
Calming and Contemplation Methods of the Tiantai School” (Tiantai zhiguan famen 天台止觀
法門),277 examined the efforts of the Chinese monk, Huisi of Nanyue 南岳惠思 (515-577), to
272
Ibid., 407.
Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan,” 407-8.
274
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 11.
275
Shengyan and John Crook, Illuminating Silence: The Practice of Chinese Zen (London:
Watkins Publishing, 2002), xviii.
276
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 11.
277
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 157-158. Clearly formative for his own later approach, this thesis
discussed Huisi Nanyue’s integration of doctrine and practice, focused on the Tathāgatagarbha
system of thought, which teaches that all beings are inherently already buddhas. Yu argues that
this showed Shengyan how to realize thought into action, and that this research laid the
groundwork for Shengyan’s interpretation of Chan later in life.
273
77
integrate Buddhist doctrine and practice, an approach that Shengyan would later apply to his own
method of teaching for modern audiences.278
2.5. A Buddhist Doctorate becoming An Educator
Shengyan would acquire not only his Doctorate degree in Tokyo, but a new perspective
on both Buddhist education and practice as well. Upon his return to Taiwan, Shengyan found a
situation in the larger Buddhist community that he perceived as stagnant and unresponsive to the
concept of a monk with a PhD. As a result, he followed causes and conditions which led him to
the United States, and ultimately back to Taiwan in the late-1970s. Finally, Shengyan would
begin to implement the goal of Buddhist education he had developed over the past three decades,
and started the process of establishing Dharma Drum Mountain in 1989.
Dongchu had expected Shengyan to return to Taiwan following the master’s degree, but
Sakamoto Yūkio was impressed with Shengyan’s performance and encouraged him to enroll in
the university’s doctoral program. Sakamoto passed away shortly after Shengyan agreed to
continue his studies at Risshō, leaving Shengyan without an advisor. However, in 1975
Shengyan received his doctoral degree under two other professors who took over Sakamoto’s
role as advisor. Shengyan wrote his dissertation on the thought of the Late Ming dynasty monk,
Ouyi Zhixu 蕅益智旭 (1599-1655), who was admired by Taixu and Yinshun, for his “forwardlooking eclecticism,”279 and as Jimmy Yu explains, Shengyan and Ouyi shared a remarkably
similar disposition and perceived of their social and cultural situations in much the same way:
Sheng Yen saw Ouyi as responding to the same crisis in the deterioration of Buddhism.
Ouyi sought ways to integrate and reinterpret various Buddhist doctrines, particularly the
Tiantai teachings, to strengthen Chinese Buddhism vis-à-vis the sociopolitical challenges
of the times. He responded vociferously to the challenges of those Buddhists and nonBuddhists who misinterpreted and misappropriated Buddhism… Sheng Yen’s identity
with Ouyi can be seen in the way Sheng Yen responds to what he perceived as a crisis in
278
279
Ibid.
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 11.
78
contemporary Chinese Buddhism and to various misinterpretations of Chan by
proponents of Japanese Zen.”280
Shengyan felt that this deterioration was caused in part by heterodox practices being
integrated into proper Chinese Buddhism. Thus, Yu categorizes this period, 1969-1975, as the
“Integrative Years,” during which time Shengyan’s intellectual development drew more from
later Mahāyāna Chinese Buddhism and began to articulate a system which synthesizes the study
(jiao 教) and practice (guan 觀) of Buddhism. The result of this would ultimately be Shengyan’s
establishment of Buddhist orthodoxy, which would be implemented as a beacon in Taiwan,
showing people through practice what “true” Buddhism looked like. Significantly, it was also
during his time in Japan that Shengyan’s eyes were opened to new models of Buddhist
education, which involved the academic study of Buddhism in sectarian Buddhist universities.
These universities were aligned with, and funded by, particular schools of Japanese Buddhism in
order to produce scholarship on their respective sect. Scholars like Griffith Foulk and Peter
Gregory have rightfully pointed out the problems with these sectarian universities, not the least
of which their tendency to project later Japanese constructions of Buddhism back onto their
earlier Chinese correlates.281 However, these institutions had also been successful in integrating
the study of Buddhism with a modern educational system and with modern society, showing
Shengyan that Buddhist education could in fact be carried out in a systemized fashion and that
this implementation could permeate popular culture. Thus, for the first time, Shengyan directly
experienced the kind of Buddhist education model that he had written about eight years prior.
This experience would have a lasting impact on Shengyan as he departed Japan for Taiwan in
1975.
Shengyan returned to Taiwan in 1975, as the first Chinese monk to earn a doctorate
degree, in order to attend the fourth Overseas National Scholar Council on Infrastructure.282
Upon his return, Shengyan was unimpressed with the situation of Buddhism in Taiwan. Perhaps
280
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 158.
See T. Grifith Foulk, “The Ch'an Tsung in Medieval China: School, Lineage, or What?”;
Peter Gregory, “The Vitality of Buddhism in the Sung,” Buddhism in the Sung, ed. Gregory, eds.
Peter N., and Daniel Aaron Getz (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), 1-20.
282
Master Sheng Yen website, timeline,
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=2 (Accessed 10
February 2012).
281
79
due to his outspoken criticism before leaving for Japan and the complacency of the Buddhist
establishment to maintain the status quo in Taiwan at the time, Shengyan did not receive a warm
welcome. It was in what he perceived as a stagnant religious environment in Taiwan that
Shengyan, with six years of higher education focused on Buddhist history and theory, and an
unprecedented doctoral degree in hand, felt “Like a person who has just gotten a driver’s license,
but has no vehicle to drive.”283
Following the conference in Taiwan, Shengyan returned to Japan. Shortly thereafter, in
December 1975, he received an invitation from Dr. C.T. (Jiazhen) Shen 沈家楨 (1913-2007),
founder of the Chinese Buddhist Association of the United States, to come to America to teach
Chan and serve as vice chairman of the association and the abbot at the Temple of Enlightenment
in the Bronx, New York.284 While in Japan, Shengyan had not only studied, but also participated
in the rich religious environment, which consisted of many new religious movements and
Buddhist groups. One such group was Sanbōkyōdan, combining practice of both extant lineages
of Zen, Rinzai and Sōtō. Bantetsugu Roshi was a lineage holder in Sanbōkyōdan, with whom
Shengyan practiced. Bantestsugu encouraged Shengyan to teach Chan in America, despite the
fact that Shengyan did not speak any English, to which Bantetsugu Roshi replied, “Zen doesn’t
rely on words. Why worry about words?”285 Shengyan now had the opportunity, and he quickly
accepted.
He arrived in New York on December 10, 1975, initiating the period of Shengyan’s life
during which he would come into his own as a Chan teacher, the period which Yu calls the
“Maturing Years.”286 For over twenty years to follow, Shengyan would travel back and forth
between Taiwan and the United States each year. In the United States, he taught Chan meditation
and established a monastery, the Chan Meditation Center in upstate New York, as well as an
English language quarterly magazine, monthly journal, and publishing house. In Taiwan,
Shengyan focused his efforts on establishing educational institutes and progressively working
step by step to realize his goals of implementing systemized Buddhist education in Taiwan and
making it the authority for Buddhists around the world. These steps included returning to Taiwan
in 1977 following Dongchu’s death to head his Nongchan Monastery and Chung-Hwa Institute
283
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 159.
Shengyan and Stevenson, Hoofprint of the Ox, 12; Jimmy Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 159.
285
Sheng Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind, 29.
286
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen and the Modern Construction of Chan Buddhism,” 159.
284
80
of Buddhist Culture, the latter of which he transformed into the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist
Studies in 1985; taking over as Director of the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the China
Academy of the College of Chinese Culture in 1978;287 establishing the Three Studies Institute at
Nongchan Monastery in 1979, which would become the Dharma Drum Sangha University in
2001; establishing the Dong Chu Publishing House in 1980 in honor of his teacher and ordaining
his disciples as the first generation of the Dharma Drum Saṅgha that same year; and re-launching
Humanity magazine, which had been discontinued in 1961.288
It was in 1989 that Shengyan’s work truly began to come to fruition, when he
successfully acquired the land and resources to establish Dharma Drum Mountain in Jinshan,
outside of Taipei, Taiwan.
287
Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan: A Historical Survey," 414.
Master Sheng Yen website, timeline.
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=2 (Accessed 10
February 2012).
288
81
CHAPTER THREE
CONSTRUCTING MODERN BUDDHISM THROUGH EDUCATION
Meanwhile, while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our
humanity.289
Seneca, On Anger (41 CE)
As Shengyan is a negotiator between tradition and modernity, and creator of orthodoxy, in
Buddhism, Dharma Drum Mountain is the tool he devised for use in doing so. Shengyan aimed
for DDM to be neither an imitator, merely mimicking the reforms of past revivalists such as
Taixu, nor a completely revolutionary New Religious Movement with little grounding in
traditional religious thought and practice. Indeed, Shengyan and DDM’s literature does not
specifically refer to itself as a “modern Buddhist” organization, but an organization that
promotes orthodoxy, which is seen in clear contrast to other folk or religious practices on the
ground in Taiwan—for example, the very design and materiality of Chinese temples which
populate the tiny island. This of course is despite the fact that DDM is using the modern
discourse of education and twentieth century Humanistic Buddhism in a deliberate effort to
relate to and attract modern people.
Indeed, if, as Talal Asad argues, “Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the
real but of living-in-the-world,”290 then DDM’s project of self- and world-transformation is
undoubtedly modern. Instead of trying to understand the world, or cognize the real, Shengyan
aimed to implement an embodied practice of living in the world through active education and
humanistic social engagement in order to both change the world and improve people’s lives, as
well as to revive, promote, and sustain Chinese Buddhism for current and future generations.
Asad further contends that “representations of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ in modern and
modernizing states mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their
experiences.”291 However, I argue that instead of using religion to mediate modern identity,
DDM, through Shengyan’s worldview, is using identity to mediate modern religion. That is
289
As cited by Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 301.
290
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 14.
291
Ibid.
82
DDM’s worldview—that a person transforms herself through education/Buddhist practice and
that transformation naturally extends to society and ultimately to humanity—puts the focus on
the self as a way of modernizing both Buddhism and its spread. Instead of directly copying the
Christian missionary approach of proselytizing by explaining the merits of the tradition, DDM
practitioners need simply to implement Buddhist practice and education in their own life, and the
following stability and peace in that person will naturally radiate outwards to affect other
relationships and, ultimately, humanity. Indeed, as Jürgen Habermas notes, even in modernity
“true belief is not only a doctrine, believed content, but a source of energy that the person who
has a faith taps performatively and thus nurtures his or her entire life.”292
Therefore, Shengyan aimed to establish a technique for mediating modernity and
tradition at DDM through a community of practice, which uses an educational structure both to
fulfill and promote a unique worldview that envisions world-transformation vis-à-vis the self.
While the stated effect of this worldview is to “uplift the character of humanity and build a pure
land on earth,” I argue that the intended effect is also to promote Chinese Buddhism through
more discrete, modern methods of proselytization. DDM’s method of proselytization then is the
using the practice of education to accomplish self- and subsequent world-transformation;
although this practice is rooted in doctrine, the method of proselytization is not through ideology
itself, but an embodied practice. I will discuss the community of practice more fully in the
following chapter. In this chapter, I will discuss how DDM’s educational philosophy and
structure work to implement Shengyan’s uniquely modern worldview without sacrificing the
traditional “religious” elements of Chinese Buddhism. In this unique process of proselytization
centered on individuals’ practice, DDM is promoting its form of orthodox Chinese Buddhism, to
which I will turn first.
3.1. Orthodoxy and Tradition at DDM
For all its modern sensibilities, Dharma Drum aims to promote traditional, orthodox
Chinese Buddhism. I will show in this section how Shengyan defined orthodoxy, and where this
understanding is rooted. I will also problematize the domains of tradition and modernity,
292
Jürgen Habermas, "Religion in the Public Sphere," European Journal Of Philosophy 14, no. 1
(April 2006), 8.
83
showing that these categories are easily blurred and indistinct, and how both are invented
constructs, as evidenced by the situation at DDM.
There is an apparent contradiction at DDM between the conflicting identity of tradition
and modernity. I visited DDM in 2010 with a friend and colleague, who quickly noticed a digital
recording of the Great Compassion Mantra playing on a loop in the background in Dharma
Drum’s Guanyin Hall. The digital prayer facilitated the overall mood of the hall as the devotee
prayed and worshiped the Guanyin Bodhisattva. The devotee could also pray to draw a tally for
his or her fortune on a piece of paper. The difference with popular fortune telling tallies available
at other folk religious temples is that the messages on DDM’s tally paper were messages of
personal blessings based on scriptures and the benefit of education. This paradox here is Dharma
Drum Mountain’s modernist discourse, on the one hand, and the traditional prayer practice, on
the other. How can an organization so evidently forward-looking and modern in scope of its
projects still be so deeply rooted in traditional devotional practices? On DDM these domains of
“traditional” and “modern” are not so distinct and mutually exclusive. When viewed in contrast
to other temples in Taiwan, it is very clear that DDM is a unique example of an organization
promoting something distinct, which one almost instinctively understands as very traditional—
despite its modernity. Thus, these domains are conjoined under the notion of “orthodoxy”
(zhengxin 正信).
The notion of “orthodoxy” as used by Shengyan refers to correct belief and views
regarding Buddhist doctrine based on authoritative texts.293 This notion, which defines what is
correct and true based on textual authority, is based on the borrowed Western idea of “religion”
or zongjiao 宗教 that can be traced back to the emergence of world religions in the nineteenthcentury.294 This construction of orthodoxy based on the Western notion of religion changes the
way Buddhism is being studied on DDM. Even though this discursive motif of DDM is referred
to by the organization as “inheriting the past and inspiring the future,” it actually transforms
Buddhism itself in a fundamental way. Indeed, Shengyan’s early definition of orthodox
Buddhism is rooted not only in the historical, but also the eternal teachings of the Buddha. For
the teachings to be eternal, Shengyan did not believe that they must remain exactly the same
293
See the translator’s preface to Shengyan’s book (published under the Romanization Sheng
Yen), Orthodox Chinese Buddhism, trans. by Douglas Gildow (New York: Dharma Drum
Publications, 2007), 13; the original Chinese book was published in May 1965.
294
See Yu, “Pure Land Devotion in East Asia.”
84
across time. Rather, at the core of his conception of orthodoxy in Buddhism is the very act of
modernization. Shengyan explains, “If a religion’s doctrines cannot stand the test of time, are
incompatible with the environment, or cannot further develop in the face of change, the religion
is superstitious.”295 This positions DDM as both an inventor and negotiator of modern Chinese
Buddhism.
This appeal to orthodoxy is partially due to DDM’s approach of inventing tradition and
creating continuity with the past in order to establish authority in the present.296 To refer to DDM
as a “modern” or “new” Buddhist group would almost certainly limit its authority and appeal to a
modern audience, which no doubt desires a practical approach, but still one rooted in traditional
teachings. Indeed, creating continuity with the past is perhaps the central purpose of one of the
characterizing features of Chinese Buddhism: lineage construction. Scholars have theorized
about the importance of lineage creation in premodern Buddhist schools as a form of
legitimation.297 Today too, in order to establish authority, and possibly dominance over other
Buddhist organizations in Taiwan, even a modern Buddhist group like DDM must maintain—
and create—its connection to the past, specifically to the ancient teachings and practices of
earlier Chan patriarchs and the Buddha himself.
In light of this fact that an important aspect of modernity is the invention of tradition, we
might then say that neither “tradition” nor “modernity” necessarily denotes anything in particular
at all. The boundary separating tradition and modernity is a fluid one. At what point does the
modern become traditional, and how does modernity both project back onto and incorporate the
traditional? For example, even the physical form of DDM is modern by virtue of its architectural
style and design. Bucking the tradition of Chinese temples being brightly colored, gilded, and
electrified, DDM’s complex is natural, muted, monochromatic, and postmodern. Thus the
minimalist aesthetic of DDM’s appearance is itself a modern reinterpretation of a Buddhist
295
Sheng Yen, Orthodox Chinese Buddhism, 19.
Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.
297
Foulk argues that between the seventh and tenth centuries, different Buddhist figures in China
were competing for religious authority by creating, altering, and reformulating this lineage, and
ultimately vying for support and protection from either the emperor or local magistrates; see T.
Griffith Foulk, “The Ch'an Tsung in Medieval China: School, Lineage, or What?,” The Pacific
World, no. 8 (1992), 28; see also Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique
of Chan/Zen Buddhism (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11-31.
296
85
monastery. This is a very clear example of how DDM is setting itself apart as the authority on
orthodox Chinese Buddhism (see below).
Figure 3. Syncretism. A Night Photo of a Traditional Chinese Temple in Taiwan. A temple’s use
of bright displays of light and color, with an admixture of religious iconography including
Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, and “folk religion” statues. Front entrance of the “popular” or “folk
religion” temple, Ciyou temple (Ciyou gong 慈祐宮), in Taipei’s Songshan 松山 district. While
this temple is primarily devoted to the goddess, Mazu 媽祖, like the vast majority of temples
throughout Taiwan, it contains statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas, as well as Daoist,
Confucian, and other folk religion figures. Note the bright lights throughout, and neon signs to
the left and right edges. (Photo taken on June 28, 2011.)
86
Figures 4. Picture of a “Daoist” temple in Yilan. Note the neon reader-board at top left,
displaying the name of a Buddhist temple in blue, and the names of Daoist temples on either
side. See also the bright red paint and detailed ornamentation throughout, which is quite typical
for “traditional” Chinese temples. (Photo taken May 16, 2011.)
Figure 5. Contrast of Dharma Drum Mountain’s “orthodoxy.” Photo of the Dharma Drum
Mountain headquarters in Jinshan. Note the monochromatic gray and brick rust colors of the
complex. (Photo taken June 3, 2009).
87
Further complicating these domains of tradition and modernity, we will see in the next
chapter that there is a difference even within modernities—specifically, between DDM’s
“modern Buddhism” as an institution, and DDBC students’ “modern Buddhism” as individuals.
While both the institution and the individuals focus on a continuity with the past, the individuals
appear to be more in line with Lopez and McMahan’s view of Buddhist modernism vis-à-vis
European Enlightenment values (namely, Buddhism as a rationalistic philosophy to be studied).
The institution on the other hand, despite its modern discourse of education and Humanistic
social engagement, is still practice-oriented (both in traditional Buddhist practices such as
meditation and liturgical services, as well as the modernist move of recasting education as an
element of Buddhist practice) and not interested in divorcing Buddhism from its religious and
even supernatural elements.
In the following sections, I will discuss DDM’s education philosophy as a vehicle for
implementing Shengyan’s modern, humanistic worldview, which places the individual at the
center of a concentric model of transformation, extending outwards from the individual to social
relationships, to the natural environment, and finally to humanity. I see this model as rooted in a
traditional Chinese model of self-cultivation and moral education, and a modern, Western
approach of promoting direct social action through institutional higher education. The goal of
implementing this worldview is to “build a pure land on earth,” while the effect is to promote
DDM’s form of orthodox Chinese Buddhism through a modernist practice that centers on the
individual. The plan for implementing this modernist worldview through institutional education
follows a four-fold process, beginning with establishing the academic Chung-Hwa Institute of
Buddhist Studies (CHIBS), and progressing to a monastic education system; a Buddhist college
combining academics with practice and propriety; and finally a secular, liberal arts university
teaching general college-level courses with a Buddhist flavor, and incorporating all aspects of the
prior educational institutions, including academics, propriety, and Buddhist practice. At the same
time, DDM maintains its connection to the past through traditional practices, such as Chan
meditation and Chinese Buddhist liturgical services, and through casting its own teachings as
congruent with records of past Chan patriarchs, mainstream Mahāyāna philosophy, and early
Indian Buddhist thought as found in the Āgamas. Furthermore, contrary to prevailing theories of
Buddhist modernism, DDM has not tried to purge all of Buddhism’s religious, even supernatural,
88
elements. Finally, Shengyan has utilized the form of DDM’s appearance as the inventor and
negotiator between the domains of modernity and traditionality.
3.2. Dharma Drum’s Educational Philosophy
Shengyan’s DDM has the overarching goal of “uplifting the character of humanity and
building a pure land on earth.” This is accomplished through three overarching tasks, which the
organization integrates and unifies through the discourse of the practice of education: Chan
practice, academic Buddhist education, and propagating Chinese Buddhism. In this emphasis on
education, the category of “education” is redefined in a three-fold structure, which includes not
only Buddhist practice, but also traditional Chan practice and socially engaged “caring” projects.
Here I will discuss the organization’s concept of education as it will be the technique by which
DDM both aims to promotes and realize its worldview, which I will discuss in the following
section.
The first phase of construction of Dharma Drum Mountain broke ground in 1989,
ushering in the beginning of what was now dubbed the “Dharma Drum Mountain World Center
for Buddhist Education.”298 Education was clearly central to the project at this early stage,
evidence of Shengyan’s unwavering focus.299 During this period, from 1988-2000 we see the
highest frequency of the discussion of Buddhism and education (jiaoyu 教育) in Shengyan’s
written discourse, with the highest peak in 1993 (Figure 6).
298
About, “Establishing DDM,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=51 (Accessed February 23, 2012).
299
Ibid.
89
Shengyan's References to Buddhism
and Education
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
1958
1960
1961
1971
1972
1976
1978
1981
1983
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1998
1999
2000
2002
2007
????
????
????
0
Figure 6. Shengyan’s references to Buddhism and education. Frequency of references to
“Buddhism” and “education” within close proximity to one another in Shengyan’s written
discourse. Note the period between 1988 and 2000 is the highest, with a drastic spike in 1993.
In the fall of 1989, Shengyan led a group of disciples on a fifteen-day pilgrimage to India
and Nepal in order to visit sacred Buddhist sites throughout the region. During this time,
Shengyan and his disciples visited Rajagaha's Nalanda University. This prompted Shengyan to
state, "The continuation of Buddha’s teachings relies on only one thing: Dharma education." It
was at the end of this pilgrimage that Shengyan stated that the goal of DDM would be to “uplift
the character of humanity and build a pure land on earth.” Thus, Dharma Drum officially states
that, “In this mission, Dharma Drum Mountain's main effort will be on education.”300
300
However, Shengyan was multifaceted in his approach of trying to uplift the character of
humanity and build a pure land on earth. In 1992, Shengyan first promoted “spiritual
environmentalism” “as the core DDM vision.” [See Profile, “Timeline,” Master Sheng Yen,
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=3 (Accessed 20
February 2012)] Shengyan further elaborated on this concept in 1994 when he put forth the
concepts of Protecting the Social Environment and The Four Kinds of Environmentalism. At this
early stage, protecting the Social Environment involved promoting and holding joint funerals,
90
Through his discourse of interpreting Buddhist practice as education, Shengyan
developed a three-fold model of education in 1994, which has served as the overarching model
for DDM’s work,301 and is central to DDM’s vision and projects today. The Three Types of
Education are: “Education through academics” (Da xueyuan jiaoyu 大學院教育), “Education
through public outreach” (Da puhua jiaoyu 大譜化教育), and “Education through caring
services” (Da guanhuai jiaoyu 大關懷教育). Education through academics refers to education as
it is popularly conceived as classroom education and instructional learning for the purpose of
acquiring skills and knowledge. Education through public outreach refers to teaching traditional
Buddhist cultivation, namely Chan meditation practice, to the masses. Education through caring
services refers to “teaching Buddhist values through socially engaged activities, such as ritual
services and disaster relief work.” 302 All three forms of “education” promote a holistic
transformation of humanity vis-à-vis the self, which is the result of Shengyan’s creation of a
modern worldview involving the holistic transformation of the self, extended outwardly to social
relationships, the natural environment, society, and humanity. This new worldview combines
elements of Confucian self-cultivation and moral education, Mahāyāna philosophy and Chan
practice, a modern Japanese reinterpretation of cosmology which puts the self at the center of a
concentric relationship with the universe, and parallels a modern Western approach to activist
education aiming to create social change, which is rooted in a Classical Greco-Roman model of
education.
3.3. The Dharma Drum Worldview
The Dharma Drum worldview is the key to DDM’s approach of negotiating tradition and
modernity through education. Rather than using religion to mediate modern identity, DDM’s
worldview is using the identity of the self in natural relation to society, and ultimately humanity,
birthday celebrations for the elderly, and “weddings in Buddhist spirit.” [See About, “The
Origin,” Dharma Drum Mountain http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=48
(Accessed 23 February 2012)]
301
Profile, “Timeline,” Master Sheng Yen,
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=3 (Accessed 20
February 2012)
302
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 169.
91
to mediate modern religion with traditional Chan practice. Thus, while advancing the goal of
“uplifting the character of humanity and building a pure land on earth,” DDM’s approach of
education by virtue of this unique worldview is actually a tool for reviving, promoting, and
maintaining Chinese Buddhism for current and future generations. Here I will provide an
analysis of Shengyan’s worldview, as rooted in traditional Confucian values, Chan practice, and
what I see as a Western model of using higher education as a means of social engagement. I will
also show how this method of portraying a worldview as transformative rather than manipulative
is unique, modern, and DDM’s way of promoting orthodox Chinese Buddhism.
After purchasing the land in Jinshan and beginning construction of Dharma Drum
Mountain in 1989, Shengyan began reinterpreting all aspects of his teachings “as expressions of
‘Buddhist education,’ including Chan practice and his interest in precepts,”303 and Shengyan’s
“teachings took the form of moral education.”304 While revolutionary in relation to contemporary
Buddhism in Taiwan at the time, Yu argues that Shengyan and Republican-era Buddhists’
approaches of using education to modernize and promote Chinese Buddhism is rooted in
traditional Confucian values of moral education. This Confucian model has always connoted
more than merely an intellectual acquisition of knowledge or skills, but rather a holistic
transformation of society vis-à-vis the self through the process of education as self-cultivation.305
Indeed, Shengyan’s holistic model of self- and world-transformation through education is in
many ways reminiscent of this Confucian teaching. However, Shengyan has pushed this
traditional Confucian model past moral education alone, implementing an educational system,
which puts equal emphasis on Buddhist practice and academic study for the purpose of selftransformation and social change. This process starts with the purifying and transforming the
mind and extending that transformation outward progressively to the body, family, career,
natural environment, society, and humanity.
303
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 168.
305
Ibid.
304
92
Figure 7. DDM’s model of world-transformation.
In Shengyan’s three-fold approach to “education,” traditional Buddhist practice, namely
Chan meditation, lies at the core. As early as 1986, Shengyan writes that “Chan practice is a
continual process of mending [our actions of body, speech, and mind]; it is a form of
education.” 306 This holistic model of concentric transformation begins with purifying and
transforming the individual’s mind through the dual methods of Chan practice and academic
education. The goal of this model is to create a “pure land on earth,” which is explicitly rooted in
Mahāyāna Buddhist thought as expressed in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra.307 In reality, such a model
would look very similar to an ideal Confucian society, wherein all individuals act in harmony
with one another in reciprocal relationships. Of course there are departure points between the
two models, such as the rigid social system of Confucianism, which is decidedly patriarchal, and
306
307
Ibid., 169.
Jimmy Yu, “Master Sheng,” 170.
93
Shengyan’s modernist view of humanity as egalitarian and encompassing the natural
environment, which must also be cared for and lived with harmoniously.
Helen Hardacre’s research on Japanese New Religious Movements shows a modernist
worldview in Japan. This Japanese worldview expands the notion of worldview to include not
only an understanding of the way the world works, but the self’s understanding and relation to
the body, the family, society, the state, and the cosmos.308 However, while Hardacre’s worldview
is also focused on the self’s relation to the cosmos, hers is more of a model manipulation rather
than holistic transformation. And while this worldview is focused on the self and the capacity for
self-cultivation, which extends to influence society and the universe, this self-cultivation is recast
as a way of dealing with sociopolitical, and even medical, bodily problems,309 again, rather than
a complete transformation of the self and the natural transformation of the external environment,
which would follow. Hardacre’s “worldview” explains the background cultural structure that
informs the decisions and perspectives of Japanese people and the new religions they create.
Thus, this worldview is the producer of these religious movements, not their product. In contrast,
Shengyan’s model of concentric transformation is his creation, not the dominant perspective in
Taiwanese culture. Thus, Shengyan is working to implement this perspective in Taiwan, rather
than being a product of this view, like the Japanese New Religions. However, Hardacre’s model
of modern religious movements in Japan does show that religion is practice-oriented.310 That is,
this modernist take on “religion” is about action, performance, embodiment, and agency; it is
something that people do, not just what they think or philosophize. As I have made clear, I see a
similar model at DDM, where the practices of education and social engagement have been recast
as religious practice—not merely a philosophical interpretation—vis-à-vis this holistic model of
concentric transformation.
Shengyan and DDM’s model of self- and word-transformation is rooted in, perhaps
unconsciously, the traditional Confucian model of self-cultivation and moral education, which is
deeply ingrained in the Chinese habitus, while incorporating the structure of the modern
308
Helen Hardacre, Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1986, 9.
309
Hardacre, Kurozumikyō, 14.
310
Here Hardacre is clearly favoring theories of practice set forth by Bourdieu, Foucault, and
even Turner rather than the Geertzian notion of symbolic, or textual, interpretation of culture and
religion.
94
Japanese worldview (Shengyan would have spent enough time in Japan to see this in the mid70s, but it is unclear if it had any direct effect on his thinking). However, I believe these two
models still lack the direct relationship between education and active social change, which
Shengyan’s model clearly possesses. Thus, I see DDM’s transformation model as possessing an
element of the modern Western approach of promoting social action through higher education—
what Martha Nussbaum refers to as “cultivating humanity.”311 Nussbaum promotes a process in
higher education of self-examination and self-cultivation through both instructional as well as
experiential service learning, which transform and connect the self to the wider body of
humanity, creating a sense of “world citizenship.” DDM’s official discourse explains that in
order to uplift the character of humanity and build a pure land on earth, the organization aims to
promote Buddhist practice and education so that:
The boundaries of nationality, religion, ideology… and space may be overcome, so that
true peace and happiness may be realized on earth on the basis of mutual trust, assistance,
and respect.”312
Similarly, Nussbaum concludes her book by citing the Roman Stoic, Seneca’s treatise On
Anger, which, in her words, argues that this form of education allows a person to be fully human,
and:
capable of recognizing and respecting the humanity of our fellow human beings, no
matter where they are born, no matter what social class they inhabit, no matter what their
gender or ethnic origin.”313
Thus, education in this model is a humanistic means of cultivating the self in order to
change and improve humanity—certainly the goal of DDM. Nussbaum cities Seneca in a way
that appropriately applies to Dharma Drum’s approach of uplifting the character of humanity
through education, and perhaps even fits all forms of Humanistic Buddhism: "Soon we shall
311
Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity.
About, “Establishing DDM,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=51 (Accessed February 23, 2012);
emphasis added.
313
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Cultivating Humanity," Liberal Education 84, no. 2 (Spring 1998):
38; emphasis added.
312
95
breathe our last. Meanwhile, while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate
our humanity.”314
Therefore, DDM’s model of concentric transformation appears to be a synthesis of these
four models: traditional Confucian self-cultivation and moral education, Chan practice and
Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, the modern Japanese worldview of the self’s relation to society
and humanity, and the Western modern-cum-Classical model of using education to cultivate
humanity. Still, the specifics of Shengyan’s holistic education are unique in combining a cocurriculum of the academic study of Buddhism with Buddhist practice. While this worldview
aims to “build a pure land on earth,” it is also recasting the identity of the self as interconnected
with others and the world, much like Hardacre’s Japanese worldview. The implication of this
inherent interconnectedness, as DDM claims, is that by transforming the self—through the active
practice of education and Buddhist practice—one naturally radiates the fruits of traditional
Buddhist practice to broader domains in the modern world. Therefore, by transforming the self
and naturally spreading that practice of transformation in society, DDM has developed a modern
method of discrete proselytization through negotiating both traditional (Chan) and modern
(education) practice.
What then is the specific formula for DDM’s method of proselytization through the
transformative practice of education? In the following section I will discuss what I see as a
modernist four-stage process at DDM of establishing educational institutions in order to realize
Shengyan’s goal of holistic, transformative education-cum-practice for Taiwanese (as a start)
society. Beginning with the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies (CHIBS) in 1985, which
focused solely on academics and laid the groundwork for Buddhist Studies to develop as an
academic field in Taiwan, each successive institution has built upon the qualities and uniqueness
of those prior institutions. After CHIBS, DDM would go on to add systematic monastic
education at Dharma Drum Sangha University (DDSU)—focusing on cultivating propriety,
314
Martha Craven Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 301. Nussbaum appears to have
rendered her own translation, one which favors her argument. I have found a slightly different
translation of this from Seneca from
http://www.stoics.com/seneca_essays_book_1.html#ANGER1, which cites this passage in :
Lucius Annasus Seneca, Moral Essays, Translated by John W. Basore. The Loeb Classical
Library. London: W. Heinemann, 1928-1935: Vol III, xliii. 3-5: “Meanwhile, so long as we draw
breath, so long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity”
96
practice, and understanding of doctrine. This would further be adapted for laity, non-DDM
clerics, and scholars, and added to a college co-curriculum focusing on the academic study of
Buddhism and the implementation of Buddhist practice at Dharma Drum Buddhist College
(DDBC). Finally, this schema would then be adapted for a more general secular audience, which
would take up general college-level education with a Buddhist tinge at Dharma Drum University.
Students in this final institution would learn, like those at DDBC, both through instruction as
well as experience, as they would be involved in the same community of practice as clerics, laity,
and scholars studying in DDSU and DDBC.
3.4. Inheriting the Past and Inspiring the Future
In this section, I will lay the foundation for discussing Shengyan’s development of its
three modern educational institutions: CHIBS, DDSU, and DDBC—each of which works to
serve as the technique for carrying out DDM’s transformative worldview. Here, I will discuss
Shengyan’s inheritance of the academic vision as set forth by his teacher, Dongchu, and the ways
in which these educational institutions work together to carry out the DDM worldview.
As we have seen, Shengyan’s life history and social circumstances helped mold him into
a Buddhist and educational leader. In particular though, his connection with Dongchu would
prove to be a powerful influence on Shengyan’s direction, and I would point to this connection to
be one of the defining sets of causes and conditions that allowed Shengyan to establish Dharma
Drum Mountain, which began with CHIBS. When Dongchu passed away in 1977, his will
stipulated that Shengyan direct the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Culture (CHIBC) and
Nongchan Monastery in the Beitou district of Taipei. Dongchu also wished that Shengyan would
establish an institute for Buddhist education in a natural mountain site.315 As shown in Chapter
Two, Shengyan was clearly influenced by Dongchu’s own academic vision for Buddhism, and
inspired by his vision to promote a socially engaged form of Buddhism for a modern age. In the
essay, “The Difficulty in Repaying One’s Gratitude to the Master,” Shengyan writes of how he
shares “Master Dongchu’s vision that Buddhism has no future without Buddhist education.”316
315
316
Yu, “Master Sheng Yen,” 168.
Ibid., 169.
97
Shengyan would continue to reiterate this concern throughout the twentieth century, and it was
this crisis mentality that served as the impetus for establishing Dharma Drum Mountain.
Shengyan, of course, was not the first to aim to establish Buddhist education neither in
China, as we have seen with the cases of Yang Wenhui and Taixu, nor in Taiwan. The first
Buddhist seminary in Taiwan was founded in 1948 by two monks: Miaoguo and Cihang.
However, it soon closed for a variety of reasons, including a lack of funds, qualified teachers,
and teaching materials, as well as a general environment of social disorder.317 Still, this marked
the foundations of Taiwan’s era of Buddhist education, which would develop throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Buddhist institutes and libraries were established, albeit
with varying degrees of success, with increasing frequency throughout the next sixty years, and
with a huge increase after the mid- to late-1980s.318 Shengyan worked to solve these problems
and finally established Dharma Drum Mountain in 1989, completing the first phase of
construction at the Dharma Drum Mountain World Center for Buddhist Education in 2005, and
opening Taiwan’s first nationally accredited college focused solely on Buddhist Studies in 2007.
In the time between beginning construction on the Dharma Drum Mountain headquarter complex
in Jinshan and opening the Buddhist Seminary, Shengyan worked to develop the Chung-Hwa
Institute of Buddhist Studies into a respectable Buddhist Studies institute, albeit one which was
not accredited by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. CHIBS would work to promote education in
the academic field of Buddhist Studies for the next twenty years, catching Taiwan up to other
countries, which already possessed a Buddhist Studies educational system, and laying the
groundwork for a culture and infrastructure for Buddhist Studies in Taiwan. A visual
representation of the relationship of these four educational institutes would look like Figure 8,
where DDBC is the product of the overlap between DDSU and CHIBS, and DDU only slightly
overlaps CHIBS and DDU:
317
Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan," 401-402.
See Figures 1-4 for a representation of the increase of Buddhist libraries, Buddhist Studies
courses, and Buddhist study groups and lectures for the periods 1900-2010.
318
98
DDU
D
D
CHIBS
B
C
DDSU
Figure 8. The overlaps of DDSU, CHIBS, and DDU.
3.5. Stage One: Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
The first institution Shengyan would create would be CHIBS. Here we see a focus
exclusively on the academic study of Buddhism, and working to lay an infrastructure and catch
Taiwan up to the level of Buddhist Studies in foreign countries, namely Japan. This would lay
the groundwork for beginning to integrate a co-curriculum of academics and Buddhist practice,
but not before Shengyan established a system for training monastic talent.
Shengyan employed the modernist discourse of education in Buddhism very early in his
intellectual development as a modern Buddhist and educational leader. At the Chung-Hwa
Institute of Buddhist Studies (CHIBS), Shengyan aimed to bring Taiwan up to speed with the
pace of Japan and Western countries in the academic field of Buddhist Studies, offering an array
of courses for those interested in studying Buddhism academically, providing scholarships for
students in other universities to write Masters and Doctoral theses on topics related to Buddhist
Studies, and establishing international academic conferences and making connections with other
99
universities. However, during this time Buddhist Studies and Buddhist practice still appeared to
be separate domains, and they were certainly not part of a co-curriculum at CHIBS, which was
exclusively academic in scope.
The first step in recasting Buddhism as a modern holistic educational system, which
would purify and transform an individual’s mind and then expand to all aspects of life, began
with the establishment of an exclusively academic institute for Buddhist Studies: the CHIBS. As
we have seen, Shengyan was already writing about the need for modern Buddhist education in
1961, and he began trying to implement this plan after having returned to Taiwan from Japan and
the United States. In 1978, he joined the Chung-Hwa Academic Institute of Buddhist Studies
(Zhonghua xueshu yuan foxue yanjiusuo 中華學術院佛學研究所) in 1978. The institute began
admitting students in 1981, but following restructuring Shengyan resigned in 1984 to find new
ways of promoting modern, academic Buddhist education. In 1985 he built on Dongchu’s
Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Culture (CHIBC) and formally established the Chung-Hwa
Institute of Buddhist Studies (CHIBS), opening new facilities in the CHIBC building in 1986,
and registering as a legal entity with the government in 1987. CHIBS began employing full-time
faculty in 1988, and between 1990 and 1996, CHIBS had ten full-time faculty members, five of
whom possessed doctoral degrees. The CHIBS program was selective and demanding, enrolling
only five to ten students each year for three-year course of study, which required thirty-six
credits for Master’s degrees, not including language and thesis hours.319
We see that during this time, Shengyan was almost single-handedly trying to catch
Taiwan up to the level of modern Buddhist Studies as seen in Japan and the West. Freshly back
from an eye-opening experience in Japan, he had seen that Buddhism could be studied rigorously
as an academic discipline, yet Taiwan had no such system or infrastructure. As a result, many
young scholars and even clerics, including Shengyan’s friend Qingsong, were traveling to other
countries to learn about their own Chinese tradition. Thus, CHIBS aimed to address the existing
problems in modern Buddhist education in Taiwan to that point, offering remedial courses on
Buddhist Studies, which were in addition to the required 36 credit hours.320 This would have
brought students with little or no background in Buddhist Studies up to speed in order to be able
to conduct research on par with that of other countries. By 1990, CHIBS was offering 34
319
320
Jones, "Buddhism in Taiwan," 410-6.
Ibid.
100
courses, with one-third devoted to language study in canonical and modern languages used in
scholarship, and the remainder divided into courses on research methodology and bibliography,
Buddhist history, and other special topics in Buddhist Studies.
Beyond CHIBS, Shengyan hoped to create a general culture of and infrastructure for
Buddhist Studies in Taiwan, and was laying the foundation for Taiwan to become a source of
authority in the academic field of modern Buddhist Studies. During this time Shengyan was not
concerned with promoting his particular form of Buddhism, but rather promoting Buddhist
Studies in Taiwan more generally. Practice was not part of the curriculum at CHIBS (we might
ask how it even could have been logistically, given the high quantity of courses students had to
take), as Shengyan’s efforts at the institute were centered on the modern academic discipline of
Buddhist Studies. By the mid-1990s, CHIBS was already offering scholarships to Masters and
Doctoral students in other universities to encourage them to research topics related to Buddhism.
CHIBS also encouraged students to participate in scholarly exchanges and helped to publish
graduate theses in English and Chinese in the Chung-Hwa Journal each year. CHIBS also hosted
international conferences and began establishing connections with other universities.321
Yet for all of Shengyan’s work, CHIBS was still not an accredited institution. However,
in 1992 the Taiwan government began to liberalize its education laws. This gave Shengyan hope
that CHIBS might one day acquire governmental accreditation, and caused him to think bigger,
hoping to build, in addition to a full monastic complex, a university including a humanities
department, which would offer courses in the study of Buddhism and other religions, as well as
religious studies methodology. This university would require classrooms, dormitories,
conference facilities, offices, a library, as well as space for Buddhist practice. Shengyan began
applying for university accreditation at this time, but he was already in the process of building
the facilities needed for this endeavor.322
3.6. Stage Two: Dharma Drum Sangha University
The second stage on DDM’s path of implementing the holistic model of transformation is
the Dharma Drum Sangha University (DDSU), which was officially founded in 2001. The
321
322
Ibid., 410-6.
Ibid., 415-6.
101
foremost goal of this Buddhist seminary—modeled on a modern, Western university—is to
cultivate clerics knowledgeable in Buddhist doctrine and practice, and capable of serving as
representatives of the Buddhist tradition. This is clearly a response to earlier anti-clerical and
anti-Buddhist discourse in China. Significantly though, we will see that this model of cultivating
representatives of Buddhism would not be limited to DDSU, but would also be a major part of
the DDBC project for laity and non-DDM clerics.
DDSU was built upon the Three Teachings Institute, which Shengyan developed upon
returning to Taiwan after Dongchu’s death in 1977. Thus, we see that from the beginning,
Shengyan aimed to approach both academic Buddhist education as well as Buddhist monastic
education. The goal of both the Three Studies Institute and the Sangha University is to cultivate a
knowledgeable monastic community, training young Buddhist talent to represent Buddhism and
defend it against attacks of a decaying tradition. In 1979, Shengyan wrote:
Practitioners at this Institute should possess all of the essential qualities of purity,
diligence, minimal desire, refraining from conflict, tidiness, quietude, harmony, selfmotivation, self-discipline, and self-rule. All should respect each other, help each other,
readily forgive each other, and complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. All
should be well learned, and advance in cultivation on the path and study, in order to
accomplish the noble goals of study and practice.323
DDSU officially opened in 2001, marking a major milestone for the organization, and
laying the groundwork for the third stage in this process: the establishment of Dharma Drum
Buddhist College. DDSU still focuses on training DDM’s clerics both through classroom
instruction and teachings in daily life. The primary focus is on teaching students how to act and
carry themselves, including engaging in society and helping others, as Buddhist clerics, and
implicitly representatives of Dharma Drum and the whole Chinese Buddhist tradition. Practice
and study of doctrine are important parts of the DDSU curriculum, but I have been told by many
clerics at DDM that intense academic learning is generally better taken up after the DDSU
process, as it is more important to know how to live and behave as a cleric, and to adjust to
monastic life.
323
Dharma Drum Sangha University, Dharma Drum Sangha University (Taipei: Dharma Drum
Publishing Corporation, March 2006), Informational booklet, 7-8.
102
3.7. Stage Three: Dharma Drum Buddhist College
The third stage in this process of implementing the concentric worldview aimed at
creating social change through higher education, is Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC),
which opened in 2007 after a lengthy petition with the Taiwan Ministry of Education to be
allowed to open an accredited college devoted solely to the study of one religion.
In essence, DDBC blends the academic training of CHIBS with the cultivation of
Buddhist propriety and monastic living of DDSU. Upon DDBC’s establishment, CHIBS has
become inactive in teaching and instead has taken on a role for research and publication
activities for issues in Buddhist Studies. DDM hopes for DDBC to produce scholar-practitioners,
who also serve as promoters of Chinese Buddhism and helmsmen for the “pure land on earth”
philosophy. However, the result of this process, whether intentional or not, appears to be the
development of a new class of Buddhist practitioner—one who is neither cleric nor lay, and one
who is no doubt exhausted by DDBC’s co-curricular schedule. While DDBC is technically a
secular college—not even every student is Buddhist—Buddhist practice is integrated into the
curriculum, which overall, at least on paper, emphasizes the academic study of Buddhism in an
undergraduate and graduate school setting.
A major component if DDBC’s plan is the students’ involvement the community of
practice. DDBC is located on the Dharma Drum campus, as are the student dormitories. Students
have to live at DDM most of the week due to the school’s distance from the nearest major city,
Taipei (roughly 60 to 90 minute bus ride), and the requirements to attend morning and/or
evening meditation and liturgical services. Thus, like DDSU, students learn through classroom
instruction as well as through daily activities and prescribed periods of practice. Academically,
DDBC offers four specializations in Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Buddhist
Informatics, which integrates Buddhist Studies and practical Information Technology. Like
CHIBS before it, DDBC’s curriculum focuses on foreign canonical languages, such as Sanskrit,
Pali, and Japanese, as well as English. DDBC is very similar to DDSU as well, with both
stressing the dual emphasis on academic learning and Buddhist practice, and the ultimate goal of
engaging society in order to purify it. However, as we will see in the next chapter, this dual
emphasis, and particularly DDBC’s appropriation of DDSU’s schedule are making it difficult for
the students to effectively implement the community of practice in their lives.
103
3.8. Stage Four: Dharma Drum University
The fourth and final stage of implementing Shengyan’s worldview progressively through
DDM’s educational institutes is Dharma Drum University. This is still under construction, and
the project has been delayed, as it was set to open in 2009. Once opened, DDU will be a further
extension of the CHIBS, DDSU, and DDBC community of practice.
DDU is designed to be a secular, liberal arts university, which is still located at the DDM
complex. The school aims to provide general studies college courses with a Buddhist flavor, such
as Buddhist Psychology. The university will have the same motto of uplifting the character of
humanity and building a pure land on earth, and students will still be expected to participate in
Buddhist practice and to engage in social action.324 Evidence of the holistic approach to this
modern education and the community of practice, DDU explains that students will “’live’ their
education in harmony and with respect.”325
Dharma Drum’s discourse states, “The Three Types of Education formed the foundation
and blueprint of the overall goal of DDM.”326 As such, the first phase of construction at DDM
focused on education, with educational facilities being equally as important as the requisite
administrative and living quarters necessary for day-to-day functioning. In his mission of
promoting Buddhist studies, Shengyan went on to establish the “Dharma Drum Research Grants
of the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation” in 1999, and 2001 marked the greatest
advancement of the Dharma Drum Mountain World Center for Buddhist Education, with the
completion of construction on the first phase. This allowed CHIBS to move into the education
complex and allowed DDM to formally open its modern university-style Buddhist seminary, the
Dharma Drum Sangha University, in addition to the Library and Information Center, as well as
the other essential buildings for daily activity at DDM. This also laid the groundwork for the
facilities to be used by the Dharma Drum Buddhist College, which would formally open in 2007,
during which time DDM also formally established the Sheng Yen Professorship in Chinese
324
Dharma Drum University, “About DDU,” Dharma Drum University,
http://www.ddc.edu.tw/en/about (Accessed February 5, 2012).
325
Dharma Drum University, “Homepage,” Dharma Drum University, http://www.ddc.edu.tw/
(Accessed February 5, 2012).
326
About, “Envisioning the Future of Global Buddhism,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=53 (Accessed February 23, 2012).
104
Buddhism, at Columbia University, New York. However, it is the design and method of Dharma
Drum’s construction that represents its modernity vis-à-vis “tradition.”
3.9. Using Materiality to Negotiate Modernity and Tradition
Negotiating tradition and modernity is also a real, material endeavor. Not only in terms of
incorporating modern facilities, such as computer labs, a modern library and classrooms, DDM
has also used the physical space and place of its Jinshan complex to stake a claim in both
tradition and modernity. In this section, I will argue that DDM’s task of negotiating tradition and
modern is embodied in the physical space of the headquarters complex. I will contrast the design
of DDM, as both traditional and modern, with the “traditional” popular Chinese temples that
populate Taiwan’s landscape.
The natural and constructed environment at Dharma Drum Mountain represents the
organization’s role as negotiator between tradition and modernity. In both structure and
surrounding environment, the organization has purposefully returned to a “traditional” form,
which is itself a modernist move. This is because the subtle, minimalist design of Dharma Drum
Mountain and the clean, serene environment in which it is settled are do not represent traditional
Chinese temples and their surroundings in Taiwan. Rather, the design and environment at DDM
project an imagined, idealist tradition by virtue of Shengyan’s modernist sensibilities (see figure
5 on page 102). Dharma Drum’s campus is in fact the exception to the rule for monasteries in
Taiwan, and is an intentional decision intended to set DDM apart from these other temples and
monasteries on the island.
Traditional Chinese temples are loud, colorful, and covered in bright lights. Indeed, from
the twentieth century to today, Chinese temples have popularly incorporated one of the most
visible manifestations of modernity: electricity. Chinese temples have not simply utilized
incandescent light bulbs out of utility. Rather, today these temples have been lit up like exhibits
at a carnival: fluorescent lights lining the outside turn these buildings into bright beacons visible
from many yards away, and blazing neon signs welcome visitors outside (figure 4, page 102);
inside, more fluorescent lights illuminate plastic and ceramic statues of buddhas and
bodhisattvas, as well as Daoist and Confucian figures (figure 9), and entire walls are lined with
tiny light bulbs and the names of sponsors who have donated money to the temple (figure 10
105
below); paper lanterns have been replaced with electronic and digital lamps imitating the
traditional form (figure 11); in some cases, an electric organ even accompanies the liturgical
services (figure12). This would no doubt strike the casual observer as very modern. However,
this form of modernity has become so popular over the past hundred years in Taiwan and
mainland China that one might now say it is traditional.
Figures 9. Altar with many divinities. Photograph of an altar at the “folk religion” Guandu
Temple (Guandu gong 關渡宮) in Taipei’s Beitou 北投 district, showing black-faced Mazu
statue at center rear, flanked by conquered demons-turned-protectors, Qianli Yan 千里眼
("Thousand-Mile Eyes") (left) and Shunfeng Er 順風耳 ("Ears With the Wind") (right). Center
front is a statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, flanked by the Buddhist Dharma protectors (hufa 護
法), Sangharama Bodhisattva (Qielan pusa 伽藍菩薩) (left) and Skanda Bodhisattva (Weito pusa
韋馱菩薩) (right). Many “traditional” Chinese temples today house an admixture of statues
representing Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, and “folk religion” icons, which are often gilded in
gold and lit by bright fluorescent lighting. (Photo taken August 6, 2011.)
106
Figure 10. Wall of lights, with donors’ names, each lit with a small electric bulb. These line the
walls at some popular Chinese temples in Taiwan. Ciyou temple, Songshan, Taipei. (Photo taken
June 28, 2011.)
Figure 11. Digital lamp. Electronic lamp in the fashion of a traditional paper lantern, at Ciyou
temple, Songshan, Taipei. (Photo taken June 28, 2011.)
107
Figure 12. Electric organ in a service at Ciyou temple, Songshan, Taipei. (Photo taken June 28,
2011.)
In the 1940s, Shengyan experienced this directly when he was required to perform rituals
in Shanghai as a young novice monk, which included being responsible for the electrical devices
in ritual platforms. Reflecting on his experience upon being brought to Dasheng Temple in
Shanghai, Shengyan writes in his autobiography, The Return Journey (Guicheng
程 ),
Shengyan writes:
A young monk in a ritual temple is very useful. Besides serving as a ritual performer free
of charge for the monastery, [he is] also able to undertake work equivalent to half of an
expert. Already at that time, Buddhist funerary services in Shanghai were “electric.” On
the [rite for pacifying] the burning mouths [of hungry ghosts] (yankou 焰口) platforms
were decorated with name placards on a pearl pagoda, over which hung all kinds of large
and small light bulbs, making the decorated yankou platform a dazzling sight. I was the
one in charge of those electrical devices. If I had gone to attend seminary, it would have
been a huge loss to my master!327
327
Shengyan, Guicheng, 121-122.
108
This experience influenced Shengyan’s reformation of Buddhism for a modern age in
Taiwan, resulting in the Dharma Drum Mountain complex’s intentionally simple and austere
physical form. Thus, DDM is located on a natural, clean (in contrast to much of Taiwan,
particularly in the 1980s) mountain site, calling to mind to the mountain sites of traditional
Chinese Buddhist monasteries. The conventional plastic and concrete building materials have
been replaced with wood and brick, lighting is often natural and subtle, while colors are muted
and earth-toned. Thus, the minimalist and traditional look of DDM’s appearance is itself a
modern reinterpretation of a Buddhist monastery in an idealized style of premodern temples.
While it is too early to judge the long-term impact this may have on other temples and
monasteries in Taiwan, I would imagine that we may start to see a trend of more temples
mimicking DDM’s style rather than continuing to decorate these buildings in the traditional folk
style.
The natural environment at DDM is also carefully constructed to reflect a modernist
sensibility of environmental protection, and a traditional image of a clean, pure landscape.
Shengyan is recorded as saying “To make a construction meaningful and functional is to make it
beneficial to society and the world.”328 Like the decision to eschew bright colors and lights,
Shengyan made a conscious decision to establish a monastic and educational complex with an
environment conducive for stilling the mind and promoting Chan practice. Thus the buildings at
DDM were designed to blend in with the natural environment, which is nestled among
mountains on and lush vegetation on three sides, and on the fourth side overlooks the small town
of Jinshan with Taiwan’s Emerald Bay (feicuiwan 翡翠灣) visible in the distance. The architect
who was chosen for Dharma Drum’s design project, Chen Bosen, specifically designed a
complex that would “be peaceful and blend well with the natural environment.” At the same
time, Shengyan drew from architecture at Buddhist monasteries around the world, particularly
those in Japan, and favored modern aesthetics, preferring a “modern point-of-view, reviewing
historical traditions while at the same time looking forward to the future with creativity and
328
Dharma Drum Mountain, Dharma Drum Mountain, 2nd ed. July, 2007, Informational booklet,
8.
109
revolution.”329 Thus even the discourse of the organization’s materiality is framed in a way that
meshes with the aforementioned paradigm: “inheriting the past and inspiring the future.”
Another important aspect of the organization’s narrative is the fact that Shengyan was
very concerned about leaving as small a footprint as possible during the DDM construction
process, portraying the organization as decidedly modern in its concerns for environmentalism,
which especially in 1980s-1990s Taiwan. Shengyan wanted to preserve as much of the natural
environment as possible, so when buildings were constructed, new foliage was planted, and over
nine hundred native trees were transplanted to other locations at the complex. To preserve water,
reservoirs were constructed, “and water wheels were made to efficiently deliver water for various
functions over the whole complex, such as irrigation, cleaning, and so on.”330 This is particularly
significant given the state of Taiwan’s environment since modernization and technologization
took hold around the latter half of the 20th century. Yanqi Tong, in a 2005 edition of the journal
Comparative Politics, writes that
Since the 1950s Taiwan has experienced rapid growth in both its aggregate economy
and personal incomes. At the same time, it has encountered serious environmental
deterioration.
Air pollution
has
become
an
island-wide
problem
since
the
late 1980s. Average household wastes rose from 230 kg per capita in 1980 to 409 kg
in 1995. The annual soil erosion of Taiwan's twenty-one major rivers, 7.9 cm
annually, ranked first in the world. Nearly 40 percent of its rivers were polluted, and the
drinking water for 23 percent of the residents was below standard. In addition to
these pollution problems, Taiwan has also faced serious problems in deforestation
and nature conservation.331
Thus in response to this form of modernization, DDM promotes modern
environmentalism, which is focused on the action of most literally making Taiwan a pure land on
earth, and returning the environment to a more natural state. Again, as stated above, I know that
some temples in Taiwan have stopped the practice of burning paper spirit money due to its
329
About, “Envisioning the Future of Global Buddhism,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=53 (Accessed February 23, 2012).
330
Ibid.
331
Yanqi Tong, “Environmental Movements in Transitional Societies: A Comparative Study of
Taiwan and China,” Comparative Politics 37, no. 2 (Jan., 2005), 172.
110
environmental impact. This is almost certainly at least a partial response to DDM’s promotion of
environmental ethics in the realm of religious practice. Noise pollution too would fall into this
category, and we may expect to see, if DDM’s model is powerful enough, that more temples will
start to promote more tranquil environments, rather than the cacophonous environment
experienced at most popular temples.
As I have already shown in Chapter Two, DDM is indeed inventing tradition by creating
continuity with the past, as Shengyan is a lineage holder in both extant lines of Chan, and the
organization promotes its teachings as wholly congruent with the teachings of past Chan
patriarchs and the Buddha himself. Thus the group aims to root itself in both Buddhist
philosophy and practice. Shengyan’s teachings drew from what he perceived as the best of all
transmissions of Buddhism dating back from the earliest Pali Āgamas of India and through all
subsequent transmissions of Buddhism, with a focus on Mahāyāna. And as already made clear,
traditional Chan practice, drawing from both extant lines of the Chan lineage, Linji and
Caodong, is a major part of Shengyan and Dharma Drum Mountain’s identity.
3.10. Buddhism as Religion and the Supernatural
Finally, DDM’s approach of negotiating modernity and tradition in no way precludes the
existence of the traditional “religious” and supernatural elements of Buddhism. Indeed, the very
narrative of DDM’s founding exemplifies this fact. Here I will discuss this founding narrative as
a point of contention in the popular narrative that modernization involves secularization, even
within so-called modern Buddhism.
Contrary to prevailing theories of Buddhist modernism, DDM has not tried to purge
Buddhism of its religious, even supernatural, elements, as we see most clearly through the
organization’s founding narrative, which is predicated on a traditional Chinese trope of
miraculous response with the Bodhisattva Guanyin. This story explains that Shengyan finally
acquired the land for his envisioned monastery and center for Buddhist education in April 1989,
after eight years of searching. 332 This story reflects the prominent concept of sympathetic
resonance, a concept detailed in Chapter Two. Suffice it to say that miraculous tales, particularly
332
About, “Establishing DDM,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=51 (Accessed February 23, 2012).
111
those related to Guanyin makes up an important genre in the Buddhist canon.333 Robert Campany
argues that these miracle tales played a large role in developing the belief and faith of the salvific
powers of Guanyin.334 Without doubt, DDM knows the implications of this story, and if they
wanted to purge their form of modern Buddhism of its religious and certainly supernatural or
even superstition elements, they would not continue to promote this story about the monastery’s
founding. Thus the fact that they do shows us the organization’s complex relationship between
tradition and modernity—neither completely rejecting one or the other.
As DDM explains it, in 1989, the Taipei City government was planning to rezone the
area where Nongchan monastery was located for residential housing, which involved the
government purchasing the monastery’s land. Hence by this time, Shengyan and his disciples
were increasingly interested in finding a new site for the monastery and educational institute. On
March 25, 1989, Shengyan led a large group of disciples (DDM states it was one-thousand
people) in chanting the Great Compassion Mantra twenty-one times at Nongchan Monastery.
Following the chanting, a man named Li Zhaonan, who owned a portion of land in Jinshan where
a small monastery by the name of Guanyin Temple was located, said to one of the receptionists
“Your land is found!” The following day, on March 26, Venerable Quandu, independent of any
knowledge of Shengyan’s efforts, also chanted the same mantra at his own temple in Jinshan—
Guanyin Temple—hoping that the temple would find an abbot. On the morning of March 27, Li
Xianzheng, a lay devotee and longtime supporter of CHIBS had a vision, which “led him to the
333
Chün-fang Yü, “Miracle Tales and the Theory of Kan-ying” in Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-Yin: The
Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 154.
For more information regarding miracle tales as a subgenre in Buddhist miracle literature, see
Donald E. Gjertson, “The Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tale: A Preliminary Survey,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 101, no. 3 (1981), 287-301. For more information regarding
ganying as “miracles” in Chinese Buddhism, see John Kieschnick, “Miracles,” in Robert E.
Buswell, Encyclopedia of Buddhism, New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004, and John
Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002.
334
Robert F. Campany, “The Real Presence for Joseph M. Kitagawa.” History of Religions 32,
no. 3 (1993), 233-272. More specifically, these stories are referred to as ling-kan or ling-ying
(“efficacious response”), and ying-yen (“evidential manifestation”). See also Chün-fang Yü,
“Miracle Tales and the Theory of Kan-ying” in Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-Yin: The Chinese
Transformation of Avalokiteśvara, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 24.
112
Fo'en Monastery where he believed he would receive omens regarding the land.”335 Lin travelled
to Fo’en Monastery, where the abbot, Venerable Tongdu, introduced him to none other than
Quandu, who “confirmed that there was such a piece of land just waiting for the right buyer.” Li
Xianzheng reported this back to a professor at CHIBS, who then led a reluctant Shengyan (he
had looked at land in Jinshan before but was disappointed) to the modest 3,600-square foot
Guanyin Temple, which was on a larger piece of land that Quandu partly owned. Shengyan was
impressed with the tranquility of the site, and in April he signed a deed for the 43.2-acre
property, with Quandu and Li Zhaonan donating their shares of the land.
This is quite a peculiar story, and perhaps not what we would think of as “modern.” It
certainly does not fit the received notion of Buddhist modernism as discussed thus far. Still,
despite its credentials as a modern Buddhist organization, DDM continues to tell this story about
its miraculous founding, evidence of the fact that the domains of “tradition” and “modernity” are
fluid, and that within modernism, tradition can still prevail.
Conclusions
DDM is complex in its negotiation and blending of “tradition” or “orthodoxy” as DDM
perceives it (not in the sense that “traditional” Chinese temples are loud and colorful) and
modernity to form an orthodoxy that connects with a distant, even manufactured, past. It is in
Hobsbawm and Ranger’s terms, an invented tradition. While certainly a modern Buddhist
organization, DDM does not meet all the criteria set forth by Lopez and McMahan for a modern
Buddhist organization—namely, the claim that modern Buddhists see the teachings of the
Buddha as a rationalistic philosophy in line with European Enlightenment values, rather than a
religion, complete with the supernatural and superstition. Thus DDM’s promotion of Buddhism
is aimed to appeal to a contemporary audience through the modernist discourse and practice of
education, while still maintaining many aspects of Buddhism’s religious tradition. Shengyan’s
uniquely modern worldview, which sees the self at the center of a concentric model of
transformation, extending outwards from the individual to social relationships, the natural
environment, and finally to humanity, is implemented in DDM’s educational institutions, DDBC
335
About, “Establishing DDM,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=51 (Accessed February 23, 2012).
113
and DDSU, with DDU on the horizon. These institutes and DDM’s continued emphasis on
Buddhist practice, and recasting of education as religious, will be made more clear in the
following chapter, as we see the ways in which DDBC students are monasticized by virtue of
their academic schedule.
114
CHAPTER FOUR
IMPLEMENTING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE THROUGH
EDUCATION
Opening a new era of Buddhist studies through practice;
educating outstanding Buddhist youth in a new generation.
Venerable Huimin, president of DDBC336
Thus far, I have shown how Shengyan established DDM as a source of orthodoxy in Chinese
Buddhism in response to nineteenth and twentieth century attacks on the Buddhist institution as a
barrier to modernity in China, in the same way that the state of popular religion and syncretism
on contemporary Taiwan are prohibiting Chinese Buddhism’s modernity. I have also shown how
Shengyan developed DDM, based in part on the Japanese model of institutionalized Buddhist
education, to be a modern Buddhist organization able to adapt traditional Buddhist practice to a
modern audience. A major part of this appeal to a modern audience as a way of negotiating
tradition and modernity involves recasting the identity of the self to serve as mediator for modern
religious orthodoxy through a concentric model of world-transformation. My final thesis, based
on ethnographic research on Dharma Drum, is that at present DDM’s education system
overreaches in its efforts to respond to the narrative of Buddhism as a backward, superstitious
religion, which its own adherents know little about. DDM has developed a system at DDBC,
which cultivates a new class of Buddhist practitioners—neither cleric nor quite lay, both scholar
and proselytizer. As a result of this overreach and the nearly impossible expectations put on
DDBC students, the community of practice, which has been developed in an aim to holistically
educate DDM’s students in both the study and practice of Buddhism, is not completely
successful. Yet these students are still learning through diffusion about what orthodox Buddhism
is by living at DDM and being surrounded by DDM’s religious environment. Thus, my
ethnographic data further complicate theories of Buddhist modernism and shows a difference
exists between institutional and personal “modernities” at DDM. DDBC students on the whole
are not committing to the full community of practice, yet DDM is still partially successful in its
336
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, informational booklet, 2.
115
attempts to promote orthodox Buddhism. Indeed, DDBC students are involved in the community
of practice by virtue of their daily life, which is lived within the institution often five days a
week. As a result, I believe these students are still learning through diffusion about orthodox
Buddhism. I spoke to no students who did not respect, if not wholeheartedly revere, Shengyan
and think that DDM is an example of a respected traditional Buddhist organization. In this
respect, DDM’s methods of promoting Buddhist orthodoxy through daily practice—that is,
students’ “living-in-the-world”—are successful. I will argue this first by showing how the
community of practice works at DDM’s two educational institutions—DDSU and DDBC. After
explaining my ethnographic methodology, I will provide a brief analysis of some of the data I
have collected at DDM over the course of the past three summers.
DDM aims to implement a community of practice from the top-down, as institutionalized
at its two educational institutes. The organization also hopes that this approach will trickle down
and permeate the wider Taiwanese and Buddhist culture. Indeed, this is how a community of
practice works: students learn from the top-down then go create new learning communities from
the bottom-up. However, based on my research, Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) is not
yet completely successful in achieving this. The goals and expectations of DDM as an institution,
including its monastic community, are different from the goals of Buddhist laypeople and clerics
from outside monasteries who come to DDM wanting to study. Thus, we are left with a
bifurcation between modern institutional Buddhism and modern personal Buddhism. These
DDBC students come to DDM to learn doctrine, and even state that they are interested in
practice, but once they are in the system at DDBC they cannot effectively do both. However,
DDBC students are still living at DDM most of the week, and are learning things through
diffusion, even if they are not actively participating in all of the practice and ritual activities, and
even if they are not aware of this diffusive learning. I believe that, while not explicitly stated, this
subtle level of learning involves coming to understand what orthodox Buddhism is based on their
daily experience at DDM.
Yet there is clearly a point of divergence over the goals of the institution and that of the
individuals. The institution aims to train future scholars of Buddhist Studies who incorporate
Buddhist practice in their daily life, so that they may fully understand Buddhism holistically—
not as separated into the binary of thought and practice—and employ both study and practice in
their daily life. However, as stated above, it appears that at least an even half of the individuals
116
seem more interested in learning about Buddhist doctrine, and therefore already come equipped
with the separation of thought and practice (itself certainly a modern concept). However, this is
precisely what DDM is trying to correct. Therefore, what appears to be an irreconcilable
contradiction between individuals and the institution may not be such a wide gulf. It even seems
that most students ideally like the idea of combining both study and practice, they simply appear
unable to do both in the way that DDM expects them to. If this is so, then question is: Is DDM’s
approach effective and successful in creating individuals who equally emphasize study and
practice? And if not, as my data suggest, why? I believe it is because DDM’s expectation of
DDBC students to take up the role of both college student and quasi-cleric is unrealistic, and
because the students and the institution have different goals at DDBC.
The Dharma Drum Mountain model provides more nuance to the discourse of “Buddhism
modernism,” as it both conforms and complicates the theories of what “modern Buddhism.” In
contrast to the argument that modern Buddhists are secularizing religious practices, we see that
as an institution, this is not the case. Dharma Drum Mountain is actually reinterpreting the
secular, normative practice of education as a religious practice with a self- and worldtransforming goal, as explained earlier. Furthermore, the process of education is clearly made
into a religious, and even a monastic, practice, with all events and living taking place at the
monastery and the entire community participating in nearly the same monastic schedule and
involved in learning on more than simply the academic level. However, it is at DDBC that the
practice of education-made-religious is seen most strikingly among the community of students,
who are in essence monasticized via the schedule that DDM has implemented for them.
If DDM merely wanted to incorporate Buddhist practice into the DDBC curriculum, it
could easily be done without implementing as rigorous a schedule on the students. Instead, this
must certainly be an intentional decision, although I have not found reference in Shengyan’s or
DDM’s official discourse about the explicit move to treat laity as quasi-clerics. The implication
of this monasticization is that DDM is, likely knowingly, creating a new class of Buddhist
practitioners. This class of practitioner would be a both practitioner and proselytizer, yet neither
quite monk nor lay, and also a respected scholar. And while DDBC students are clearly supposed
to be learning from the saṅgha community, I have come across no evidence to suggest that the
saṅgha community is learning from the DDBC students—or any reason for why they should. The
effect of this approach, where DDBC students are essentially expected to uphold two roles,
117
appears to be that DDBC students are unable to keep up with the demands. We see this in their
daily schedule and their opinions: while Sangha University students report being quite content
with the system at DDSU, discontent and dissatisfaction overwhelmingly characterize DDBC
students.
Before turning to an analysis of my ethnographic data to assess the successfulness of
DDM’s community of practice and aim to create a new class of Buddhist practitioners, I will first
provide an explanation of the theory of communities of practice, and show how DDM’s two
educational institutions, DDSU and DDBC, fit this model. I will then explain my research
methods and end with an analysis of my data.
4.1 Dharma Drum Mountain’s Community of Practice
In order to understand the model of education occurring at DDM, we must first discuss
the theory of “communities of practice.” I see this as the predominant model in DDM’s
education system, where learning occurs not only through classroom education, but also through
experiential learning in daily life.
“Communities of practice,” a concept first articulated by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
in 1991, describe a particular method of learning. Lave and Wenger sought to rethink some
practices of education as more than simply acquiring knowledge. They described more fully and
holistically a process that integrates agents for learning in a community of other learners. This
participation within the community begins as less involved “legitimate peripheral participation”
and gradually moves toward more complex and fully integrated social learning within the
community of practice.337 However, this kind of education is not simply “informal learning,” or
the off-hands practice of learning simply by observing. Instead, the community of practice is a
physical process located within a specific environment of situated learning, which takes place
over time as participants learn not just what to do or say, for instance, but, more importantly,
how to do or say it. These student-participants learn not only from the learning curriculum taught
by instructors or “masters,” but particularly from other learners in the community. Further, it is
this style of education in the holistic sense of learning to be part of the community.338 In a
337
338
Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 14-37.
Ibid., 98; 108-109.
118
community of practice learning does not end with successful completion of learning. Rather, the
communities are self-reproducing, whereby participants enter the wider society and are expected
to develop new communities and encourage like-minded participants.
It is this social world as a part of the process of learning, not only an instructional
environment, that makes communities of practice unique. 339 DDM is involved in both the
instructional as well as the social learning environment, and arms students with the tools to enter
the social world in order to continue to learn and affect change. In other words, learners in a
community of practice are learning from one another in a holistic system, and are expected, just
like at DDM, to implement what they learn in their own lives, society, and the world, then go on
to reproduce new communities.
At Dharma Drum Buddhist College or DDBC, for instance, the instructional learning
taking place in both conventional (as we see it in the West) classroom education and particularly
in constructed “communities of practice” is meant to extend to a larger “community of practice”
in the social world, where the individual, armed with the tools and skills learned at DDBC may
effectively affect social change and implement Chan practice in their daily life, transforming
themselves, their family, their work, the natural environment, society, and humanity as a whole.
Students are expected to carry out, in Lave and Wenger’s, terms both the “development of
knowledgeably skilled identities in practice and to the reproduction and transformation of
communities of practice,”340 whereby students graduate and go on to develop, independently,
learning organizations in society. This relates to the ultimate goal of the community of practice,
where “learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person
acting in the world,”341 and in which learning is “an evolving, continuously renewed set of
relations.”342
The model of communities of practice focuses not on participants learning knowledge
alone, but instead it stresses “the learning of knowledgeable skills.”343 That is, those skills to be
implemented in the social world. Thus, DDM’s approach of education at both DDSU and DDBC
involves teaching knowledge, but also an attitude, a philosophy, and most importantly a method
339
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 55.
341
Ibid., 49.
342
Ibid., 50.
343
Ibid., 29.
340
119
of practice to implement in daily life. This is all rooted in DDM’s re-conception of education and
Buddhist practice, resulting in a community of praxis, whereby clerics, laity, and scholars learn
in situ what true Buddhism and Buddhist practice are. Therefore, we must ask: What and how are
participants at DDM’s educational institutions learning, and what are they expected to do while
enrolled and after graduating from these institutes? To what extent are participants able to
successfully integrate the “community of practice” into their lives?
4.2. Dharma Drum Sangha University
The community of practice is clearly implemented at DDM’s Buddhist seminary, DDSU,
where students are involved in an apprentice-like learning environment. Here I will discuss the
history, structure, and goals of DDSU from DDM’s perspective.
A nearly textbook model of a community of practice is most clearly implemented at
Dharma Drum Sangha University (DDSU). In 2001, DDM established the formal Buddhist
seminary at the headquarters site to train clerics in the DDM lineage. DDSU evolved from the
Three Teachings Institute, founded by Shengyan following his return to Taiwan from the United
States in 1977 by request of his teacher, Dongchu, who asked his student to tend to his ChungHwa Institute of Buddhist Culture and Nongchan Monastery near Taipei. Evidence of
Shengyan’s farsighted vision and already longstanding plan, upon his return he quickly called
together members of the Institute for the Translation of the Chinese Tripiṭaka and individuals
who had participated in seven-day Chan retreats to found an Institute for training monastic
members. Already by the late-1970s, Shengyan clearly articulated the goal of the Institute as a
source of training young Buddhist clerics capable of spreading Buddhadharma and serving as
caretakers of the Chinese Buddhist tradition, implicitly, through their roles as reputable clerics.
Shengyan desired a Chinese Buddhist monastic community “who emphasize the cultivation of all
the three studies of precepts, concentration, and wisdom,” and who have a particular devotion to
upholding monastic conduct as delineated in the monastic precepts and codes, as well as
Shengyan’s specific stance on how monastic members should live. This emphasis on precepts,
concentration, and wisdom would come to serve as the foundation for not only DDSU, but
DDBC as well—evidence of the monastic-style approach Shengyan took toward education.
Twenty years later, on October 2, 1998, Ven. Shengyan officially began planning for the
120
establishment of “a more systematic and comprehensive Buddhist seminary.” On March 2, 1999,
Shengyan convened the First Buddhist Seminary Preparatory Meeting at Nongchan
Monastery.344 DDSU officially opened in autumn 2001, as “a realization of DDM’s educational
ideals much like the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies (CHIBS) founded by DDM to
cultivate high-level researchers in Buddhist studies.” Thus, the establishment of DDSU is a
continuation of the education philosophy of DDM, which re-conceptualizes the process of
education as Buddhist practice and progressively builds upon the community of practice first set
forth with CHIBS. This education is aimed at not only acquiring knowledge through instructional
education, but familiarizing students with Buddhist practice in the DDM style, so that these
students may apply the DDM method of Buddhist practice in their daily life with the ultimate
goal of transforming society. As of 2006, DDSU’s aim is “to develop monastic talent with a
capacity for virtue and study, equal emphasis on understanding and practice of the Dharma, and
a strong sense of religious devotion to undertake the task of purifying society.”345
Furthermore, DDSU is actively working to counter the narrative of Buddhism in decline
and repair the image of Buddhist clerics in Chinese culture by emphasizing the need for clerics to
behave appropriately. This emphasis is seen in the early stages of the Three Teachings Institute,
and its role today is a major, if not the most important, aspect of DDSU’s immediate goal. As the
seminary explicitly states:
Faced with in this new era’s tide of attacks, Buddhism needs more than [ever] to cultivate
a tier of young monastic talent who put equal emphasis on understanding and practice,
have a virtuous heart and profoundly forward-looking ability, and tolerant nature and
international panoramic [vision]. [These real, capable individuals] will not only inherit
from the Buddha and the successive generations of patriarchs and virtuous teachers, but
will also, with calluses on their hands and feet, take up the project of spreading the
Buddhadharma. [These individuals] should then develop an even more extensive form
and presence, and employ the ability of Buddhadharma’s propagation and transmission to
transcend language, and regional and ethnic limitations.346
344
Dharma Drum Sangha University, Dharma Drum Sangha University, 6-7.
Ibid., 7-8.
346
Dharma Drum Sangha University, “School Introduction” (Xuexiao 學校簡介), About,
http://sanghau.ddm.org.tw/aboutus/AboutUs1.aspx (Accessed January 10, 2012).
345
121
In order to accomplish this proper cultivation, before becoming a fully ordained monk or
nun in the Dharma Drum lineage, incoming potential-clerics must complete a four or six
curriculum in a university-style setting, with modern, western methods of classroom instruction,
and a yearly 18-month academic calendar, which mirrors the major Taiwanese universities’
calendars. A special two-year curriculum has existed at DDSU for older individuals who wish to
become clerics, however that course of study has been discontinued, at least tentatively, for the
2011-2012 academic year. In addition to critical thinking and foreign language skills learned
through instructional learning, each curriculum track primarily involves the study of Buddhist
doctrine and practice, and a heavy emphasis on proper behavior and attitudes for monks and
nuns, as DDM sees fit:
The Buddhist Studies at DDSU aspires to train monastic members at the same level as
that of Buddhist studies institutions, so that they would be equipped with both virtue and
study, giving equal attention to understanding and practice, and would become monastic
leaders of social purification.347
Students in both the four- and six-year tracks take essentially the same fundamental
courses for the first four years, while those in the six-year curriculum devoted to becoming a
Chan meditation teacher spend progressively more time focused on meditation and living in the
Chan meditation hall. The DDSU instructional curriculum is divided into three categories of
Wisdom, Blessings, and Virtue. The Wisdom category is divided into two subcategories:
Understanding and Practice, where the Understanding curriculum includes studies of precepts,
concentration, and wisdom, while the Practice curriculum includes “Buddhist spiritual
cultivation and practices in daily life.” The category of Blessings includes the subgroups Service
and Dharma Propagation. The Service curriculum includes implementing DDM’s Fivefold
Spiritual Renaissance Campaign, developing proper monastic etiquette, using Chan practice in
daily life, and fostering a “community spirit.” The curriculum for Dharma Propagation is similar,
involving implementing DDM’s Fivefold Spiritual Renaissance Campaign, becoming capable
monastic leaders, effectively propagating and protecting the Dharma, and caring for and serving
347
Dharma Drum Sangha University, Dharma Drum Sangha University, 7-8.
122
the community. The Virtue curriculum involves simply “molding the monastic personality and
cultivating the body and mind.”348
Most generally, graduates of DDSU become fully ordained clerics in the DDM lineage
who take on tasks within the organization to both promote DDM’s philosophy and carry out
DDM’s tasks in society. Ideally, from DDSU’s perspective, these graduates are also expected to
take up one or more of three roles as administrative, educational, and/or academic talent. Upon
graduation, students are expected to take an administrative and teaching position at one of
DDM’s many branch temples, meditation halls, or offices, normally rotating placements
frequently in order to allow them to gain proficiency in different roles. However, students are
also encouraged to continue their studies in academia, focused on the scholarly study of
Buddhism, with many clerics attending university in Taiwan, the United States, and Japan,
before taking up their positions with DDM.349
While enrolled at DDSU, monastics-in-training live in the monastic complex (with
separate living quarters for males or females) with fully ordained monastic members. In their
first year at DDSU, students are not yet monastic members. They do not wear monastic robes,
and females do not shave their heads, but rather wear a short, cropped style. Over the next three
years, if they remain in the program, they will take progressive steps to become fully ordained
clerics with DDM, donning robes, shaving the head, and taking novice precepts after completing
their first year. Throughout their time at DDSU, students lead a rigorously scheduled life. DDSU
students wake up at 4:10am for morning meditation and chanting service and throughout the day
attend classes, complete chores, study, and tackle other assigned duties, eat in the monastic
dining hall for two to three meals a day, and go to sleep at 10:00pm after evening meditation and
chanting service. Thus, throughout the day students are learning about Buddhist doctrine and
practice and proper monastic etiquette in a classroom setting, while also learning proper practice,
etiquette, and even doctrine, in their other daily activities outside of the classroom. It is in this
same environment of situated learning, in which students learn through doing and from daily
experiences with one another, that Dharma Drum Buddhist College students are also active, and
as I will show, even their schedules are remarkably similar.
When the Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) began the new policy in 2006 of
348
349
Ibid., 32-3.
Ibid., 44.
123
accrediting schools devoted to the study of a single religious tradition, DDM originally planned
to expand DDSU into a comprehensive university “containing a college of Chinese, Tibetan,
Theravāda, and world Buddhism that will cover both traditional and contemporary
Buddhism.”350 In the end, however, DDM made a more ambitious move and established a
separate school, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, which officially opened in 2007.
4.3. Dharma Drum Buddhist College
The community of practice at DDM is expanded with the Dharma Drum Buddhist
College, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in Buddhist Studies for laity and
secular students unaffiliated with Dharma Drum, as well as Buddhist clerics from other
monasteries in Taiwan and abroad. DDBC students are a part of the same community of practice
as DDSU students and DDM’s clerics. As a result, we start to see that DDBC students are
actually treated as not just laity or outside clerics, but a new class of Buddhist practitioners in the
DDM model. Again, this section discusses the history, structure, and goals of DDBC.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) opened in 2007, once DDM was able to receive
rare government accreditation in 2006 for a college specializing solely in Buddhist Studies.
DDBC is also housed at the DDM headquarters, in the same building as DDSU and CHIBS. The
college currently offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, and is planning to grant doctoral
degrees in the future. Most students are lay students while many are monastic members from
other Buddhist groups who want to study Buddhism, primarily Buddhist doctrine. The institute
offers four specializations in Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Buddhist
Informatics, which integrates Buddhist Studies and practical Information Technology. The
classroom education at DDBC is decidedly academic, with a heavy emphasis on foreign
canonical languages, such as Sanskrit, Pali, and Japanese, as well as English, which is officially
required for admission to the school. The college also possesses a five-story library, which has
resources for Buddhist Studies in many languages as well as rare canonical collections. In line
with DDM’s overarching goal DDBC’s mission statement is strikingly similar to that of DDSU,
stressing the dual emphasis on academic learning and Buddhist practice, and the ultimate goal of
engaging society in order to purify it:
350
Ibid., 47.
124
Our school aims to promote the essence of Chinese Buddhist culture, with the principle
of nurturing and fostering helmsmen for the pure land on earth philosophy. We cultivate
theory and practice equally, mutually integrating tradition and innovation, and aim to
equip religious teachers with an international, macroscopic field of vision as well as
academic and cultural knowledge so that they would be able to promote Buddhist
education and culture. Our hope is that they would be able to extend care to the whole
society and shoulder the responsibility of purifying the world.351
Like the mission of DDSU and DDM overall, this is a clear response to and attempted
method of correcting the popular understanding and narrative of the nineteenth and twentieth
century which painted Buddhists as backward, unlearned in their own tradition, and disengaged
from society. We see here that the goal of DDBC is not merely to produce scholars, but
“helmsmen for the pure land on earth philosophy,” or transmitters of Buddhist practice for
following generations of learners. This self-reproduction is a key element of communities of
practice. Participants undergo training in the primary community (in this case, DDBC) and often
proceed to take on students of their own, expanding the community and creating new social
networks for learning. However, at DDBC the goal is for students not to become teachers at
DDBC, but to integrate back into society and independently develop new learning networks that
promote this pure land on earth philosophy:
Still, the expressed goal of DDBC’s education is rooted in academics, and aims to:
1. Cultivate religious teachers to propagate and transmit Buddhism
2. Train talented Buddhist researchers and educators
3. Produce Buddhist religious teachers and academic researchers who possess
informatics skills
4. Promote academic research related to Buddhism
5. Promote interaction and collaboration among international Buddhist academic circles
and mainstream academia352
351
DDBC, “Vision (Chuangxiao linian 創校理念),” About the School,
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/aboutthecollege/vision.html (Accessed January 10, 2012).
352
Ibid.
125
Furthermore, the school hopes to blend tradition and modernity—a theme characteristic of DDM
as a whole—and to:
1. Initiate a non-denominational paradigm for Buddhist education
2. Utilize digital technology to develop a Buddhist information system
3. Encourage multiple languages for a broad international overview
4. Emphasize modern academic study and Buddhist practice
5. Maintain an excellent faculty and a superb library
Provide a tranquil and enjoyable campus with modern facilities353
Dharma Drum Buddhist College divides its instructional curriculum into four academic
majors. Three majors are focused on geo-historical/philosophical Buddhist traditions: Indian,
Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhism, while the fourth is focused on Buddhist Informatics, blending
Buddhist Studies and practical Information Technology skills. The three more traditional
Buddhist Studies majors focus on history and doctrine related to their respective tradition. Within
the Indian Buddhist Studies major at DDBC, students primarily study aspects of early Buddhist
texts, the Agamas; scholarly commentaries on Buddhist scriptures, Abhidharma; and two
Mahāyāna Buddhist schools of thought, Mādhyamaka and Yogacara, which originated in India.
Chinese Buddhist Studies at DDBC focus on the characteristic schools of thought in Chinese
culture: Tiantai, Huayan, Chan, and Pure Land. Tibetan Buddhist studies focuses on the four
major monastic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk. Each of
these majors reflects the traditional method of understanding and presenting Buddhist Studies in
the West since the twentieth century, with a focus on doctrine, history, and philology. However,
DDBC’s Buddhist Informatics major is unique, blending Buddhist Studies with Information
Technology skills, such as computer programming language and database management. The
school also provides special programs in Buddhist Informatics, Translation Studies for Buddhist
texts, as well as continuing education courses focused on Buddhist doctrine, Buddhist canonical
languages, and “applied Buddhism.” Of course, because DDBC is part of the larger DDM
community of practice, in addition to the instructional, classroom learning at DDBC, the school
puts a great deal of emphasis on students engaging in Buddhist practice, so much so that students
find that it interferes with their academic studies.
353
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, 5.
126
DDBC students live on the DDM campus, nearly adjacent to the monastic living quarters
in the middle of the DDM headquarters in Jinshan. DDBC students are held to a high standard
and have an exceptionally heavy workload. Undergraduate students must take a minimum of 128
credit hours to graduate, however they often take enroll in more courses. Of these 128 hours,
students must take between sixteen and twenty-five credit hours per semester in the first three
years. In their final year, they are permitted to take as few as nine, but still up to twenty-five
hours. However, not all of these required credit hours are in academic study. To the contrary,
DDBC students are also required to participate in Buddhist practice, such as meditation,
chanting, and other practices. Of the undergraduate students’ required 128 hours, 28 hours are
required to be from practice “courses.” Graduate students, who are required to take forty-four
credit hours between two to four years, ten hours must come from practice credit. Like DDSU
students, DDBC students also have a rigid schedule that mirrors the monastic schedule. DDBC
students are also expected, and required, to participate in morning and evening meditation and
chanting services, eat meals with monastics and follow the same dining rituals, and often sit in
on extra courses, often focusing on language skills. The practice requirements for students are as
follows:
For the Master’s degree:
1. Essentials of three higher learnings
2. Special topics in Chan practice study-practice
3. Special topics in rituals study-practice
4. Special topics in propagation study-practice
5. Special topics in Buddhist art study-practice
6. Morning and evening meditation class
For the Undergraduate degree:
1. Chan practice
2. Morning and evening meditation
3. Chanting and rituals
4. Special topics in Chan practice study-practice
5. Special topics in rituals study-practice
6. Special topics in Buddhist art study-practice
127
7. Special topics in Buddhist art study-practice354
As already stated, this emphasis on the process of integrating instructional classroom
education with daily Buddhist practice is precisely what makes DDBC unique. The school’s
Center for Practice and Study plainly explains the purpose of this learning technique:
The distinguishing characteristic of the Center for Practice and Study rests on the spirit of
religiosity, but such principle is supplemented through the appropriation of modern
humanities studies and social sciences. The purpose of the Center for Practice and Study
is to manifest the function of self-purification through Chan practice. We hope to instill
in students an inclination for a lifelong commitment of self purification through “special
topics in study-practice” courses. We hope students can develop the ability to plan and
carrying out their own self-improvement.355
[We] hope that through the training of [religious] practices, academic “research” and
[Buddhist] “practice” will be combined. [We aim to] nourish religious leaders who
possess an international, global perspective of academic learning and cultural
knowledge—becoming helmsmen for promoting a pure land on earth.356
Through the intensive training of Chan practice, [we] encourage students to familiarize
themselves with methods of practice so they can apply them in daily life and develop
correct understanding of the meaning and spirit of Buddhist self-cultivation so they will
fully expand the limits of Buddhist academia and the efficacy of research in order to
reach of the goal of the dual emphasis of understanding and practice.357
Again, we see that DDBC aims to cultivate not only scholars, but practitioners and
354
DDBC, “Credit Provisions,” Department of Buddhist Studies,
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/buddhist_studies4/credit.html (Accessed January 10, 2012)
355
DDBC, “Center for Practice and Study,” Department of Buddhist Studies,
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/ (Accessed January 10, 2012).
356
DDBC, “Characteristics and Planning,” Center for Practice and Study,
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/plan.html (Accessed January 10, 2012).
357
DDBC, Semester Meditation, Center for Practice and Study,
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/crp.html (Accessed January 10, 2012).
128
proselytizers, whose status is on the border of laity and monasticism. Because DDBC students
are held to such a strict, nearly monastic schedule, and because they typically live in dorms at the
DDM complex five or more days a week, they too are learning about Buddhism not just through
classroom education but also through actively practicing, participating in, and experiencing
Buddhism on a daily basis. Thus, DDM aims to train generations of individuals who learn what
Buddhism is as DDM defines it through both classroom as well as situated learning. However,
the current system at DDBC appears not to be completely smoothed out and perfected yet.
4.4. Ethnographic Methodology
In the following section, I will explain my methodology in collecting ethnographic data at
DDM over the course of three summers, from 2009 to 2011. I used a wide array of techniques to
build rapport and collect qualitative and quantitative data from informants. While limited in time
and resources, due to the fact that I was enrolled in a Master’s program rather than a Doctorate
program which would otherwise have allowed me to devote more time in the field, I believe the
data that I was able to collect is relevant, accurate, and valid. Here I discuss my research plan,
data collection techniques, and methods of analyzing and validating data.
I have collected a large amount of ethnographic data at DDM, more than I can analyze
for the purposes of this research. In addition to informal interviews and participant observation
conducted over the course of three summers from 2009-2011, I conducted twenty-five structured
interviews, each over an hour long, with students and faculty at DDSU and DDBC. This included
lay and cleric, male and female, undergraduate and graduate, and covered a relatively broad
range of ages given the demographics of the schools. These interviews confirmed the data
collected through the twenty-two completed questionnaires I received from students at DDBC
and students and faculty at DDSU, and the questionnaires in turn corroborated the interview data.
For all but one questionnaire and for all structured interviews, respondents completed
demographic intake forms, detailing their age, sex, status, religious affiliation (I spoke to two
people at DDBC who identified as non-Buddhist), as well as geographic, educational, and
economic background. Each interviewee also signed informed consent forms, after having
received an oral explanation of its content. These forms and the ethnographic research plan was
approved by Florida State University’s Human Subject Committee (HSC; also known as the
129
Institutional Review Board) on April 25, 2011, following revisions made to the proposed
research process as required by the HSC on February 24, 2011, after having submitted an initial
application on January 24, 2011.
For the purposes of this research, I have chosen to focus on the structure of the twentytwo questionnaires and thirteen free-lists I received from DDBC and DDSU students and faculty
beyond the first year, as I feel that these students have more insight into the process than do the
first year students. I use the data collected through structured and informal interviews, as well as
participant observation, to triangulate and validate these data. I have coded the questionnaire
data, in my own categories, and have used these categories to analyze the data.
All ethnographic fieldwork involves interpretation on all levels. I am aware of the
potential biases inherent in this process of interpretation. I am also aware of the fact that all
scholarship involves interpretation and is always filtered through the lens of the researcher. I
have tried my best to be aware of my own perspective, and have used this to better understand
and question what I observed at DDM.358 For example, before I first visited DDM I had read
very little about contemporary or modern Buddhism. My understanding of Buddhism was rooted
in ancient traditions and prescriptive accounts of monastic life that harkened a medieval Chinese
system. I had read as much as I could about DDM and Shengyan, but that too was largely
prescriptive. Thus, first I went into the field thinking I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t speak
the language and I knew no one in Taiwan. I simply accepted on faith that I would be picked up
at the airport and everything would work out from there. However, now I understand that I did
have expectations, and these were manifestations of my bias. I was expecting a very traditional
Chan Buddhist monastery at DDM, much like the ideas I had conjured in my imagination when
reading about medieval Chinese Buddhism. I was victim of a romanticized, Orientalist
perspective in which only very austere and solemn monks and nuns lived at the monastery
(leaving no room even for laity); where everyone practiced meditation at all times in intense
meditation retreats; and where “Buddhism” was a “traditional” figment of my imagination.
However, as it turned out, it was this very bias that allowed me to see, like an anchor in a river
358
I am taking a page here from Paul Riesman, “Fieldwork a s Initiation and as Therapy,” Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington,
D.C., 4 December 1982 in the panel entitled "Distance and Prejudice in Anthropological
Fieldwork and Theorizing."
130
highlighting the motion of the water, the contrast between so-called tradition and modernity at
DDM. And it was from here that I realized how important and unique education at DDM really is.
The primary goal of my research was to investigate the relationship between education
and Buddhist practice, anticipating that DDM constructs and fosters a community of practice for
students, faculty, and staff to participate in an embodied practice of education as Buddhist
cultivation. My research called for a qualitative research methodology because it focuses on
describing the meaning, contexts, and processes by which people coexist while engaging in
similar educational and religious practices.359 Thus, I relied on participant observation, informal
interviews, semi-structured interviews, free-listing exercises, and questionnaires. I have taken to
heart Russell Bernard’s claim that “ethnographic and survey data combined produce more insight
than either does alone,”360 and employed this array of research methods in order to more fully
understand what is happening on the ground at DDM.
Participant Observation. For three summers I utilized participant observation to integrate into
everyday life at DDM. I integrated into the organization’s various education institutions, in part,
to identify key informants for interviews. The data obtained through participant observation
provided the context in which participants live, practice, and study, and the relation between
their everyday, educational, and religious lives. Specifically, I became involved in the following
ways:
(a) In order to facilitate access to the community and to build deeper rapport with participants, I
lived in the DDM Jinshan complex where I collected preliminary data, built close ties with
monastics, volunteers, students, faculty, and staff, including administrators and high-ranking
employees. The administrative heads of Dharma Drum Buddhist College and Sangha University
granted me permission to collect this data for my MA thesis. I maintained rapport with
informants by sustaining a constant presence in the complex.361 A more thorough ethnographic
359
See H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, 4th ed (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 2006); Joseph A. Maxwell, Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach,
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996); Michael Quinn Patton, Qualitative Research &
Evaluation Methods, 3rd ed (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001).
360
Bernard, Research Methods, 362-364.
361
See Bruce Jackson, Fieldwork (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
131
project would have involved spending a full academic year enrolled at DDM—ideally enrolled in
DDBC, and possibly even DDSU. Still this provided me with a more thorough understanding of
the curriculum; the concerns of the instructors and the institutions; the motivation of students,
faculty, and staff; and the overall ways in which the community of practice is fostered and
utilized. I believe that given the constraints of MA thesis research, I was able to collect a
respectable amount of data.
(b) In order to observe and further build relationships with informants, I regularly attended daily
activities including meditation, chanting services, and sat in on a limited number of classes at
DDBC. I directly observed the daily processes and practices informants discussed during
interviews and questionnaires, and observed processes and practices about which to interview
participants. In this way, I was able to contrast informants’ claims with observed practice,
identifying discrepancies that I could further explore.362 I also gathered details on the lesson
plans and curriculum that are used in classes. I participated in religious ceremonies, rituals,
observations, and celebrations whenever possible, such as daily meditation and chanting
services, Buddha’s birthday, Rites for Water and Land and Rites of Feeding Hungry Ghosts and
Rites for Burning Mouth Hungry Ghosts (Buddhist rituals to assuage suffering of sentient
beings). I felt that direct involvement in religious practices were a moderate balance between
observation and participation.363
(c) Participants in semi-structured interviews (see “Semi-structured Interviews” below) were
shadowed as much as possible throughout the research in order to gain an understanding of their
daily life, religious and educational activities, and relationships. However, this was limited due
to the relatively limited amount of time I had and the broad swath of data I was trying to collect.
(d) Key moments from observations, interactions, and informal interviews were written down as
they occurred, or immediately afterwards.364 I also used audio and video recorders to capture an
audio recording of the interviews.
362
See Michael H. Agar, Speaking of Ethnography (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1986).
See Patton, Qualitative Research; Spradley, Participant Observation.
364
See Kathleen M. Dewalt, Billie R. Dewalt, and Coral B. Wayland, “Participant Observation,”
363
132
Informal Interviews. I identified informants for informal interviews using purposive
sampling,365 based on their involvement in the educational activities and daily events which I
observed. Willing informants were also used in subsequent semi-structured interviews. Data
collection included students, faculty, and staff from the spectrum of educational institutions,
focusing on faculty, and undergraduate and graduate level students at DDBC and DDSU. Within
these groups, I especially sought out people who represent particular categories, such as male
and female, undergraduate and graduate, older and younger, good and poor students, popular and
unpopular instructors, and so on. By identifying what students focus their energy on, I identified
the students’ concerns and the institution’s ultimate concern in educating students. Similarly, I
then identified what these students value, and ascertained their motivation for studying at the
institution.
Informal interviews took place alongside participant observation and free-listing
exercises and improve the quality of the data collected through these methods by asking
informants to explain and offer opinions of events as they are occurring or directly thereafter.
Informal interviewing allowed me to ascertain what the institutions value in students, faculty,
and staff, and what motivates students, faculty, and staff to be involved in the institution. The
information collected through informal interviews shaped subsequent, more structured interviews
by building relationships with informants and giving the necessary information to formulate
productive questions on Buddhist practice and education.366
I recorded the content of these conversations as best as possible, as well as observations
and personal reactions to the interviews. I also prepared field notes following the exchanges in
order to preserve descriptions and findings relating to Buddhist practice and education. 367
Admittedly, I was not able to do this as frequently as I would have liked, again due to limited
time in the field. I used field notes from participant observation and informal interviews to
construct questionnaires and ask respondents questions regarding DDM’s use of education and
Buddhist practice as a way to build a community of practice in order to ultimately affect social
Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. H. Russell Bernard, ed. Walnut Creek:
AltaMira Press, 1998.
365
See Patton, Qualitative Research.
366
See Bernard, Research Methods.
367
See Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic
Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Spradley, Participant Observation.
133
change. These questions were not always explicit or direct, but when taken together, I believe the
responses they elicited helped to shed light on my overall question about the community of
practice and the role of education and Buddhist practice at DDM.
Semi-structured Interviews, and Questionnaires. After collecting primary data and developing
preliminary schemas and questions through participant observation and informal interviews, I
questioned students and faculty at DDM about the relation between Buddhist practice and
education at DDM, as well as their interests and motivations, through semi-structured interviews.
Semi-structured interviews consisted of a series of pre-formulated, open-ended questions on
Buddhist practice and education and gave participants a chance to offer a nuanced description of
their daily routine, interests, motivations, and how they carry out their daily lives in or out of
accordance with the DDM discourse of education as Buddhist practice. This ultimately further
detailed respondents’ perceived and actual relationship between Buddhist practice and education,
and how it does or does not mesh with DDM’s discourse. All interviews were conducted
privately in locations comfortable and culturally appropriate to interviewees, thereby giving
informants an opportunity to articulate freely and confidentially their views and practices.368 I
conducted interviews over three months in order to ensure, as best as possible given the time
restraints, diverse representation from various demographics of participants.
Informants were selected based on a variety of factors, including age, gender, status as
cleric or layperson, education level, and above all willingness to participate in the project. I
questioned informants on their motivation for being at the educational institution, the perceived
benefits of being there, the difference between their institution and conventional educational
institutions in Taiwan, or elsewhere. To further test my hypothesis about the community of
practice at DDM, I asked informants to express their perceived goal of DDM’s education
campaign and compared these responses between participants of different groups (students,
faculty, staff) in order to understand whether each group maintains itself in relation to shared
understanding—as a community of practice.
I posed questions during interviews and questionnaires designed to understand
similarities and differences among the perceptions and motivations of students, faculty, and staff.
368
Steinar Kvale and Svend Brinkmann, Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative
Research Interviewing (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2008).
134
Such questions utilized free listing to elicit lists of members of the various groups to which
informants belong.369
Free-Lists. I concluded each interview with an attempt at free-listing exercises. Free-lists are a
cognitive anthropological technique, in which interviewees are asked to define a particular
cultural domain in their own terms. Particularly useful for situations of limited time in the field,
the purpose of this is to discover as many elements in a cultural domain or category as possible
in order to understand better that domain. To learn about how students and faculty at DDM
define Buddhist practice, and expecting that education would be included in this domain, my free
listing exercise asked students and faculty at DDBC and DDSU to list off the top of their head
the kinds of Buddhist “practice” happening at DDM. Specifically, they were asked “Please list
for me all the kinds of Buddhist practice that participants at DDM engage in.” Because I was
seeking informants’ definition of the domain, not imposing my own, I wanted to impose as little
structure as possible. Unfortunately, this lack of structure met some resistance from informants,
and they did not know how to answer the question, even with probing. While ideally I would
have collected at least twenty completed free-lists, I was able to elucidate thirteen usable freelists from respondents, which indeed show that students and faculty at DDM partially define the
domain of Buddhist practice with the characteristic of education. In other words, education for
them is a type of Buddhist practice. This suggests that DDM’s community of practice is
successful in cultivating individuals who believe that education is a part of Buddhist practice,
and we might assume, that Buddhist practice is a part of education.
I analyzed and tested the validity of each method using the following techniques:
Participant-Observation and Informal Interviews. My research took place over a period of three
summers, totaling approximately seven months. Long-term participant-observation would have
provided more complete data, but I believe that what I was able to collect in such a short time is
still valid, and allows me to elucidate the relationship between education and Buddhist practice
on DDM, the successfulness of DDM’s educational institutions and whether or not the
community at DDM has wholly embraced the community of practice that has been established. I
369
Free listing is a technique for eliciting a list of persons or items in a cultural domain using an
open-ended question. See Susan C. Weller and A. Kimball Romney, Systematic Data
Collection, Qualitative
Research Methods, v. 10 (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Publications), 1988.
135
have conducted a line-by-line analysis (or open-coding) of my questionnaire data, and crossreferenced it to interview and participant-observation data as best as possible, to identity issues
and themes in the fieldwork.370 This analysis has allowed me to identify ideas and recurring
themes on education and Buddhist practice among students, faculty, and staff, and reveals how
participants structure their religious and educational practices. This data was further explored in
interviews, in order to confirm or deny the assumptions formulated through participant
observation. I have paid close attention to the differences, or contradictions, that arise when
surveying data in its entirety, and research themes were modified to reflect contradictions until
the discrepancy was affirmed or resolved. 371 Items of contention were reviewed through
additional interviews and participant observation, and discrepant evidence is reported here, in
those cases where I was unable to resolve and account for the inconsistencies in data.372
I solicited feedback about data and conclusions using “member checks,” or respondent
validation.373 In other words, I would periodically share general observations with informants
through informal and semi-structured interviews to ensure that I was accurately understanding
the data I had collected from others.374 I have thematically analyzed the content of DDBC and
DDSU curricula by identifying key themes therein. I also questioned informants during informal
and semi-structured interviews about the educational and religious themes identified therein to
determine the extent these events influence the opinions of the students, faculty, and staff place
on education as a religious practice, and how these practices are understood in relation to any
potential larger social impacts. Discrepancies between interpretations uncovered in informal and
semi-structured interviews were resolved through further member checks and additional
interviewing and observation on the point of dispute.375 This process of resolution and analysis
ultimately produced a focused and coherent picture of the community of practice DDM is
cultivating, as well as the degree to which the community of practitioners embodies the discourse
that DDM is prescribing.
370
See Emerson et al., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.
See Agar, Speaking of Ethnography.
372
See Maxwell, Qualitative Research Design.
373
See Egon G. Guba, and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Fourth Generation Evaluation (Newbury Park,
Calif: Sage Publications, 1989); Maxwell, Qualitative Research Design.
374
See Guba and Lincoln Fourth Generation Evaluation.
375
See Matthew B. Miles, and A. M. Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis: A Sourcebook of
New Methods (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1984).
371
136
Semi-structured Interviews, Questionnaires, and Free-Lists. I recorded all interviews with the
informants’ consent and transcribed them during the interviews; the remainder of those which
have not been digitally transcribed will still be done. I analyzed all data collected from
interviews, questionnaires, and free-lists, with an emphasis on the latter two for this study, in
order to understand the role of education as a form of Buddhist practice for the informants—both
those involved and not involved with DDM—and similarity and differences between DDM’s
discourse and students, faculty, and staff at DDM’s educational institutions. This analysis has
allowed me to determine the preliminary degree of continuity and discontinuity between daily
life among students, faculty, and staff, and DDM’s official discourse on education as Buddhist
practice. This information, in turn, informed the questions posed in succeeding rounds of
interviews and questionnaires.376 I have since used the data gathered in interviews to assess
similarities and differences in the actual lived religious and educational life of informants in the
community of practice compared with DDM’s discourse of education as religious practice.
In order to protect both informants and myself, I acquired research clearance from Florida
State University’s Human Subjects Committee and the appropriate Taiwanese authorities before
beginning ethnographic research in Taiwan. All participants had their well-being and interests
protected according to the regulations established by the American Anthropological
Association’s Code of Ethics (1998) and the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human
Subjects, 45 CFR 46 (2001). Informants had the option of anonymity, and identities are coded in
all notes, transcripts, and records.377 Interviews were frequently conducted with the help of my
friend and colleague at Florida State, Lori Chung, serving as interpreter. The informed consent
forms that respondents signed included a portion for Lori to sign, if she was involved, stating that
she would uphold the same ethical standards and privacy concerns as I would. I am the only
person with access to the records of the research, which were kept in a secure location at all
points during the research and now.
During the first and second summers in the field, or phase one, of the research, I
familiarized and reintroduced myself as a researcher at DDM. During this time, I collected and
analyzed preliminary data (participant observation and informal interviews), and studied
Mandarin daily through texts and conversations. This preliminary data was largely used to
376
377
See Agar, Speaking of Ethnography.
See Dewalt et al., “Participtant Observation.”
137
construct questions for semi-structured interviews, and deepened the understanding of successive
participant-observation and informal interviews. During my third summer in the field, or phase
two, I was able to administer semi-structured interviews and free-list exercises, in addition to
continuing participant observation and informal interviews. Necessary follow-up interviews were
indentified and covered before the end of the summer. Participant observation, informal
interviewing, and shadowing of informants was conducted throughout the duration of fieldwork.
I began intensive data analysis immediately upon returning to the United States in 2011.
4.5 Ethnographic Data and Analysis
My aim in participant observation, interviews, free-lists, and questionnaires, was to
augment the prescriptive view of DDM as represented by the organization’s official literature.
Most importantly, I aimed to understand descriptively how successful the community of practice
at DDM has been internalized and implemented by the individuals who populate the community.
By understanding how agents on the ground at DDM view the identity of the self, the
organization, and Buddhism in general, I also aimed to see how education fits into the model of
Buddhism that DDM is both portraying and creating. To do this, I focused my questions on
individuals’ reasons for coming to DDM, what they hoped to gain from the experience, what
they perceived to be the most important activities at DDM, and their weekly time allotment. For
the purposes of this research, I exhibit data collected directly through 22 questionnaires, which
were further corroborated by 25 structured interviews and many more informal interviews and
three summers worth of participant observation.
The description of DDSU that I received is relatively clear-cut, and with some nuances
among different voices, the views of those involved with DDSU are relatively uniform: It is a
good experience, and almost universally all involved simply wanted to become clerics in order to
learn doctrine, practice Buddhism, and help others. Almost all DDSU students report that they
came to the school in order to become a cleric, largely due to DDM and Shengyan’s reputation.
Furthermore, many DDSU students report having no expectations before enrolling, which may
be a reason why they are so satisfied with the situation. Additionally, we might expect clerics to
report more prescriptive DDM responses, as they are, after all, a part of the institution. DDBC
data is more varied, but still relatively straightforward, if very different from the DDSU data.
138
Students cite coming to DDBC because of DDM’s image and reputation, the opportunity for
education, and to learn about Buddhist doctrine. Practice ranks very low on most of their lists.
However, DDBC students hope to learn about doctrine, practice, and research techniques while
they are there, and after graduation they plan to continue their education or research. DDBC
students cite Chan practice as the most important activity at DDM, yet they report spending the
vast majority of their time devoted equally to doing schoolwork and morning and evening
services. As a result, DDBC students report the school has not met their expectations and report
largely unfavorable sentiments toward the current structure of the curriculum.
Number of Responses
Reason for Coming to DDBC
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Types of Reasons Given
Figure 13. Results of Analysis, 1.
As explained above, the reason for coming to DDSU is quite plain: to become a cleric,
while there are other secondary reasons, such as the positive reputation of DDM, the strong
desire to learn from Shengyan, and the wish to help fulfill his goal of revitalizing Buddhism for a
modern world and creating a pure land on earth. DDBC students’ responses on the other hand are
139
more varied. Interestingly, practice is not high on the list of reasons given for wanting to come to
DDBC. Consistent with the rest of the data collected from DDBC students, it appears that these
individuals are more interested in learning about Buddhist doctrine. This would appear to verify
the contention that “modern Buddhists” favor philosophy over practice, and view Buddhism as a
philosophy rather than a religious system. Yet, DDM certainly does not teach that Buddhism is
not a religion. Quite to the contrary, DDM is firmly rooted in the religious aspect of Buddhism:
in addition to the founding narrative, the entire mountain complex is dedicated to the Bodhisattva
Guanyin, and Shengyan often spoke about the need to pay reverence to bodhisattvas and dharma
protectors; DDM hosts monthly repentance services, weekly Buddha-recollection practice
(which can be perceived, and is by some at DDM, as a devotional religious practice), in addition
to other ritual practices, such as Rites for Water and Land, and Flaming Mouth Hungry Ghosts;
and as we see below, morning and evening chanting services—where participants chant
scriptures, praise to buddhas and bodhisattvas, and even esoteric dhāraṇī—consist of a major
portion of the time spent by DDBC students.
Furthermore, as shown above and throughout prior chapters, DDM is very clearly
involved in promoting Buddhist practice and recasting education as a part of and kind of
Buddhist practice for modern times. Thus, DDM is rooted in tradition and practice, while also
promoting a modern academic education program and is involved in an overall humanistic
Buddhist thrust. Yet the students overall appear to be more concerned with studying, often
sacrificing practice in order to study. This is of course also due to the fact that these students are
still enrolled in a college, and have to pass classes and earn credits. As a result we are left with a
dichotomy between “modern Buddhist” individuals, and “modern Buddhist” institutions. Perhaps
any attempt to define “modern Buddhism” must take into consideration the fact that this division
clearly exists. We may feel uncomfortable in referring to it as an “elite/popular” dichotomy, and
it is not quite a “lived/institutional” binary, but certainly at DDM there is a difference between
what the students want out of their Buddhist experience and what the institution wants the
individuals’ Buddhist experience to be. This is not to say that indeed, there are those who
embody the philosophy of DDM in their daily life. And in fact, it may simply be that I am
viewing a single frame in the middle of a filmstrip. However, we clearly have a divide between
institutional and personal modernity, as based on my research. This is more complex than the
lived religion divide between institutional and daily practice, because even within the daily
140
experience of individuals, it is nearly impossible not to be inundated with DDM’s form of
Buddhism and Buddhist orthodoxy. Students at DDBC have no choice but to be exposed to this
daily, whether or not they are actively participating in practices. Through these daily experiences,
students learn proper Buddhist behavior and etiquette as DDM sees fit, and even a proper
Buddhist “essence,” if ever there were one. Therefore, even if not actively a part of the practice,
students must still absorb some portion of the community.
Thus, among those questioned we see the predominant view of Chan practice and
education as the most important activities at DDM, with Buddhist rites following as the third
most important activity. However it is interesting, and significant, that only DDSU students
reported education as being an important activity at DDM (see Figure Y). This suggests that
DDBC students have not fully embraced the education element of DDM’s community of practice,
and certainly shows that these students do not believe that education is a major focus for DDM.
This also suggests that students do not have the same view of DDM and the role of education at
the institution after having experienced DDBC as compared to when they first enrolled. Students
confirm this when asked about how the school has met their expectations (see below).
Furthermore, of the free-list exercises I conducted, I received nine responses from six of
thirteen respondents listing “education” in some form as a type of Buddhist practice occurring at
DDM. This suggests that the discourse of education as Buddhist practice has partially permeated
through the ranks at DDM. However, of these six respondents, only two were DDBC students.
One of these students responded that education is only prescriptively a part of Buddhist
practice, explaining that for this individual, it is not easy to do both research and practice. Instead,
this individual reports that personally, practice and research are two different things, and
although advisors say it is possible, this person believes that one must be a very experienced
practitioner to able to do this effectively. Thus again, we see that DDBC students have not
wholly incorporated the practice or even the discourse of education as an element of Buddhist
practice.
141
Number of Responses
Most Important Activity at DDM
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
DDBC
DDSU
Types of Responses
Figure 14. Results of Analysis, 2
Students' Plans After Graduating
DDBC
Continue education or
research
Use education for social
application
Temple work
No plans
Figure 15. Results of Analysis, 3
142
The answer to the question, “What will students do after graduation?” is quite simple for
DDSU students: They plan to be clerics at DDM, working for the organization, teaching dharma
and meditation, helping people through disaster relief work and other types of social engagement
activities, and working to help create a pure land on earth. It is actually a simple response from
DDBC students as well, and one which explains their level of discontent with DDBC: They aim
to continue to study, either in graduate school or doctorate programs, often abroad, or even work
at CHIBS as a researcher. This may speak to the success of DDBC’s goal of training scholars, if
not the practice aspect. While students come to DDBC wanting to learn, after spending time in
the program, they do not appear to be discouraged from continuing their education.
Number of Hours Spent
Reported Weekly Time Allotment
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
DDBC
DDSU
Activities
Figure 16. Results of Analysis, 4
It is clear that the majority of DDBC students’ time is devoted to schoolwork. However,
among DDBC students and between DDBC and DDSU students there is a wide range of
143
responses, particularly between DDBC and DDSU students, leaving me to ask: What are these
people spending their time doing? It is possible that they misunderstood my question, which
asked them to list their time weekly. Thus, perhaps some of them listed daily time allotment
instead. It is also possible that they are engaged in business outside of my categories, however I
included an “other” option, which was often still not selected even when respondents did not
evidence a great, or any, use of time in the other categories. It may simply be that respondents
did not carefully answer this question.
However, we still see that when compared to one another, DDBC students’ timetable
seems to be, based on these responses, more time-consuming than the monastic timetable. This is
remarkable at first glance, as we might expect a monastic schedule to be more heavily focused
on discipline. However, this gives concrete evidence supporting our understanding of the way in
which students at DDBC are monasticized, DDBC students are expected to live like clerics while
also being held to the standard of graduate students in a credible institution of higher learning,
even among the undergraduates. Based on the quantitative data collected, DDBC students spend
97.263 hours per week on schoolwork, office work, “traditional” Buddhist practices (such as
prostrations and Buddha-recollection), physical exercise, and other activities. While many
students spend seven days a week at DDM, if we assume this refers only to the normal five-day
“work” week, that means that DDBC students devote an average of over nineteen hours a day to
these activities—leaving fewer than five hours for sleep. This is confirmed by the other
questionnaire responses and the twenty-five structured interviews I conducted with students,
faculty, and staff at DDM in summer 2011, where students consistently responded that the
schedule they are held to is incredibly difficult to uphold, and often cuts into their time for sleep.
Although DDBC students are technically required by the curriculum to attend morning or
evening service and morning or evening meditation, we can see that this is not always the case.
Many respondents answered that they do not spend any time at morning and evening service,
which I can confirm from my participant observation However, other students say they spend no
time doing schoolwork or preparing for class, which I find peculiar. Dealing with this apparent
discrepancy would require more research. On the whole, we can see that the average amount of
time devoted to schoolwork is the same as the amount of time spent in morning or evening
services (39.25 hrs/wk each). Seated meditation, on the other hand, receives relatively little
attention (4.0625 hrs/wk), more than 53% less time than students devote to office work (7.575
144
hrs/wk). This is clearly contrary to the claim by Lopez that meditation is the key practice for
modern Buddhists. If anything, outside of study, these students are most involved in morning and
evening chanting services, which include praises of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and dhāraṇī and
sutra recitation. While it may be available and is even required, DDBC students do not typically
engage in seated meditation on the whole. Again, I can confirm this from my limited observation
in the DDBC meditation hall. This is also true for what we may consider other “traditional”
Buddhist practices, such as Buddha-recollection (0.7 hrs/wk) and prostrations (1.525 hrs/wk).
DDBC students devote 2.3 hrs/wk to physical exercise and 2.6 hrs/wk to other activities. While
students did not always explain what this activity was, students who did clarify explain that for
them it refers to daily chores. Still, we see that the institution, DDM, requires these practices,
while students are more interested in studying doctrine and passing classes.
A summary of the tallied DDBC responses follows:378
Activities
Number of hours per week spent by DDBC students
[avg(9-10) + avg(30-40) + 0 + 35 + 0 + 20 + 80 + 60
Schoolwork/preparing for class
+ 80 + avg(80+80+60)] / 10 = 39.25
[.75 + 0 + 0 + 0 + avg(70-80) + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0] /
Office work
10 = 7.575
[1.75 + 6 + 4 + 4 + avg(10-13) + 3 + 4 + 2 + 0 +
Morning and evening service
(6)0.5] / 10 = 24.75+11.5+3 = 39.25
Buddha-recollection
[0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 3 + 1 + 0 + 2] / 10 = .7
378
Some respondents gave a specific range of time in reporting the time spent in each category.
In those cases, I have taken the average of the range. Regarding the first timetable question,
“how much time per week do you spend doing schoolwork or preparing for class,” of the DDBC
students, one reported instead of a numerical response gave a qualitative answer, stating:
“Besides time devoted to eating, sleeping, and bathing, the majority of time is all devoted to
studying language and writing reports.” As a result, I have assigned a number to this response
using the average of the three highest responses for this question from other respondents (two
responses saying 80 hours, and one saying 60). One respondent reported spending thirty minutes
per day in morning and evening services. Since it is not clear how many days per week this
person spends at DDM, I have chosen to count it as six days, since most students spend at least
five, if not all seven days, per week on campus. One respondent reported spending “less than”
ten hours in seated meditation per week, which I have given the benefit of the doubt and rounded
to ten.
145
[.25 + 2.5 + 0 + 0 + avg(5-6) + 3 + 3 + 0 + 1 + 0] /
Prostrations
10 = 1.525
[avg(.5-.75) + 6 + 4 + 10 + <10 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 0 + 0]
Sitting meditation
/ 10 = 4.0625
[0 + 1 + 0 + 6 + avg(8-10) + 3 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 0] / 10
Physical exercise
= 2.3
Other
[1 + 0 + 0 + 18 + 5 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 0] / 10 = 2.6
Total average
97.263
By comparison, DDSU students report spending a total of 40.644 hours per week devoted
to the same categories as DDBC students. There is a bias in these data however, as most of the
DDSU students who completed questionnaires are students in the Chan track, which focuses
more on meditation. Thus, one DDSU student reported that the time reported did not include
personal periods of meditation not with a group, which is typical for students in the Chan Studies
track. These data do not imply that DDSU students are involved in fewer activities or are lazier
than DDBC students. Rather, the data support my argument that learning at DDM is carried out
through daily life and interactions.
A summary of the tallied DDSU responses follows:379
Activities
Number of hours per week spent by DDSU students
[4 + 28 + 3 + morning to night (14+24) + 7 +
Schoolwork/preparing for class
(14+24) + 14 + 4 + 1] / 9 = 15.222
Office work
[0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 4.5 + 0 + 0] / 9 = .833
379
One respondent reported working on schoolwork and preparing for class “from morning to
night,” which I have designated the highest number reported by another DDSU respondent. The
question of time spent practicing Buddha-recollection is much more difficult to calculate for
DDSU students, as the majority of them reported that this is done all day, and is not limited to
any specific amount of time. I have included the specific numbers reported for this activity. One
respondent reported practicing prostrations “occasionally,” which I have designated a number
corresponding to the lowest number reported by another DDSU student. One respondent reported
taking a walk after meals, which I have conservatively estimated to take thirty minutes per day at
seven days per week.
146
Morning and evening service
[7 + 10 + 2 + 1.67 + 7 + 7 + 9 +5 + 14] /9 = 6.963
[.5 + 1 + all times + no limit + 1 + unable to count
Buddha-recollection
+ unable to count + 0 + all times] = .2777
[3 + 2.5 + 1 + .5 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 3 + occasionally (.5)]
Prostrations
/ 9 = 2.25
[5 + 4 + .5 + .67 + 3 + 3 + avg(1-2) + 3 + 7] / 9 =
Sitting meditation
3.074
[1 + 1.5 + .5 + .25 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 0 + walk after
Physical exercise
meals (3.5)] = 1.083
[4 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 7 + a lot of sitting on own time + 7
Other
+ (6+7) + 0] /9 = 3.444
Total average
40.6437
DDBC and DDSU Students' Satisfaction
Based on Expectations
Number of Respondents
8
7
6
5
4
DDBC
3
DDSU
2
1
0
Overall satisfied
Overall dissatisfied
Overall Satisfaction Level
Figure 17. Results of Analysis, 5
147
Neutral
Largely as a result of this monasticized schedule and general overworking, DDBC
students report being largely dissatisfied with the current system implemented at DDBC. While I
did not directly ask respondents if they were satisfied with their experience, the responses to the
question, “Is your experience at DDBC/DDSU the same or different from your expectations
before matriculating?” provide a clear view into the level of satisfaction, as respondents
elaborate on why the school did or did not meet their expectations, often in terms of satisfaction
or dissatisfaction.
Overall, DDBC students’ expectations were not met, and they are decidedly more critical
of the DDBC experience. These responses are confirmed by my interviews, in which no DDBC
student expressed an absolute favorable opinion of their experience at DDBC, and all remarked
that it was not exactly what they had expected. Between questionnaires, and structured and
informal interviews, the overwhelming response was that DDBC had not yet struck the right
balance of practice and academics. An equal amount of students responded that they would
prefer having practice emphasized more as those who desired academics to be the major focus
instead. Similar sentiments characterize the DDBC professors’ opinions: some want more
emphasis on practice, while others want more emphasis on academics. The majority of
professors I spoke to wanted more emphasis on academics, but this may be due to a bias in my
data collection: these professors were more proficient in English either due to their Western
upbringing or their education in elite Western institutions of higher education, which clearly
stress critical thinking and academics.
DDSU students were by and large very happy with the experience and it met their
expectations. DDSU students were also far more likely to respond that they did not have any
expectations coming in, and their primary concern was simply to become a cleric with DDM.
This is not surprising, as DDSU has had more time to mature and come into its own system,
while DDBC has only existed since 2007, and is still in the process of evolving and negotiating
the needs and wishes of its students with the school’s ideology of combining rigorous academic
training and Buddhist practice.
Eight of eleven DDSU respondents report a sense of overall satisfaction with DDSU,
while the remaining three DDSU respondents reporting a neutral response. No DDSU students
reported an overall negative or dissatisfied sentiment regarding their experience at DDSU. By
contrast, six of the ten DDBC students responded in an overwhelming dissatisfied manner. An
148
equal amount (two each) responded overwhelmingly positively and neutrally. Thus, it appears
that DDBC students are not satisfied with the current system at DDBC, often pointing to the
curriculum and schedule as the reason for this disappointment.
Conclusions
In conclusion, in their attempts to respond to critiques of Buddhism as a backward
religion, incompatible with modern times, Shengyan and DDM have strived to develop a system
of training laity, clerics, and scholars to become, in essence, all of the above. However, as of
now the weight particularly falls on DDBC students, who are expected to fulfill the role of a new
class of modern practitioners as DDM sees fit. These practitioners are expected to be scholars
bred in the modern, Western academic model. At the same time, they are monasticized by virtue
of their daily schedule, and expected to behave and practice with nearly the same intensity as
DDM’s clerics. As a result, we appear to see two models of “Buddhist modernism” at DDM:
institutional and personal. While DDM aims to create this system for training clerics and laity
who share an equal level sophistication in understanding and practice of Buddhadharma, the
organization appears to be overshooting in their expectations of DDBC students.
Again, this desire to reform the Buddhist community by making both clerics and laity
proficient in philosophy and practice, with a shared understanding of the limits of orthodoxy in
Chinese Buddhism, is clearly rooted in responding to and correcting the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries’ discourse of Buddhism as a degenerate, backward religion whose own followers and
clerics knew little of the tradition. In this way, DDM is certainly in line with the understanding
of a modern Buddhist organization. Students coming to DDBC also represent this trend in
Buddhist modernism, showing a tendency to privilege philosophy over practice. They are
interested in practice, and ideally want to engage in it, but they are more interested in philosophy
and doctrine overall, or perhaps just getting the course credit. However, DDM as a whole blurs
this philosophy/practice boundary, as the organization very strongly promotes Buddhist practice.
Indeed, it is practice which first comes to mind for the majority of people I talked to about DDM.
Thus, DDM appears to be doing exactly what they claim to do: inherit the past and inspire the
future—blend tradition and modernity. They promote traditional Chan practice while also
149
innovatively painting education as a part of this practice, and promote a rational, academic
education, while making traditional Chan practice a required and necessary part of that process.
150
CONCLUSION
RETHINKING MODERNITY
In this study, I have shown that the community of practice at Dharma Drum Mountain
complicates received theories of Buddhist modernism. DDM’s dual emphasis on modern,
academic education and traditional Buddhist practice nuances the theory of modern Buddhists as
privileging philosophy over practice and the secular over the religious. DDBC students, who
constitute a major part of the community of practice at DDM, spend the majority of their time
studying instead of practicing, and generally appear more interested in studying doctrine. This
points to a further nuance in the theory of modern Buddhism, as it highlights a discrepancy
between DDM as a modern Buddhist institution and modern Buddhist individuals. DDBC
students are expected to partially take up the roles of both lay college students and clerics, and as
a result the community of practice is as of yet not fully successful, although it is still early in the
school’s development. The purpose of this education and practice model is to use education as
agent of social change through a view of world-transformation vis-à-vis the self. However, the
effect of this world-transformation is also to promote Chinese Buddhism through a modern and
more subtle practice-oriented approach. This education and practice model also aims to correct
and defend the popular image of Buddhism in Chinese culture by creating Dharma Drum as a
source of orthodoxy and authority in Buddhism. This desire to lift up Buddhism and Buddhist
Studies is partially rooted in a response to nineteenth and twentieth century attacks on Buddhism
from Chinese secularizers and Western Christian missionaries, as well as what Shengyan
perceived as the despair of Chinese Buddhism—namely a lack of education and opportunities to
train capable Buddhist leaders. Thus Shengyan and DDM are negotiators of tradition and
modernity, aiming to revitalize, promote, and preserve a humanistic style of modern Chinese
Buddhism, which promotes a modern blend of study and practice, built upon a traditional
religious foundation.
Here, I would like to conclude with some remarks on Buddhist modernism in light of
these findings, and address some models of religion in higher education outside of the East Asian
Buddhist context. These institutes of higher education represent the aspect of these religions that
focuses most heavily on education, and which exists in modernity.
151
Buddhist Modernism
Marcus Bingenheimer provides a similar model of Buddhist modernism as McMahan and
Lopez, but the way he frames it, and what he chooses to highlight, is slightly different.380 I
believe his is a helpful alternative for looking at this issue. Bingenheimer distills Heinz Bechert’s
definition of the concept into five main traits.381 Although Bechert was referring specifically to
Theravāda Buddhism, Bingenheimer highlights the transplantability of these traits to modern
Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism. These traits are 1) the emphasis of the rational elements of
Buddhism, 2) the influence of European history and “scientific standards of rationality” on
Buddhist leaders, 3) the expanded role of the laity, 4) competition with, and drawing from,
Christian missionaries, and 5) social engagement.
McMahan also cites Bechert and Richard Gombrich’s 1984 work, Der Buddhismus:
Geschichte und Gegenwart, which adds to this list the traits demythologization and, again,
stressing that Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion.382 McMahan begins to concede
that practice is an element in Buddhist circles, however he merely continues to cite meditation as
the key method of practice and only touches an the “activist element” of modern Buddhism,
which involves promoting social work, democracy, and what Bechert refers to as a “philosophy
of equality.” Therefore, given what have seen with the case study of DDM’s emphasis on
practice over philosophy, I find Bingenheimer’s definition of Buddhist modernism more helpful
than the schemes developed by McMahan and Lopez, particularly because Bingenheimer’s does
not imply a particular dichotomous relation among the categories.
Bingenheimer’s definition of modern Buddhism also consists of themes similar to those
posited by McMahan and Lopez, which are helpful for understanding Buddhist modernism.
These particular traits are the assimilation of Western ideas and “the influence of academic
scholarship that leads Buddhist communities to explore new directions of belief and practice.”383
This latter characterization is particularly appropriate for viewing DDM’s identity as a modern
380
Bingenheimer, “Some Remarks,” 152.
See Heinz Bechert, Hellmuth Hecker, and Duy Tu Vu, Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in
den Ländern des Theravāda-Buddhismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Metzner, 1966).
382
See Heinz Bechert, and Richard F. Gombrich, Der Buddhismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart
(München: C.H. Beck, 2008).
383
Bingenheimer, “Some Remarks,” 153.
381
152
Buddhist organization. Despite this modernist bent and focus on Western, academic
scholarship—the twentieth century torchbearer for which was the monk Yinshun—there is a
tendency for modern Buddhist communities to develop a discourse relating their current state
back to an original era in order to allow their current practices and beliefs to be compatible with
the ancient tradition.
Thus, modern Buddhist groups such as DDM actively work to link their present tradition
to an orthodox Buddhism as they define it. DDM and other modern Buddhist groups then
reformulate their own practices into a tradition “that pretends to be older and ‘more traditional’
than the current state of ‘the tradition’ which is often perceived of as corrupted or in decline.”384
That is, often in response to at least perceived attacks of a tradition in decline and irrelevance,
modern Buddhist groups respond, whether consciously or not, by first recasting their practices to
suit and appeal to modern audiences. In the process these groups reformulate the self-conscious
discourse of their own tradition so that the new forms of Buddhism they promote are consistent
with the oldest form of the tradition as they present it. In other words, these groups, including
DDM, are actively involved in the construction of orthodoxy and the invention of tradition.
While DDM is unique in using education as a negotiator between modernity and its
religious tradition, and recasting the role of education as a holistic endeavor aimed at
transforming the individual and larger society, these approaches are seen outside of Buddhist
East Asia in modern institutions of higher education. Other institutions are also incorporating
religious teachings, and employing models similar to DDM’s approach to education. Blackwell
and Dreyfus provide excellent detail on models of Buddhist learning outside of China, in Lankan
and Tibetan cultures, respectively. While these are useful models of monastic Buddhist
education, I have decided instead to focus on the integration of religious values and higher
education in modern institutional settings, such as Jesuit colleges in America and Islamic
pesantren in Indonesia. While monastic Buddhist education is about Buddhist learning, what
DDM is doing is more closely connected to the integration of modern university models of
education with Buddhist practice.
Furthermore, what are the effects of modernization, particularly in terms of religion?
First, I have shown that we must rethink the motif that modernization must involve outright
secularization. DDM has certainly not purged Chinese Buddhism of its religious elements, and
384
Ibid.
153
shows no signs, or need, to do so in the future. Similarly, DDM also shows us that “modern
Buddhism” does not necessarily privilige philosophy over practice. However, we must also
rethink the broad category of modernization all together, and instead perhaps speak of specific
modenizations. What is the effect of modernization on an institution as compared to on
individuals? We see the development of two kinds of Buddhist modernism on DDM—might this
be a typical situation that is being overlooked by scholars who do not engage the community of
practitioners on the ground in their research? Moreover, what are the effects of modernization on
education on proselytization? Will DDM’s modern, practice-oriented approach be successful,
and if so might it serve as a model approach for other traditions? Or will DDM be forced to look
at other traditions for inspiration in effectively implementing their approach? It is too early to say
now, but Shengyan has certainly established DDM as a source of contrast to other temples in
Taiwan, which are often bright, colorful, noisy, and full of an admixture of different deities from
Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and folk religion pantheons. Will this start a trend in Taiwan, and
cause other temples to modify their own practices and materiality? More research needs to be
done in the future to assess this.
It is to this last point that I would briefly like to turn. While not identical, there do exist
similar models of institutions of higher education integrating religion outside of Buddhist East
Asia. In the following sections, I will address some of these similar models. While comparative
religion studies are problematic, I do not aim to argue that these other models are exactly the
same as DDM’s. However, I do believe that they provide a useful parallel to think about the role
of modern religious education in a university setting. In each case, which is indeed similar to
DDM’s model, we see the ways in which modern institutions of higher education implement, or
want to implement, religious education. What is the relation between religious practice and
education at these institutions, and what can we learn from these outside parallels? Below I touch
on religion in education, which involves education through action or a community of practice, in
two cultural contexts: Islamic education in Indonesia, as well as Jesuit education, and the
narrative of secularized education and the corresponding renewed interest in reintegrating
religious values into higher education in the United States. I do not aim to show how these are
exactly the same as the DDM model, but rather use them to raise some questions about the future
of DDM and the role of religion and education.
154
Comparing DDM with Islamic Education in Indonesian Pesantren
Perhaps surprisingly, there is a much older precedence for religious education similar to
the model that DDM employs in Islamic cultures. Ronald Lukens-Bull’s A Peaceful Jihad:
Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim Java provides an ethnographic account of an
Indonesian Islamic boarding school (pesantren), named Al-Hikam, which is remarkably similar
to the model of education implemented at DDM. This is a residential boarding school where
students are expected to follow a strict schedule that combines academic learning with religious
practice. Lukens-Bull argues that education is used as a tool at pesantren for negotiating tradition
and modernity, allowing students to receive a religious education in a community of practice.
What is interesting is that this community of practice model has lasted for generations, and
shows the viability of such a model to last and be successful. Moreover, we may ask, if this is
where Islamic education in Indonesia has ended up, what will come of DDM’s model if they are
just starting from this position?
Pesantren, places of Islamic education, are similar to the Islamic madrasa throughout the
Arabic speaking world. In Indonesia, public education is strictly secular, and until the twentieth
century there was a complete absence of formal education outside of pesantren. Thus the Islamic
schools have historically filled a need for education among the masses, offering instructional
learning in the classroom and experiential learning in daily life.385 As at DDM, according to
Lukens-Bull, students at Al-Hikam attend classes and live at the pesantren in order to “learn
more about their religion and the right ways to practice it.”386 Lukens-Bull explains that the goal
of pesantren education is to cultivate religious leaders who are able to pursue higher college
level education387 and change society through education.388 This is precisely the same goal as
stated by DDM.
As I have shown, education is not an end for DDM, but rather an active process and a
means for modernizing Buddhism and affecting social change. Arguing for the potential power
385
Ronald Lukens-Bull, A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim Java
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1. See also Robert W. Hefner, Making Modern
Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press), 2009.
386
Ibid., 2.
387
Ibid., 18.
388
Ibid., 17.
155
of the practice of education to bridge tradition and modernity, Lukens-Bull states very clearly:
“The process of negotiating modernity and tradition in this community starts with education.”389
He also cites Eleanor Leacock’s390 discussion of how the ways in which modernity is imagined
in turn shapes how educational systems engage and negotiate modernity.391 Thus, Lukens-Bull
perceives Al-Hikam as using education as a “cultural broker,” a negotiator, between tradition and
modernity as a means of understanding both in its own religious context.392 I perceive DDM as
using education for the same purposes, although with more nuance. In this way, both Al-Hikam
and DDM are involved in the “invention of tradition” and the creation of “imagined
communities”393 by using education to interpret and reinterpret both tradition and modernity “in
terms of each other.” Lukens-Bull cites Habermas’s “insistence that modernity ‘must create its
normativity out of itself’”394 to describe Al-Hikam’s, and the Indonesian Classicist Muslim
community’s, appropriation of education in order to reinvent the materials of modernity and thus
implement an accepted traditional practice in a modern setting. In other words, Al-Hikam “must
imagine a modernity in need of revamping” and “imagine a tradition that is able to fit with and
temper modernity”395 As the local and wider cultural-religious communities seeks to “redefine
modernity and recreate it in the community’s image, so it is forced to (re)invent tradition.”396
Similarly, DDM has redefined education as a key element of modernity, in order to fit DDM and
the Buddhist tradition’s image, while at the same time re-inventing the Buddhist tradition to be
compatible with modernity.
Pesantren provide an analogous model for looking at DDM’s community of practice,
particularly in its form and purpose of providing holistic education with the ultimate purpose of
implementing a particular perspective in society, with the goal of transforming it. Both of these
religious educational institutes, which are essentially boarding schools, provide specialized
education in the classroom as well as throughout daily life. Lukens-Bull argues that through this
389
Ibid., 23.
As cited in Ibid., 9.
391
Ibid..
392
Ibid., 6.
393
Lukens-Bull, A Peaceful Jihad, 6, presumably referring to Benedict R. O'G Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
2006).
394
Lukens-Bull, A Peaceful Jihad, 7.
395
Ibid., 9.
396
Ibid., 7.
390
156
education pesantren not only pass on particular knowledge, but, like DDM’s education, students
in the community of practice are taught a specific worldview, “which they are then encouraged
to carry out into society.”397 Thus, in both examples of religious education in a community of
practice, knowledge and skills learned are not necessary as important as the outlook and
implementation in society of particular values as promoted by the organization. As with DDM’s
educational institutions, students wake up at 4:00 am and go to sleep at midnight (even later than
DDM’s students). Pesantren students’ days are filled with both instructional education in the
classroom and experiential learning through practice in daily life, thus a community of practice is
also in place. Pesantren also provide low-cost housing, and typically do not provide access to
meat, beds, or television. 398 Al-Hikam, which actively integrates elements of tradition and
modernity,399 does not provide living conditions as ascetic in nature as the most traditional
pesantren, the traditional schools. Both Al-Hikam and DDM provide beds for students, albeit
both with very thin mattresses, while DDM does not provide meat as per the organization’s
identification as a traditional Chinese Buddhist monastery which strictly forbids meat to be
brought on to the monastic complex, even by tourists who visit the grounds. DDSU does not
have a television in the education building or in the monks’ quarters (and I assume in the nuns’
quarters, although I was not afforded access), and DDBC has a television in the lobby, but to my
knowledge DDBC dorm rooms do not have televisions. Lukens-Bull explains that at Al-Hikam,
“students are said to be more easily taught when they feel indebted… the living conditions are
more ascetic than those in a college dorm, even if they are less ascetic than those in a traditional
pesantren.”400 DDM does not phrase the purpose of providing their accommodations in the same
way. However, there does seem to be a religious purpose in both institutions in giving students
only what they need, rather than what they may want to live.
Similar to DDM, Al-Hikam provides extensive language training for students, so much so
in fact that students cite “access to additional educational opportunities, specifically learning
Arabic and English, as additional reasons for enrolling there.”401 Of particular significance is that
397
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 2.
399
Ibid., 7, defines modernity as “a trans-local tradition that is invented in the global movement
of goods and symbols and (re)invented in local and national settings.”
400
Ibid., 2.
401
Ibid..
398
157
Al-Hikam incorporates religious (in this case, Sufi) practices into daily life.402 Again, this shows
that the community of practice in a religious institution is not limited to DDM.
Al-Hikam is not a unique example of pesantren education in Indonesia, and it is not the
only pesantren with clear similarities to DDM’s educational institutions. Lukens-Bull cites
Indonesia’s most famous pesantren, Tebu Ireng, founded in 1899, to ground his study. Eliade403
claims that Tebu Ireng “has interacted with processes of modernization and globalization,”
resulting in the sanctification of the institution’s grounds, “meant to serve as an imago mundi, or
a microcosmic model for how the world should be.” 404 In this way, Tebu Ireng, too, is
remarkably similar to DDM. Both are sites of religious education (DDM’s headquarter complex
has many roles, but site for Buddhist education is the primary one), which have also become
pilgrimage sites; both were founded as seminaries which evolved to emphasize secular
education; the founders of both institutions, who are both buried at the respective sites, are
highly revered for their spiritual practice; both serve as religious boarding schools; and the
student dorms are very simple, by design.405
Tebu Ireng also perceives of education as a way of developing Indonesia, and trains both
religious scholars (ulama), as well as lay people “with a wide range of skills, albeit with a good
moral foundation. Hence the point of Tebu Ireng’s curriculum now is to create people who can
help the umma [community of Muslims] who have a moral and religious basis, so that Islam can
thereby grow. …saw the need for Islamic education to fit the needs of the time.”406 Were one
simply to change the geographic location and religious tradition, and replace Islamic terms for
Buddhist ones, we would have a nearly identical mission statement for DDM.
Residence Life, Cura Personalis and Service Learning at Jesuit Institutions
The United States of course has its own tradition of religious education within the
infrastructure of colleges and universities. The best known examples of higher education
402
Ibid., 18.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 373.
404
Lukens-Bull, A Peaceful Jihad, 26.
405
Ibid., 26-34.
406
Ibid., 36.
403
158
institutions working in tandem with religious practice are most likely Jesuit colleges and
universities. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind as Westerners when we think of religious
higher education is the Jesuit model. This model is similar to Nussbaum’s, which calls higher
education to cultivate agents capable of affecting social change. Again, here we have an
established system of higher education which implements a co-curriculum of academics and
religious practice, which in the case of Jesuit institutions often refers to service projects that
involve social engagement. We also see that many of these institutions promote a community of
practice through residential life, whereby students learn from religious authorities in daily life.
Thus, again we see a model similar to DDM’s, which is in an advanced stage of development.
We must ask once again, if DDM is starting at this stage, how will the community of practice
continue to develop and change, or will it stay the same?
In contemporary Jesuit institutions of higher learning in the United States, we see a
model, similar to what DDM has implemented in Taiwan, of using education as an agent for
comprehensive, concentric transformation, beginning with transforming the self and resulting in
transforming society and humanity as a whole. Jesuit education was first established in the
sixteenth century by Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuits.407 As of
1997, there were “approximately 850 religious affiliated colleges and universities, 220 of which
identify themselves as Catholic,” and 28 of those Catholic colleges and universities were
founded by the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. These Jesuit colleges and universities
strive to integrate academic education with the promotion of, often socially engaged, religious
values.408
These colleges and universities share three primary similarities with DDM’s method of
education. These similarities involve the promotion of 1) residence life for students, faculty, and
staff; and 2) a holistic, comprehensive education system, which develops academic and religious
values in the individual with the goal of changing society as a whole, which in the Jesuit context
often involves specific service learning projects, as opposed to DDM’s approach of
implementing Buddhist practice. While I have not found any evidence suggesting, nor do I
407
Boston College, “A Pocket Guide to Jesuit Education,” “Beginnings,”
http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/offices/mission/publications/guide/beginnings.html (accessed 16
February 2012).
408
Alexander F. King, and Don E. Robertson, Residential Colleges: Reforming American Higher
Education (Louisville, Ky: Oxford International Round Table, 1998), 166.
159
claim, that Shengyan was directly influenced by Jesuit education, it is possible that Shengyan
was exposed to such models, given the longstanding legacy of Jesuit missions in China since the
sixteenth century, and the presence of Fu Jen Catholic University (Tianzhujiao Furen Daxue 天
主教輔仁大學) in Taiwan since 1961, 409 in addition to other Christian universities which
migrated from China to Taiwan following the Communists’ implementation of anti-religious
policies in the 1950s.
Residence life is an incredibly important aspect of DDM’s community of practice.
Indeed, this is the key characteristic that allows the community of practice to exist in the first
place. Many contemporary Jesuit institutions like Boston College, founded in 1863, are
residential colleges as well, where the majority of students live on campus. Characteristic of
Jesuit colleges and universities, Boston College is devoted to “building a stronger campus
community reflective of a commitment to social justice and spiritual as well as intellectual
values,” forged out of a partnership between Jesuit clerics and laity.410 As of 1997, all first year
students at Boston College, which numbered 2,200, and roughly 300 sophomores lived in
traditional three-storied “corridor centered residence halls” on campus. Boston College does not
require that students are Catholic in order to be admitted, and in 1997 approximately 70% of the
student body identified as Catholic, while it is estimated that the religious demographics of
faculty and staff would include far fewer individuals who identify as Catholic.411 On the other
hand, at Boston College in 1997 approximately 130 Jesuit priests also lived on campus, of whom
30 were full-time faculty, 15 were administrators or chaplains, and the remainder were
researchers, visiting scholars, graduate students, part-time faculty or retirees. An internal study at
Boston College conducted from 1996-1997 points to this residence life among students as the
central method of emphasizing “rigorous intellectual development and personal formation as the
distinctive marks of a Boston College undergraduate education.”412
In striking similarity with the community of practice at DDM, as a result of the internal
study, Boston College aimed to increase the interaction among adult Jesuit role models and in409
Fu Jen Catholic University, “Historical Sketch,” About Fu Jen,
http://140.136.240.107/english_fju/index.php/about-fujen/historical-sketch (accessed February
29, 2012).
410
King and Robertson, Residential Colleges, 167.
411
Ibid., 166.
412
Ibid., 167.
160
residence freshmen students on campus: “These persons would come from the faculty,
administration, and staff. They would not be housing administrators but rather role models,
counselors, advisors, and friends… The theory is that there would be a reduction in negative
behavior and a significant positive growth in the maturation process as a result of the interaction
between these adults and the freshmen.”413 Thus, like DDM, students are expected to learn about
proper behaviour and etiquette from representatives who live on campus with them. Students see
how these representatives behave in daily life and are encouraged and expected to model their
own behavior off of them, as they are exemplars of the tradition. And like Boston College, DDM
does not require that students, faculty, or staff are Buddhists, despite the fact that Buddhist
practice is a required portion of the school’s curriculum. In fact, I spoke with more than one
person at Dharma Drum Buddhist College who did not identify as Buddhist.
Cura personalis, meaning “care of the person,” is one of the core ideals of all Jesuit
colleges and universities,414 and a model that could easily be used to describe education at DDM.
Regis University, one of the largest Jesuit universities in the United States explains: “Latin
meaning ‘care for the person,’ cura personalis is having concern and care for the personal
development of the whole person. This implies a dedication to promoting human dignity and
care for the mind, body and spirit of the person.” In other words, cura personalis refers to
holistic, comprehensive education, which includes both intellectual and spiritual development,
the “habits of the heart and mind, spirit and body (the virtues),”415 through both instructional
learning in the classroom as well as experiential learning in daily life.416 This often refers to the
relationship between students and faculty, in which faculty cares for each individual student.
This model also frequently involves the integration of the student with the wider social
community through service learning in order to affect social change. This ultimate goal of
413
Ibid., 170.
Ann Wright, Nicki Calabrese, and Julie J. Henry, “How Service and Learning Came Together
To Promote Cura Personalis,” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education 20, no. 2 (2009): 274-283.
415
King and Robertson, Residential Colleges, 168.
416
Regis University, “Jesuit Values,” About Regis,
http://www.regis.edu/regis.asp?sctn=abt&p1=mjv, accessed February 5, 2012. The other core
ideals of Jesuit educational institutions, which appear to be based on the first tenet of cura
personalis, are “Magis” (literally meaning “more,” referring to one striving to do better in life),
“Men and Women for and with Others,” “Unity of Heart and Mind,” “Contemplatives in
Action,” and “Finding God in All Things.”
414
161
affecting change in society through education as set forth by Jesuit colleges and universities is
similar to that of DDM, if different in execution. At Jesuit colleges, specific service projects
aimed to remedy particular social problems are often the method used to promote this holistic
care of the self and society, while the focus at DDM, on the other hand, is not on enacting
specific projects or even curing specific social problems. Instead, DDM is involved in an even
more holistic approach of first purifying the self, with the hope and assumption that this
transformation will naturally extend outward, progressively and systematically, to the whole of
humanity.
Often associated with cura personalis, service learning is a key component of many
Jesuit institutions, and a departure point—on the surface at least—from the DDM Model.
However, I argue that while this particular practice differs from DDM’s approach of cultivating
the self on the surface, I believe that the same general model of experiential learning applies to
DDM. The difference then is that instead of specific service learning projects, DDM promotes a
holistic cultivation of the self that is ultimately intended to produce individuals who promote
social change on their own, and who are involved in a process of communal transformation and
purification. Service learning is a form of experiential learning—as contrasted with exclusively
instructional classroom education—which links theory learned in a classroom with practice
executed in a wider social community, thus providing “real-world” engagement for students who
carry out the theory learned in class in concrete social situations.417 The point of these service
projects is for students to become actively involved in what they study rather than simply read
about it and understand it academically. Thus service learning aims to help students develop a
more complete understanding of the course material,418 much in the same way that DDM’s cocurriculum of education and Buddhist practice emphasizes students gaining a complete
understanding of what Buddhism is—not solely the academic study of Buddhist Studies.
Traditional service learning is different from DDM’s co-curriculum promoting holistic
education, which integrates the academic study of Buddhism with Buddhist practice and daily
immersion of Buddhism in a Chan monastic setting. However, I perceive the Jesuit approach of
augmenting instructional learning with service learning in order to fulfill the promotion of cura
417
418
Wright, et al, “How Service and Learning Came Together,” 274.
Ibid., 274.
162
personalis as analogous to DDM’s approach of augmenting instructional learning with Buddhist
practice.
Wright et al, explain that service learning relies on three conditions: 1) “alignment with
course curricula”—that is, instructional learning in the classroom; 2) “service component where
students work with a high-need community organization,” which is the application of theory put
into practice in a social community; and 3) “students’ reflections of the service learning
experience,” cited as the critical, concluding element of the service learning process, the goal of
which is to allow for the application of what is learned in the classroom to a wider, global
context. Wright, et al. state that, “A body of research supports the positive academic, social, and
cultural impact service learning has on students' learning outcomes,” stressing that “positive
impacts appear to be evident many years after the service learning experience.”419 Therefore, I
believe that an analogy can be drawn with DDM, which is using a similar model, implementing
Buddhist practice instead of service learning. While the specific method used may be different,
the goal in both examples is the same: to fully develop the potential of each student, having
deeper impacts on and teaching students how to be members of society who affect change, long
after leaving the educational institution.
In explaining the difference between “community service” and “community-based
service learning,” Wright et al argue that, “Often, community service turns out to be simple
charity work. Community-based service learning goes beyond charity work as it allows students
to practice theoretical knowledge they learn in the classroom.” Thus, like the community of
practice, service learning combines classroom education with real-life engagement in society into
an institutionalized co-curriculum of theory and practice, where “learning becomes part of the
course learning goals, part of the pedagogical strategy. The community is the beneficiary of
service learning, but it is also a source of information, evaluation, and validation of
knowledge.”420 This is precisely what DDM is engaged in through the community of practice:
students learn about Buddhist theory and history in the classroom, then implement it in
scheduled practice curriculum as well as through diffusion in daily life.
419
420
Ibid.
Ibid.
163
Secularization of Universities in the United States
In contrast to these explicitly religious institutions, in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, we begin to see in America a discourse of secularization in American colleges and
universities, which would come to be criticized as a problematic narrative. Accompanying this
discourse came both a rejection of the claim altogether, and a call to restore the place of religion
to the ever-secularizing American institution of higher learning. If this narrative were true, then
this is more in line with where DDM is starting from in Taiwan, where nationally accredited
institutions of higher education have been largely secularized. This is partly due to the fact that
Taiwan’s population growth after 1949 and the ensuing rapid development of new culture was
already steeped in the trends of “modernity.” While research has shown that higher education in
the US has not been as secularized as popularly thought, there has been a voice in the US to
reintegrate religious values in higher education. What might this say about the roles of religion
and education in a modern democracy? Taiwan seems to be moving in the direction of allowing a
closer relationship between higher education and religion, unless DDBC is an outlier, then
perhaps this trend will continue. Looking to the American situation, might we expect DDM to be
poised to establish further institutes beyond even DDU?
The body of research regarding the presence of religion in American higher educational
institutions not overtly affiliated with a religious tradition largely treats the two domains of
religion and education as separate and exclusive in modern times. Rather than incorporating
education and religious practice into an institutional co-curriculum, or using religious values to
inform academics and social life on campus, American universities are often characterized as
shunning and pushing religion to the periphery.421 Until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, “Educators often assumed that religious principles and biblical knowledge were
coextensive with science, history, and languages.” These earlier educators believed that
religious—that is, Judeo-Christian—principles and knowledge formed the backbone of the
educational endeavor. Cherry, et al argue that this foundation in advancing education allowed
women’s colleges to be established, such as Mount Holyoke, the first women’s college in the
US, founded in 1837, where “higher education for women was justified because it was presumed
421
Conrad Cherry, Betty A. DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
164
to be joined seamlessly with piety… [Catholic and Jewish centers of advanced learning] operated
on the premise that religious and moral instruction was fundamental to all other forms of
learning.”422
However, the popular narrative of American higher educational institutions in the US has
claimed that religion no longer had a place in the American university beginning in the twentieth
century. Studies in the 1990s showed a move toward further “methodological secularization.”
For instance, George Marsden argues that, “Despite the presence of many religion departments
and a few university divinity schools, religion has moved from near the center a century or so
ago to the incidental periphery. …religion in most universities is as about as important as the
baseball team. Not only has religion become peripheral, but also there is a definite bias against
any perceptible religiously informed perspectives getting a hearing in the university
classroom.”423
Interestingly, as a result of East Asian modernization of universities in general, modern
higher education in Taiwan is actually starting from this highly secularized model. As I have
shown, DDM was only able to receive accreditation from the Taiwan Ministry of Education in
2006, a full twenty-one years after the establishment of DDM’s educational institution, as the
MOE consistently turned down a permit for a college devoted only to the study of one religion.
DDM, modeled partially off of what Japan has already begun with sectarian Buddhist
universities, is actually moving higher education past this and returning to a system where
religion has an important place in the college, and where instructional learning and experiential
learning reinforce one another through a co-curriculum of religious practice and religiously
informed academic classroom education. In other words, the organization is developing a system
where higher education is “joined seamlessly with piety” and where “religious and moral
instruction [permeate] the entire curriculum.”424
Cherry, et al complicate and nuance this narrative of the secularization of higher
education in America,425 showing that it is not the case that modern universities completely shun
religion and move it to the periphery, but that religion is still important in the American college
422
Ibid., 2.
Ibid, 3.
424
Ibid., 2.
425
See also Stephen Rowntree, “Ten Theses on Jesuit Higher Education,” America 170, no. 19
(May 28, 1994), 7.
423
165
experience, even within sectarian universities. Still, the American situation is clearly different
from DDM’s model. The primary difference of course is that religious participation in American
colleges is not institutionalized by the university, as it is at DDM. Even at religious American
universities, Amanda Porterfield’s ethnography shows that the institutional religiousity and
students’ lived life are not always congruent.426 This stands in contrast to the DDM model, where
students’ daily life focuses around coursework and studying, and Buddhist practice. In my time
at DDM, I never observed students involved in a social environment contrary to the ideals
promoted by the university. Thus, as far as I saw, there was complete adherence to the values of
DDM among all students. Of course, my time at DDM was relatively limited, and my amount of
observation of students’ social life is in no way a statistically valid study. Thus, this is little more
than anecdotal evidence that I provide, and more research needs to be done in this area.
However, much like the discourse of the decline of Buddhism in China led to its revival,
the discourse of the decline of the place of religion in higher education led some to argue for the
implementation of religious aspects back into higher education in the United States. Responding
to this same narrative of secularization in American higher education in the 1990s, the Christian
philosopher Mark R. Schwehn promotes the implementation of communities of learning in order
for modern American institutes of higher learning to return to religious values, thus leading to
the “reappropriation of certain religious virtues” in order to reconceptualize “the academic
vocation.”427 Richard Rorty, a secular humanist philosopher, and Parker Palmer, a Christian
philosopher, advance the community concept in their critique of the epistemological discourse of
the past three hundred years of Western philosophy, which has focused on physical sciences in
order to prove that our knowledge of the world fits the reality of the world itself. Rorty argues
that this approach, which he calls “foundationalist,” has failed scholars as “Science, rather than
living, became philosophy’s subject, and epistemology its center,”428 whereas Palmer argues that
this approach, referred to as “objectivism,” fractures communities and results in moral decay
which “trends inherently toward violence.” Schwehn locates the intersection of these two men’s
thought at a “quest for community,”429 where “both Rorty and Palmer understand knowledge and
426
Cherry et al, Religion on Campus, 160.
Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22.
428
Ibid., 24.
429
Ibid., 25.
427
166
community as correlative terms.”430 In other words, for these men, knowledge is a dialogue and a
social practice; it is a process through which participants in a community converse in a shared
discourse, “rather than translating it into one’s own.”431 Schwehn takes this communal practice,
or “societas,” as a method of reuniting religious values with higher education, as he believes
“that the most promising argument for an integral relationship between religion and higher
education can be made through a demonstration that the practice of certain spiritual values is and
has always been essential to the process of learning, even within the secular academy.”432
Indeed, if the shared discourse among the community in higher education is reconceptualized to
include religious values and teachings, the community as a whole will acquire knowledge
through a religious lens. This community learning, including a shared religious discourse and
practice, is precisely what DDM has developed at DDSU and DDBC. What might the road ahead
be for religiously rooted institutes of higher education in Taiwan based on these models in
America?
Of course there are many limitations in comparing different regions, cultures, and
religious traditions under the umbrella of "religious education." Still, I would be remiss in
ignoring these analogous models of what no doubt falls under the category of modern higher
education incorporating religious values, teachings, and/or practice. By briefly examining these
other models outside of Buddhist East Asia, we are perhaps left with more questions than
answers, primarily: What does this say about a model that is starting off where most of these
established traditions have taken generations to build up to? What kind of change might we
predict at DDM based on the knowledge of these other models? Certainly the community of
practice can work in an environment of higher education integrating religious practice, as is
evident by looking at Jesuit and especially pesantren education. While DDM’s community of
practice is not yet successful, with some modification it is entirely possible that this will be a
lasting model. And in the event of the absence of an institution of higher education providing
religious education in Taiwan, we might expect, based on the American example, to see a desire
to have other organizations fill the void. If we can draw parallels with these other models, this
may show that indeed there exists a market for higher education institutes that integrate religion.
430
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., quoting Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 1979), 318.
432
Schwehn, Exiles from Eden, 41.
431
167
Thus, despite DDBC’s relatively small enrollment at present, perhaps the organization can more
effectively promote its educational institution by capitalizing on this market by emulating some
of the aforementioned models outside of East Asia. All of these examples, including DDM, seem
to suggest that indeed there is a place for religion in modernity and the “public sphere.”
Future Research
The present research is merely the tip of the iceberg in understanding education at DDM,
a topic which itself is merely one aspect of this influential organization that deserves more
attention from scholars in an array of disciplines including and beyond even Religion and
Anthropology. I hope that future research will continue to examine the practice of education
occurring on the ground at DDM. Of particular interest is the Dharma Drum University, a secular
liberal arts university currently under construction and set to open soon (its inauguration date has
been pushed back since 2009). This university aims to continue to follow the trend of
Shengyan’s view of education, which began with monastic education and progressed to a college
devoted to promoting Buddhist Studies. Moreover, further research needs to be done to check
with graduates of DDBC to assess further the success of the community of practice.
How has DDM’s orthodoxy aimed to, and been successful at, change Taiwan’s
“traditional” practices of “folk” or “popular” religion? Is DDM’s orthodoxy eliminating and
purging these traditions, hiding them, downplaying them, or treating them on equal footing with
their own tradition? An answer may be found through a situation that occurred when the DDM
headquarters was established. Originally, the land that DDM now sits on contained a small altar
devoted to a popular religion deity. However, instead of demolishing the altar in order to
establish the monastery, Shengyan decided to leave it, and, from what I have been told by
informants, even upgraded the facilities of the small shelter in which it is housed. The altar now
sits at the foot of the complex, in front of the main gate. It is not promoted as a part of DDM, and
it is not of particular concern from what I can tell, other than basic maintenance. Therefore,
DDM did not aim to complete wipe out the vestige of popular religion, nor do they try to hide it,
and they certainly do not promote it. Instead, it lies at the foot of the mountain complex, while
DDM proper is positioned at the mountain’s highest plateau, overlooking the area—including the
small altar. In the same way, I do not believe that DDM aims to completely destroy, hide, or
168
certainly promote popular religion in Taiwan. Instead, Shengyan has put DDM on the proverbial
top of the mountain—more authoritative than anything else below, which it overlooks. Thus, the
goal of DDM is certainly to promote orthodox Chinese Buddhism, which would ultimately
preclude popular religious practices. But they appear to be approaching this through the practiceoriented proselytization approach, rather than the discursive approach of openly condemning
popular religion. However, this presentation presents the situation, falsely, a uni-directional
monologue. More research needs to be done to understand how the dialogue between DDM’s
orthodoxy and popular religions operates on the ground in Taiwan.
Furthermore, because Ven. Shengyan passed away in 2009, it remains to be seen what
will happen to DDM without the present voice of its founder. Will contributions continue to be
donated as prominently? Will interest in and attraction to DDM continue to persist? Will the
monastic community continue to grow as needed to uphold the operation of the organization?
Will the organization be able to maintain the vision set out by its founder without either
deviating from the organization’s original purpose or clinging too closely to the words of
Shengyan without taking into account the very change and reinvention that allowed DDM to
come into existence in the first place? What kind of changes remain to be seen for the existing
schools at DDM, and what kind of impact, if any, will they have on secular educational
institutions in Taiwan? What kind of impact, if any, will DDM continue to have outside of
Taiwan and Asia in general?
It seems likely that DDM will continue to exist and thrive for the foreseeable future, as
Shengyan paid close attention to laying out his plans and passing on administrative control in a
democratic system, which he established to ensure that leadership of DDM could in fact continue
without his physical presence. Indeed, the first time I visited DDM was in 2009, only three
months after the passing of Shengyan. As a result, I was interested in knowing what those
individuals associated with the organization thought of its future without their founder, teacher,
and leader. I received nearly the same reply no matter whom I asked—lay or cleric, employee or
casual devotee, male or female: “It will be hard, of course. Yet we know that Shengyan was just
a man, but all of this—everything he taught, worked for, and built, throughout his whole life—is
what is important. This was all for preserving the Buddhadharma, and we will carry it on.”
169
In the time that I have been at DDM since then, this direction has not changed. There
still appears to be a universal consensus that DDM was not about one man, but about preserving
and promoting Buddhadharma. And that may be precisely why DDM is able to survive.
170
APPENDIX
Figures for Chapter Three
The following data (Figures 1-4) are taken from Dharma Drum Buddhist College, “Buddhist
Temples in Taiwan,” DDBC-GIS, http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/taiwanbudgis/
(accessed February 6, 2012).
Buddhist Libraries in Taiwan
(1900-2010)
12
Number of Libraries
10
8
6
4
2
0
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
Year
Figure 18. Increase of Buddhist libraries in Taiwan from 1900-2010, with particular emphasis on
the period after Vens. Miaoguo and Cihang’s short-lived Buddhist seminary in 1948.
171
Buddhist Studies Courses in Taiwan
(1900-2010)
175
Number of Institutes
150
125
100
75
50
25
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Figure 19. Increase of Buddhist Studies courses in Taiwan. Again, note the increased
development following the slight increase around 1948, followed by a steady increase,
particularly between the 1960s and 1980; a further increase in the mid 1980s, followed by an
explosion of courses in the late-1980s with a consistent trajectory that appears to be continuing
to the present.
172
Number of Study Groups and Lectures
Buddhist Study Groups and Lectures in
Taiwan (1900-2010)
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Figure 20. Increase of Buddhist Study Groups and Lectures in Taiwan. Note the similar
trajectory as the increase of Buddhist Studies courses in Figure 2. The close relationship between
these two domains is likely a result of increased Buddhist institutes being founded throughout
Taiwan.
173
Number
Comparison of Budhist Libraries,
Courses, and Groups/Lectures in Taiwan
(1900-2010)
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1900
Libraries
Courses
Groups/Lectures
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
Year
Figure 21. A composite graph consisting of Figures 1-3, note the close relationship among the
each line’s trajectory, particularly between Buddhist Studies courses and groups/lectures.
174
Research Approval from Florida State University’s Human Subjects Committee
Office of the Vice President For Research
Human Subjects Committee
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742
(850) 644-8673 · FAX (850) 644-4392
APPROVAL MEMORANDUM
Date: 4/25/2011
To: Daniel Tuzzeo
Address:
Dept.: RELIGION
From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair
Re:
Use of Human Subjects in Research
Buddhist Modern: Monasticism, Social Change, and Education on Dharma Drum Mountain
The application that you submitted to this office in regard to the use of human subjects in the
proposal referenced above have been reviewed by the Secretary, the Chair, and one member of
the Human Subjects Committee. Your project is determined to be Expedited per per 45 CFR §
46.110(7) and has been approved by an expedited review process.
The Human Subjects Committee has not evaluated your proposal for scientific merit, except to
weigh the risk to the human participants and the aspects of the proposal related to potential risk
and benefit. This approval does not replace any departmental or other approvals, which may be
required.
175
If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent
form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be
used in recruiting research subjects.
If the project has not been completed by 4/23/2012 you must request a renewal of approval for
continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your
expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request
renewal of your approval from the Committee.
You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by
the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol
change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition,
federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any
unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others.
By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor is
reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects
involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to
insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS
regulations.
This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protection. The
Assurance Number is FWA00000168/IRB number IRB00000446.
Cc: Joseph Hellweg, Advisor
HSC No. 2011.6218
176
Sample Permission and Informed Consent Form for Ethnographic Research
FSU Research Consent Form
Buddhist Modern: Monasticism, Social Change, and Education on Dharma Drum
Mountain
I grant Daniel Tuzzeo permission to conduct research at Dharma Drum Mountain’s (DDM)
Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC)/Dharma Drum Sangha University (DDSU), including
observing, interviewing, and surveying students, faculty, staff, laity, and monastics,
This study is being conducted by Daniel Tuzzeo, department of Religion at Florida State
University (FSU), as part of thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Hellweg and Dr.
Jimmy Yu, department of Religion at Florida State University.
Background Information:
The purpose of this study is: To learn more about participants and education at DDM.
Compensation:
You will not be paid for participating in this research study.
Confidentiality:
The records of this study will be kept private and confidential to the extent permitted by law. In
any sort of report I might publish, I will not include any information that will make it possible to
identify a subject, unless they request to be identified. Research records will be stored securely
and only the researcher will have access to the records. Computer files will be password
protected and hard copies will be kept in a locked room. No one else will have access to these
materials. Materials will be kept for at least ten years.
Voluntary Nature of the Study:
Participation in this study is voluntary. You are not required to consent to the research.
177
Contacts and Questions:
The researcher conducting this study is Daniel Tuzzeo. You may ask any questions now. If you
have questions later, you are encouraged to contact him directly, or at a later date at
The researcher’s
advisors are Dr. Joseph Hellweg
and Dr. Jimmy Yu
), Florida
State University,
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this study and would like to talk to someone
other than the researcher, you are encouraged to contact the Florida State University Internal
Review Board at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 323062742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this information to keep for your records.
Statement of Consent:
I have read the above information. I have asked questions and have received answers. I grant
permission for Daniel Tuzzeo to conduct research at Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC).
________________
Signature
________________
Signature of Investigator
_________________
Date
_________________
Date
178
Sample Informed Consent Form as Approved by HSC
FSU Behavioral Consent Form
Buddhist Modern: Monasticism, Social Change, and Education on Dharma Drum
Mountain
You are invited to be in a research study of participants at Dharma Drum Mountain. You were
selected as a possible participant because of your involvement at Dharma Drum Mountain. I ask
that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the study.
This study is being conducted by Daniel Tuzzeo, department of Religion at Florida State
University, as part of thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Hellweg, department of
Religion at Florida State University.
Background Information:
The purpose of this study is: To learn more about participants at Dharma Drum Mountain.
Procedures:
If you agree to be in this study, I would ask you to do the following things:
You will be asked to answer some basic questions about your experience at Dharma Drum
Mountain. No questions will be of an incriminating nature, and all answers you give will be kept
confidential. Your identity will not be published unless you declare that you want it to be. The
interview will involve audio and/or video recording, but if you chose, we can proceed without
recording it. Your participation is voluntary, and you can stop the survey or interview at any
time without any penalty to you.
This information will not be released to a third party.
179
I will store all materials in a safe, private location in my home. Computer files will be password
protected and hard copies will be kept in a locked room. No one else will have access to these
materials. Confidentiality can be protected only to the extent permitted by law. Materials will
be kept indefinitely.
Risks and benefits of being in the Study:
You will benefit from this project by being given a voice in issues that concern your involvement
at Dharma Drum Mountain. This research gives you an opportunity to express you concerns
regarding daily life as a participant at Dharma Drum Mountain, and to provide information to the
wider academic community about this organization, which is currently greatly understudied.
Research may bring more attention to the organization and allow for greater publicity, possibly
recruiting new members.
Compensation:
You will not be paid for participating in this research study.
Confidentiality:
The records of this study will be kept private and confidential to the extent permitted by law. In
any sort of report I might publish, I will not include any information that will make it possible to
identify a subject, unless you request to be identified. Research records will be stored securely
and only researchers will have access to the records. Computer files will be password protected
and hard copies will be kept in a locked room. No one else will have access to these materials.
Materials will be kept for at least ten years.
Voluntary Nature of the Study:
Participation in this study is voluntary. Your decision whether or not to participate will not
affect your current or future relations with Dharma Drum Mountain. If you decide to participate,
you are free not to answer any question or to withdraw at any time without affecting those
relationships.
180
Contacts and Questions:
The researcher conducting this study is Daniel Tuzzeo. You may ask any question you have
now. If you have a question later, you are encouraged to contact him at
u. The researcher’s advisor is Dr.
Joseph Hellweg, Florida State University,
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this study and would like to talk to someone
other than the researcher, you are encouraged to contact the Florida State University Internal
Review Board at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 323062742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this information to keep for your records.
Statement of Consent:
I have read the above information. I have asked questions and have received answers. I consent
to participate in the study and be recorded.
________________
Signature
________________
Signature of Investigator
_________________
Date
_________________
Date
181
Sample Informed Consent Form in Chinese
參
研究同意書
簡介
此研究的目的是爲了深入了解法鼓山的教育，並邀請所有法鼓山僧伽大學/法鼓佛教學院
的現任教師以及學生參加。請在參加研究前先閱讀此同意書，如果您
此同意書有任何疑
問，請在訪談開始前向研究人員詢問。研究人員Daniel Tuzzeo目前為佛羅里達州立大學宗
教系的碩士班學生，此研究為他的碩士論文主題。他的指
教授是佛羅里達州立大學宗教
系的Jimmy Yu教授以及Joseph Hellweg教授。
背景資料
這項研究的目的是透過您的個人經驗來更進一步的了解法鼓山的教育。此一資料被稱為研
究資料。研究人員會負責保密您所填寫的資料，除非您希望您的個人資料被公開，否則所
有個人資料都會被保密。
訪談程序
如果您願意參加此研究，請先了解以下幾點事宜
訪談中的所有問題都不會
果您同意的話，我
您產生不利，您的資料
會被保密。此訪談
會全程錄音
如
會同時進行錄影。參加研究是自願的，無論您是否參加研究，您的決
定不會影響您現在或未來
法鼓山的關係。如果您選擇參加研究，您仍有權力在訪談途中
選擇停止。
研究的風險和利益
藉由參加此研究，您
能提出自己
法鼓山的看法。由於目前尚未有學者研究法鼓山的教
育，因此您的參
會讓法鼓山這個團體受到更多學者的注目，也可能更進一步的讓一般
民眾
趣。
法鼓山產生
182
報酬
此為無金錢物質酬勞之面談，純屬教育研究之用途。
隱私權的保障
您的所有資料都會被保密。研究資料
會被上鎖保管，除了研究人員以外不會有其他人能
閱讀此資料。此研究資料至少會被保留十年。當公開研究報告時，除非您希望您的個人資
料被公開，否則所有個人資料都會被保密。
聯絡方式
研究人員為Daniel Tuzzeo。當進行訪談時，您可以隨時提出任何問題。如果訪談後您有任
何疑問，您可以用以下方式
研究人員聯繫。
地址
電話:
; 電子郵件:
研究人員的指
.
教授為Jimmy Yu教授,
和
Florida State University,
Joseph Hellweg教授, Florida State University,
如果您
此研究有疑問並想
研究人員或其指
教授之外的
業人士討論，您可以
以下
單位聯繫: Florida State University Internal Review Board, 2010 Levy Street, Research Building
B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742; 電話: +1-850-644-8633; 電子郵件:
[email protected].
訪談後您
參
會拿到一份此同意書的影本。
者聲明
我聽取了本研究的口頭說明。在口頭說明時有一位熟悉我的語言的口譯員在場。我有機會
提出問題。我知道如果以後我
研究或是研究參
者的權利有任何問題，本表格第一和第
二頁上列出的人員會為我解答。我自願同意參加參加研究。
183
Participant’s Statement
I have been given an oral presentation of the research study. An interpreter fluent in my language
has been present during the oral presentation. I have had the chance to ask questions. I
understand that the persons listed on the first and second page of this form will answer any future
questions I have about the study or about research participants’ rights. I voluntarily agree to take
part in this research study.
______________________________________
研究參 者正楷姓名
Printed Name of Research Participant
_______________________________________________________________________
研究參 者簽名
Signature of Research Participant
___________ _____________
日期
時間
Date
Time
184
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Boston College, “A Pocket Guide to Jesuit Education,” Beginnings,
http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/offices/mission/publications/guide/beginnings.html.
Accessed February 16, 2012.
Chung-Hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies. “Chung-Hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies.”
http://www.chibs.edu.tw/eng_html/index_eng00.html. Accessed March 14, 2012.
Confucius, and James Legge. Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the
Mean. New York: Dover Publications, 1971.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. “Center for Practice and Study.” Department of
Buddhist Studies. http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/. Accessed January 10, 2012.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. “Characteristics and Planning.” Center for Practice and
Study. http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/plan.html. Accessed January 10, 2012.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. “Credit Provisions.” Department of Buddhist Studies.
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/buddhist_studies4/credit.html. Accessed January 10, 2012.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. Dharma Drum Buddhist College. Informational
pamphlet.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. “Semester Meditation.” Center for Practice and Study.
http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/cps/crp.html. Accessed January 10, 2012.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College. “Vision (Chuangxiao linian 創校理念).” About the
School. http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/zh/aboutthecollege/vision.html. Accessed January 10,
2012.
185
Dharma Drum Mountain. Dharma Drum Mountain. 2nd ed. July, 2007. Informational
pamphlet.
Dharma Drum Mountain. “Dharma Drum Mountain.” http://www.dharmadrum.org.
Accessed March 14, 2012.
________. “Envisioning the Future of Global Buddhism,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=53. Accessed February 23,
2012.
________. “Establishing DDM,” Dharma Drum Mountain,
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=51. Accessed February 23,
2012.
________. “The Origin,” Dharma Drum Mountain
http://www.dharmadrum.org/content/about/about2.aspx?sn=48. Accessed February 23,
2012.
Dharma Drum Sangha University. Dharma Drum Sangha University. Taipei: Dharma
Drum Publishing Corporation, March 2006. Informational pamphlet.
Dharma Drum Sangha University, “School Introduction” (Xuexiao 學校簡介), About,
http://sanghau.ddm.org.tw/aboutus/AboutUs1.aspx. Accessed January 10, 2012.
Dharma Drum University, “About DDU,” Dharma Drum University,
http://www.ddc.edu.tw/en/about. Accessed February 5, 2012.
Dharma Drum University, “Homepage,” Dharma Drum University,
http://www.ddc.edu.tw/. Accessed February 5, 2012.
186
Fisher, D. W. Calvin Wilson Mateer, Forty-Five Years a Missionary in Shantung, China:
a Biography. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1911.
Fu Jen Catholic University. “Historical Sketch.” About Fu Jen.
http://140.136.240.107/english_fju/index.php/about-fujen/historical-sketch. Accessed
February 29, 2012.
Hodous, Lewis. Buddhism and Buddhists in China. Auckland: Floating Press, 1923.
Humanity Magazine, August, 2011.
International Conference on Education. The International Conference on Education Held
at Philadelphia, July 17 and 18, in Connection with the International Exhibition of 1876.
Washington: Govt. print. off., 1877.
Johnston, James. China and Formosa: The Story of the Mission of the Presbyterian
Church of England: With Many Illustrations Prepared for This Work and Four Maps.
Tapei: Ch'eng Wen Pub. Co., 1972 (originally published 1888).
Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christian Missions in China. New York:
Macmillan, 1929.
Lee Chih-fu, Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, "Appendix: A Short Introduction
to the Life of Ven. Sheng-yen," http://www.chibs.edu.tw/ch_html/chbj/13/chbj1329.htm.
Accessed 9 February 2012.
MacNair, Harley Farnsworth. Modern Chinese History: Selected Readings: A Collection
of Extracts from Various Sources Chosen to Illustrate Some of the Chief Phases of
China's International Relations During the Past Hundred Years. Shanghai: Commercial
Press, 1927.
187
Martin, W. A. P. Report on the System of Public Instruction in China. Washington: Govt.
Print. Off., 1877.
Master Sheng Yen. “Dharma Drum Lineage.”
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_04_05.aspx
Master Sheng Yen. “Timeline.”
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=2 Accessed
10 February 2012.
Monroe, Paul. A Report on Education in China (for American Educational Authorities),
1922.
Peake, Cyrus Henderson. Nationalism and Education in Modern China. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1932.
Pott, F. L. Hawks. The Emergency in China. New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1913.
Profile, “Timeline,” Master Sheng Yen,
http://www.shengyen.org/e_content/content/about/about_01_2.aspx?PageID=3. Accessed
20 February 2012.
Purcell, Victor. Problems of Chinese Education. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co,
1936.
Putnam Weale, B. L. The Fight for the Republic in China. New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1917.
Regis University. “Jesuit Values.” About Regis.
http://www.regis.edu/regis.asp?sctn=abt&p1=mjv, Accessed February 5, 2012.
188
Reichelt, Karl Ludvig, and Kathrina Van Wagenen Bugge. Truth and Tradition in
Chinese Buddhism: A Study of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism. Shanghai, China:
The Commercial Press, Limited, 1927.
Richard, Timothy. Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences. New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1916.
Rowntree, Stephen. “Ten Theses on Jesuit Higher Education,” America 170, no.
19 (May 28, 1994).
Sheng Yen Education Foundation, “Sheng Yen Education Foundation,”
www.shengyen.org.tw/eng/eng.htm. Accessed March 14, 2012.
Sheng Yen. Footprints in the Snow: The Autobiography of a Chinese Buddhist Monk,
Translated by Kenneth Wapner and Rebecca Li, New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Shengyan. Orthodox Chinese Buddhism: A Contemporary Chan Master’s Answers to Common
Questions. NY: Dharma Drum Publications, 2005.
________. Getting the Buddha Mind: On the Practice of Chan Retreat. 2nd ed.
Translated by Ming Yee Wang, Paul Kennedy, and Karen Swaine, Elmhurst, New York:
Dharma Drum Publications, 2005 (1st ed. Publoished in 1982).
________. “Shengyan fashi qishi nianpu 聖嚴法師七十年譜.”
http://www.shengyen.org/content/about/about_01_3.aspx. Accessed March 14, 2012.
________. “Fagu shan de san da jiaoyu 法鼓山的三大教育,” from Fagu shan de
fangxiang
法鼓山的方向
. In Fagu quanji, di 8 ji, di 6 ce, Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua
shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 130-131.
189
________. “Fagu shan de san da jiaoyu 法鼓山的三大教育,” from Fagu jiafeng
風
法鼓家
, in Fagu quanji, di 8 ji, di 11 ce, Taibei Shi: Fagu wenhua shiye gufen youxian
gongsi, 1999, 11-13.
________. “Tisheng ren de pinzhi jianshe renjian jingtu 提昇人的品質建設人間淨土,”
from Fagu shan de fangxiang
法鼓山的方向
, in Fagu quanji, di 8 ji, di 6 ce, Taibei
Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 26-29.
________. Gui cheng. Taipei: Dong chu chu ban she, 1993.
________. “‘Liang’an foxue jiaoyu jiaoliu zuotanhui’ yinyan
引言” from Jiaoyu, wenhua, wenxue
兩岸佛學教育交流座談會
教育‧文化‧文學
. In Fagu quanji, di 3 ji,
di 3 ce, Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 106-113.
________. Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng
聖嚴法師學思
程
. In Fagu quanji, di 3 ji,
di 8 ce, Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999.
________. “Weimo jing liujiang 維摩經六講” from Shuxu
書序
, In Fagu quanji, di 3
ji, di 5 ce, Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 295-299.
________. “Women bu ban jiaoyu fojiao jiu meiyou mingtian 我們不辦教育佛教就沒有明
天” from Jiaoyu, wenhua, wenxue
教育‧文化‧文學
. In Fagu quanji, di 3 ji, di 3
ce, Taibei Shi: Fa gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 147-151.
________. Yi: Wuyou de tongnian 一、無憂的童年. Tongnian he shaonian 童年和少年,
Shengyan fashi xuesi licheng 聖嚴法師學思
190
程), 9-19.
________. “Zhongguo dangdai fojiao de kumen 中國當代佛教的苦悶” from Jiaoyu,
wenhua, wenxue
教育‧文化‧文學
. In Fagu quanji, di 3 ji, di 3 ce, Taibei Shi: Fa
gu wen hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 1999, 43-47.
Sheng Yen and John Crook, Illuminating Silence: The Practice of Chinese Zen. London:
Watkins Publishing, 2002.
Sheng-yen, and Daniel B. Stevenson. Hoofprint of the Ox: Principles of the Chan
Buddhist Path As Taught by a Modern Chinese Master. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001.
Smith, Arthur H. The Uplift of China. New York: Young People's Missionary Movement
of the United States and Canada, 1908.
Taixu, “Zhengli sengjie zhidu lun,” in Taixu dashi quanshu: Sengzhi, v. 9 (Beijing: Zhongjiao
wenhua chubanshe, 1005).
Taylor, Howard, and Howard Taylor. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission: The
Growth of a Work of God. London: China Inland Mission, 1918.
Van Dorn, Harold Archer. Twenty Years of the Chinese Republic; Two Decades of
Progress. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1932.
Wolferstan, Bertram. The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907. London: Sands
& Co., 1909.
191
Secondary Sources
Adams, Donald K. Education and Modernization in Asia. Reading, Mass: AddisonWesley Pub. Co, 1970.
Agar, Michael H. Speaking of Ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1986.
Ahir, D. C. The Pioneers of Buddhist Revival in India. Bibliotheca Indo-Buddhica, no.
70. Delhi, India: Sri Satguru Publications, 1989.
Almond, Philip C. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Andreasen, Esben. Popular Buddhism in Japan: Shin Buddhist Religion & Culture.
Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2003.
Ashiwa, Yoshiko and David L. Wank, “The Globalization of Chinese Buddhism: Clergy
and Devotee Networks in the Twentieth Century,” International Journal of Asian Studies
65, no. 2 (May 2006): 337-359.
________. Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Ayers, William. Chang Chih-tung and Educational Reform in China. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1971.
192
Bakken, Børge. The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the
Dangers of Modernity in China. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Barrett, David P., and Lawrence N. Shyu. China in the Anti-Japanese War, 1937-1945:
Politics, Culture and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Bays, Daniel H. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996.
________. "The Nature of Provincial Political Authority in Late Ch'ing Times:
Chang Chih-Tung in Canton, 1884-1889." Modern Asian Studies 4 (1970): 325-347.
________. China Enters the Twentieth Century: Chang Chih-tung and the Issues of a New
Age, 1895-1909. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1978.
Bays, Daniel H., and Ellen Widmer. China's Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural
Connections, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Beal, Samuel. Buddhism in China. Non-Christian Religious Systems. New Delhi: [J.
Jetley for] Asian Educational Services, 1996.
Beasley, W. G. The Meiji Restoration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Bechert, Heinz, and Richard F. Gombrich. Der Buddhismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart
München: C.H. Beck, 2008.
Bechert, Heinz, Hellmuth Hecker, and Duy Tu Vu. Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft
in den Ländern des Theravāda-Buddhismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Metzner, 1966.
Bergere, Marie-Claire. The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937.
Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
193
Berkwitz, Stephen C. Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late
Medieval Sri Lanka. Brill's Indological library, v. 23. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Bernard, H. Russell. Research Methods in Anthropology, 4th edition. Thousand Oaks:
Sage Publications, 2006.
Bernhardt, Kathryn. Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region,
1840-1950. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Bianchi, Esther. “The Tantric Rebirth Movement in Modern China: Esoteric Buddhism
Re-Vivified By The Japanese And Tibetan Traditions.” Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hung 57, no. 1 (2004): 31–54.
Biggerstaff, Knight. The Earliest Modern Government Schools in China. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1961.
Bingenheimer, Marcus. “Chinese Buddhism Unbound - Rebuilding and Redefining
Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan.” In Kalpakam Sankarnarayan (Ed.), Buddhism in Global
Perspective, Mumbai: Somaiya Publications, 2003.
________. “Some Remarks on the Usage of Renjian Fojiao and the
Contribution of Venerable Yinshun to Chinese Buddhist Modernism” In Development
and Practice of Humanitarian Buddhism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Mutsu Hsu,
Jinhua Chen, and Lori Meeks (Eds.). Hua-lien (Taiwan): Tzuchi University Press, 2007,
141-161.
Blackburn, Anne M. Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century
Lankan Monastic Culture. Buddhisms. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
________. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
194
Blum, Mark Laurence, and Shinʼya Yasutomi. Rennyo and the Roots of Modern Japanese
Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bolitho, Harold. Meiji Japan. Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Borthwick, Sally. Education and Social Change in China: The Beginnings of the Modern
Era. Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1983.
Botjer, George F. A Short History of Nationalist China, 1919-1949. New York: Putnam,
1979.
Bowers, John Z., J. William Hess, and Nathan Sivin. Science and Medicine in TwentiethCentury China: Research and Education. Science, Medicine, and Technology in East
Asia, v. 3. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, the University of Michigan, 1988.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social
Anthropology, 16. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and James Samuel Coleman. Social Theory for a Changing Society.
Boulder: Westview Press, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture. Theory, Culture & Society. London: Sage, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and John B. Thompson. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Brickman, William W. Guide to Research in Educational History. New York: New York
University Bookstore, 1949.
195
Brook, Timothy. Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik, and David Strand. Reconstructing Twentieth-century China:
State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Bruner, Jerome S. The Culture of Education. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1996.
Buoye, Thomas M. China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future. Ann Arbor, Mich:
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.
Buswell, Robert E. ed. Encyclopedia of Buddhism, New York: Macmillan Reference,
2004.
Cameron, Meribeth E. "The Public Career of Chang Chih-Tung 1837-1909." Pacific
Historical Review 7 (1938): 187-210.
Campany, Robert Ford. Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early
Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009.
________. “The Real Presence for Joseph M. Kitagawa.” History of Religions 32, no. 3
(1993): 233-272.
Chan, Ming K., and Arif Dirlik. Schools Into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the
Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927-1932. Durham
[N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1991.
Chandler, Stuart. Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: the Foguang Buddhist Perspective
on Modernization and Globalization. Topics in contemporary Buddhism. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 2004.
196
Chang, Peng Chun. Education for Modernization in China: A Search for Criteria of
Curriculum Construction in View of the Transition in National Life, with Special
Reference to Secondary Education. New York city: Teachers college, Columbia
University, 1923.
Chauncey, Helen R. Schoolhouse Politicians: Locality and State During the Chinese
Republic. Studies of the East Asian Institute. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
Chen, Joseph T. The May Fourth Movement in Shanghai, 1964.
________. The May Fourth Movement in Shanghai; The Making of a Social Movement in
Modern China. Tʻoung pao, 9. Leiden: Brill, 1971.
Chen, Theodore Hsi-en. The Maoist Educational Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1974.
Chen, Xiaoming. From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo
and the Chinese Path to Communism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Cheng, James Chester. Chinese Sources for the Taiping Rebellion, 1850-1864. [Hong
Kong]: Hong Kong University Press, 1963.
Cherry, Conrad, Betty A. DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield. Religion on Campus. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Chiang, Yung-chen. Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Chʻien, Chün-jui, and John N. Hawkins. Educational Theory in the People's Republic of
China; The Report of Qian Junrui. Asian Studies at Hawaii, no. 6. [Honolulu]: University
of Hawaii Press, 1971.
197
Chilcott, John H., Norman C. Greenberg, and Herbert B. Wilson. Readings in the SocioCultural Foundations of Education. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub. Co, 1968.
Chow, Kai-wing. Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity.
Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefied, 2008.
Chow, Kai-wing. Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity.
Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefied, 2008.
Chu, Don-chean. Patterns of Education for the Developing Nations; Tao's Work in
China, 1917-1946. Tainan, Taiwan: Kao-chang Print. Co, 1966.
Clarke, Peter B. Japanese New Religions: In Global Perspective. Richmond, Surrey:
Curzon, 1999.
Clart, Philip, and Charles B. Jones, eds. Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and
Innovation in a Changing Society. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.
Cleverley, John F. The Schooling of China: Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Education
[Chung-kuo pʻei hsün jen tsʻai chih tao lu]. Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Coble, Parks M. Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi,
1937-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
________. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937. Cambridge,
Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1980.
Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
198
Cong, Xiaoping. Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State,
1897-1937. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.
Cooke, Gerald. “In Search of the Present State of Buddhism in Japan.” In Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 42, no. 1 (Mar., 1974): 18-34.
Craig, Albert M. Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1961.
Culp, Robert Joseph. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in
Southeastern China, 1912-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.
Curran, Thomas D. Educational Reform in Republican China: The Failure of Educators
to Create a Modern Nation = [Minguo shi dai de jiao yu gai ge : jiao yu jia chuang zao
xian dai min zu de shi bai]. Chinese Studies, v. 40. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press,
2005.
“The Current State of Sectarian Universities.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31,
Traditional Buddhism in Contemporary Japan (2004): 429-464.
Davis, Winston. “Buddhism and the Modernization of Japan.” In History of Religions
28, no. 4 (May, 1989): 304-339.
Deng, Peng. Private Education in Modern China. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997.
Dessi, Ugo. “Shin Buddhism, Authority, and the Fundamental Law of Education.” In
Numen 56 (2009): 523–544.
DeVido, Elise Anne. Taiwan's Buddhist nuns. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
199
Dewalt, Kathleen M., Billie R. Dewalt, and Coral B. Wayland. “Participant Observation.”
In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. H. Russell Bernard, ed. Walnut
Creek: AltaMira Press, 1998.
Dillon, Nara, and Jean Chun Oi. At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social
Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2008.
Dolezelová-Velingerová, Milena, Oldrich Král, and Graham Martin Sanders. The
Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China's May Fourth Project. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.
Dorn, Frank. The Sino-Japanese War, 1937-41; From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl
Harbor. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Dreyfus, Georges B. J. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan
Buddhist Monk. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2003.
Du, Ruiqing. Chinese Higher Education: A Decade of Reform and Development (19781988). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern
China. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Duke, Benjamin. The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National
School System, 1872-1890. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2009.
Eastman, Lloyd E. Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 19371949. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1984.
200
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Peter N. Gregory. Religion and Society in Tʼang and Sung
China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996.
Elman, Benjamin A. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Elman, Benjamin A., and Alexander Woodside. Education and Society in Late Imperial
China, 1600-1900. Studies on China, 19. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994.
Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, Linda L. Shaw. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Eppsteiner, Fred, ed. The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism.
Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988.
Feng, Chongyi, and David S. G. Goodman. North China at War: The Social Ecology of
Revolution, 1937-1945. World social change. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2000.
Fetterman, David M., and Mary Anne Pitman. Educational Evaluation: Ethnography in
Theory, Practice, and Politics. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986.
Feuerwerker, Albert, Rhoads Murphey, and Mary (Clabaugh) Wright. Approaches to
Modern Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
201
Fewsmith, Joseph. Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant
Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890-1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1985.
Findly, Ellison Banks. Women's Buddhism, Buddhism's Women: Tradition, Revision,
Renewal. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000.
Fischer, Louis, and Donald R. Thomas. Social Foundations of Educational Decisions.
Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub. Co, 1965.
Fitzgerald, C. P. Revolution in China. New York: Praeger, 1952.
Fitzgerald, John. Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist
Revolution. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Fogel, Joshua A., and Peter Gue Zarrow. Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and
the Concept of Citizenship, 1890-1920. Studies on Modern China. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, 1997.
Forster, Lancelot. The New Culture in China. London: Allen & Unwin, 1936.
Foulk, T. Griffith. “The Ch'an Tsung in Medieval China: School, Lineage, or What?” The
Pacific World, no. 8 (1992): 18-31.
Fraser, Stewart E., and Kuangliang Xu. Chinese Education and Society, a Bibliographic
Guide; the Cultural Revolution and its Aftermath. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts
and Sciences Press, 1972.
Fujitani, Takashi. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
202
Fujiwara, Satoko and 藤原聖子. “Survey on Religion and Higher Education in Japan.” In
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, Essays from the XIXth
WorldCongress of the IAHR, Tokyo, March 2005 (2005), pp. 353-370.
Galt, Howard Spilman. 1952. A History of Chinese Educational Institutions. London: A.
Probsthain, 1950.
Gjertson, Donald E. “The Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tale: A Preliminary Survey,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 101, no. 3 (1981): 287-301.
Gimello, Robert. “Ch'eng-kuan on the Hua-yen Trinity.” In Chung-Hwa Buddhist
Journal 9, Taipei: The Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies (1996).
Glosser, Susan L. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003.
Goldman, Merle, and Elizabeth J. Perry. Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern
China. Harvard Contemporary China series, 13. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2002.
Goldman, Merle and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Goldstein, Melvyn C., and Matthew Kapstein. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet:
Religious Revival and Cultural Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Goonatilake, Susantha. Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Goossaert, Vincent. “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” In The
Journal of Asian Studies 65 (2006): 307-335.
203
________. “The Concept of Religion in China and the West,” Diogenes 205 (2005): 13-20.
Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. The Religious Question in Modern China.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Goto, Harumi. Japan and Britain in Shanghai, 1925-31. St. Antony's Series. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Graham, Gael. Gender, Culture, and Christianity: American Protestant Mission Schools
in China, 1880-1930. Asian Thought and Culture, v. 25. New York: P. Lang, 1995.
Gregory, Peter N., and Daniel Aaron Getz, eds. Buddhism in the Sung, Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
Greene, Maxine. Landscapes of Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 1978.
Guba, Egon G. and Yvonnes Lincoln. Judging the Quality of Fourth Generation
Evaluation. In Fourth Generation Evaluation. Egon G. Guba and Yvonnes Lincoln, eds.
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1989.
Gulick, Edward Vose. Teaching in Wartime China: A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Studies
in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987.
________. "Religion in the Public Sphere." European Journal Of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (April
2006), 1-25.
Han, Dongping. The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their
Impact on China's Rural Development. New York: Garland Pub, 2000.
204
Hashimoto, Mineo, and Tatsuo Murakami. 2003. "Two models of the modernization of
Japanese Buddhism: Kiyozawa Manshi and D T Suzuki." Eastern Buddhist 35,
no. 1-2: 6-41.
Hardacre, Helen. Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1986.
Harrell, Stevan, and Huang Chun-chieh, eds. Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
Hashimoto, Mineo, and Tatsuo Murakami, "Two models of the modernization of
Japanese Buddhism: Kiyozawa Manshi and D T Suzuki," Eastern Buddhist 35, no. 1-2
(2003): 6-41.
Hefner, Robert W. Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast
Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.
Heine, Steven, and Charles S. Prebish. Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of
an Ancient Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Henriot, Christian, and Wen-Hsin Yeh. In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under
Japanese Occupation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Hershatter, Gail. Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 1996.
Hobsbawm, E. J., and T. O. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge
[Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hockx, Michel, and Kirk A. Denton. Literary Societies of Republican China. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2008.
205
Holt, John, Jacob N. Kinnard, and Jonathan S. Walters. Constituting Communities:
Theravāda Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2003.
Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. The Rise of Modern China. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Hu, Changdu. Aspects of Chinese Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1969.
Hu, Puyu. A Brief History of Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Taipei, Taiwan: Chung
Wu Pub. Co, 1974.
Hua, Shiping. “The Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Late Qing Reform (1898) Revisited:
Strategies and Philosophies.” East Asia (Piscataway, N.J.) 21, no. 3 (December 01,
2004): 3-22.
Huang, C. Julia. Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi
Movement. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Huang, Songkang, and Xun Lu. Lu Hsün and the New Culture Movement of Modern
China. Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1957.
Huimin Bhiksu. “From CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association) Electronic
Tripitaka Collection to BIP (Buddhist Informatics Program) and IBA (Integrated
Buddhist Archives).” Paper presented to the EBTI After 15 and CBETA at 10 Years:
Joint International Conference on Digital Buddhist Studies, Jinshan, February 15-17,
2008.
Hung, Chang-tai. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
206
Huters, Theodore. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and
Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005.
Huters, Theodore, Roy Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu. Culture & State in Chinese History:
Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques. Irvine Studies in the Humanities. Stanford,
Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Hayhoe, Ruth. China's Universities, 1895-1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict. New
York: Garland Pub, 1996.
Hockx, Michel, and Kirk A. Denton. Literary Societies of Republican China. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2008.
Huters, Theodore. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and
Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005.
Ikeda, Eishun. “Teaching Assemblies and Lay Societies in the Formation of Modern
Sectarian Buddhism.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Spring,
1998), pp. 11-44.
International Conference on Religion, Modernity, and the State in China and Taiwan, and
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State
Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Carl Heinrich Becker, M. Falski, Paul
Langevin, and R. H. Tawney. The Reorganisation of Education in China. Paris: League
of Nations' Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1932.
International Seminar on Higher Education in Buddhism. International Seminar on
Higher Education in Buddhism. Bangkok, Thailand: [Secretariat, World Fellowship of
Buddhists, 1968.
207
Israel, John. Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
Jackson, Bruce. Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Jessup, James Brooks. The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 19201956. Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley: 2010.
Jian, Youwen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1973.
Jondhale, Surendra, and Johannes Beltz. Reconstructing the World: B.R. Ambedkar and
Buddhism in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Jones, Charles Brewer. Buddhism in Taiwan: An Historical Survey. Dissertation:
University of Virginia, 1996.
________. Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990. Honolulu, HI: University
of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
Josephson, Jason Ānanda. “When Buddhism Became a ‘Religion,’ Japanese Journal of
Religious Studies 33, no. 1 (2006): 143–168.
Kapstein, Matthew. Buddhism Between Tibet and China. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
2009.
208
Karl, Rebecca E., and Peter Gue Zarrow. Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political
and Cultural Change in Late Qing China. Cambridge, Mass: Published by the Harvard
University Asia Center, 2002.
Karunyakara, Lella. Revival of Buddhism in Modern India: The Role of B.R. Ambedkar
and the Dalai Lama XIV. New Delhi: Ashish Pub. House, 1995.
Kawahashi, Noriko and 川橋範子. "Feminist Buddhism as Praxis: Women in Traditional
Buddhism." In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3/4, Feminism and
Religion in Contemporary Japan, 2003, 291-313.
Keenan, Barry C. The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political
Power in the Early Republic. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 81. Cambridge, Mass:
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1977.
Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
Kempner, Kenneth Marc, and William G. Tierney. The Social Role of Higher Education:
Comparative Perspectives. New York: Garland Pub, 1996.
Kennedy, Thomas L. “Chang Chih-Tung and the Struggle for Strategic Industrialization:
The Establishment of the Hanyang Arsenal, 1884-1895.” In Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 33 (1974): 154-182.
Ketelaar, James Edward. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its
Persecution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Kieschnick, John. The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002.
209
Kimball, Solon Toothaker. Culture and the Educative Process: An Anthropological
Perspective. Anthropology & Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974.
King, Alexander F. and Don E. Robertson. Residential Colleges: Reforming American
Higher Education. Louisville, Ky: Oxford International Round Table, 1998.
Kirby, William C. State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars.
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 193. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center,
2000.
Kneller, George F. Educational Anthropology: An Introduction. New York: Wiley, 1965.
Kotler, Arnold, ed. Engaged Buddhist Reader. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996.
Kraft, Kenneth. The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism: A New Map of the Path. New York:
Weatherhill, 2000.
Kuhn, Dieter. The Age of Confucian Rule: the Song Transformation of China.
Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Kuo, Cheng-tian. Religion and Democracy in Taiwan. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2008.
Kvale, Steinar and Svend Brinkmann. Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative
Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2008.
Kwong, Julia. Chinese Education in Transition: Prelude to the Cultural Revolution.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979.
Kwong, Luke S.K., “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days
Reform of 1898,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (July, 2000): 663-695.
210
Laliberté, André. The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan: 1989-2003
Safeguarding the Faith, Building a Pure Land, Helping the Poor. London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Lary, Diana. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation,
1937-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Lash, Scott, and Sam Whimster. Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen
& Unwin, 1987.
Lattimore, Owen, and Eleanor Holgate Lattimore. The Making of Modern China: A Short
History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1944.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,
1930-1945. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Lee, Thomas H. C. Education in Traditional China: A History. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Lee, Thomas Hong-chi. Education in Northern Sung China. Thesis--Yale University,
1978.
Léon, Antoine. The History of Education Today. Educational sciences. Paris, France:
Unesco, 1985.
LeVine, Sarah, and David N. Gellner. Rebuilding Buddhism: the Theravāda Movement in
Twentieth-Century Nepal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
211
Lieberthal, Kenneth. Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Studies on
Modern China. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1991.
Lin, Huangzhou. Shengyan fashi sixiang xing yi. Zhihui hai xilie. Taipei: Fagu wenhua,
2004.
Lin, Hsiao-ting. Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics,
1928-49. Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006.
Lin, Yusheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the
May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
Lindsay, Michael. Notes on Educational Problems in Communist China, 1941-47. New
York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations.
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony. Government in Republican China. New York, London:
McGraw-Hill Book Co, 1938.
Liu, Dajun. China's Economic Stabilization and Reconstruction. New Brunswick:
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1948.
Liu, Judith, Heidi A. Ross, and Donald P. Kelly. The Ethnographic Eye: Interpretive
Studies of Education in China. New York: Falmer Press, 2000.
Liu, Xun. Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner
Alchemy in Republican Shanghai. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center,
2009.
Long, Darui. “An Interfaith Dialogue Between the Chinese Buddhist Leader Taixu and
Christians.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000).
212
Lopez, Donald S. Buddhism in Practice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1995.
________. Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
________. Modern Buddhism: Readings for the Unenlightened. London: Penguin, 2002.
________. A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West. Boston:
Beacon Press, 2002.
________. The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings. [San
Francisco]: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.
Lukens-Bull, Ronald. A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim
Java. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Lyall, Leslie T. A Passion for the Impossible: The China Inland Mission, 1865-1965.
Chicago: Moody Press, 1965.
MacKinnon, Stephen R., Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Vogel. China at War: Regions of
China, 1937-1945. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Madsen, Richard. Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political
Development in Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Malalgoda, Kitsiri. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900: A Study of Religious
Revival and Change. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Maraldo, John C., and Heinrich Dumoulin. Buddhism in the Modern World. New York:
Macmillan, 1976.
213
Maxwell, Joseph A. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996.
McDaniel, Justin. Gathering Leaves & Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic
Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.
McGuire, Meredith B. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
McHale, Shawn Frederick. Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism
in the Making of Modern Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004.
McMahan, David L. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
McRae, John R. “Oriental Verities on the American Frontier: The 1893 World's
Parliament of Religions and the Thought of Masao Abe.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 11
(1991): 7-36.
Mende, Tibor. The Chinese Revolution. [London]: Thames and Hudson, 1961.
Merton, Thomas. The Zen Revival. London: Buddhist Society, 1967.
Michael, Franz H. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1966.
Miles, Matthew B., and A. M. Huberman. Qualitative Data Analysis: A Sourcebook of
New Methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1984.
Miles, Steven B. The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century
Guangzhou. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
214
Mookerji, Radhakumud. Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist). Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1960.
Nagai, Michio, and Miguel Urrutia. Meiji Ishin: Restoration and Revolution. Tokyo,
Japan: United Nations University, 1985.
Nattier, Jan. Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline.
Berkeley, Calif: Asian Humanities Press, 1991.
________. “A Prophecy of the Death of the Dharma.” In Donald Lopez (ed.) Buddhism in
Practice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth
Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Norman, E. H. Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H.
Norman. Ed. by John W. Dower. New York: Pantheon, 1975.
Nussbaum, Martha C. "Cultivating Humanity," Liberal Education 84, no. 2 (Spring
1998): 38.
________. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Orsi, Robert. "Introduction." In Hall, David D., Lived Religion in America: Toward a
History of Practice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Pacey, Scott. “A Buddhism for the Human World: Interpretations of Renjian Fojiao in
Contemporary Taiwan,” Asian Studies Review, 29, pp.445-461, 2005.
215
Park, Jin Y. Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010.
Patton, Michael Quinn. Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, 3rd edition.
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001.
Pepper, Suzanne. Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search
for an Ideal Development Model. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Phillips, Richard T. China Since 1911. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Phillips, Steven E. Between Assimilation and Independence: the Taiwanese Encounter
Nationalist China, 1945-1950. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Pittman, Don Alvin. “The Modern Buddhist Reformer T'ai-hsü on Christianity.”
Buddhist-Christian Studies 13 (1993): pp. 71-83.
________. Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu's Reforms. Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, 2001.
Prebish, Charles S. Buddhism: A Modern Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1975.
Pye, Lucian W. Warlord Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Modernization of
Republican China. New York: Praeger, 1971.
Queen, Christopher S. and Sallie B. King, ed. Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation
Movements in Asia. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Queen, Christopher S., Charles Prebisch and Damien Keown, eds. Action Dharma: New
Studies in Engaged Buddhism. London: Routledge, 2003.
216
Rambelli, Fabio. Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese
Buddhism. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Ramteke, D. L. Revival of Buddhism in Modern India. New Delhi: Deep & Deep, 1983.
Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1979.
Rappleye, Jeremy, and David Phillips. Exploring Cross-National Attraction in
Education: Some Historical Comparisons of American and Chinese Attraction to
Japanese Education. Oxford Studies in Comparative Education. Oxford: Symposium
Books, 2007.
Reynolds, Douglas Robertson. China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan.
Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993.
Riesman, Paul. “Fieldwork a s Initiation and as Therapy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 4 December 1982 in
the panel entitled "Distance and Prejudice in Anthropological Fieldwork and Theorizing."
Roberts, Joan I., and Sherrie K. Akinsanya. Educational Patterns and Cultural
Configurations: The Anthropology of Education. New York: D. McKay Co, 1976.
________. Schooling in the Cultural Context: Anthropological Studies of Education. New
York: D. McKay Co, 1976.
Ropp, Paul S., and Timothy Hugh Barrett. Heritage of China: Contemporary
Perspectives on Chinese Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press: Princeton,
1979.
217
Rubinstein, Murray A., ed. The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present. Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1994.
Schneider, Axel. "Between Dao and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a
Modern Identity for China." In History and Theory 35, Theme Issue 35: Chinese
Historiography in Comparative Perspective (1996): 54-73.
Schopen, Gregory. “Sukhāvatī as a Generalized Religious Goal in Sanskrit Mahāyāna Sūtra
Literature.” Indo-Iranian Journal 19 (1977): 177-210.
Schrecker, John E. The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective. Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2004.
Schurmann, Franz, and Orville Schell. Republican China: Nationalism, War, and the Rise
of Communism, 1911-1949. The China reader, 2. New York: Random House, 1967.
Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May
Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Schwartz, Benjamin I., and Charlotte Furth. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: a
Symposium. Cambridge, Mass: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1972.
Schwehn, Mark R. Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Scott, John. Social Network Analysis A Handbook. London: SAGE Publications, 1991.
Seneca, Lucius Annasus. Moral Essays, Translated by John W. Basore. The Loeb
Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann, 1928-1935: Vol III, xliii.
218
Seybolt, Peter J. Revolutionary Education in China; Documents and Commentary. White
Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1973.
Sharf, Robert. "The Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun) and the Sinification of
Buddhism in Eighth-Century China." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1991.
Sheridan, James E. China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History,
1912-1949. The Transformation of Modern China series. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Shi, Chang Hui. Shengyan fashi fojiao jiaoyu linian yu shijian. Chung-Hwa foxue
yanjiusuo lun cong xilie. Taipei: Fagu wenhua, 2004.
Shi, Youzhong. The Taiping ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967.
Sih, Paul K. T. Nationalist China During the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945. Hicksville,
N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1977.
Silberman, Bernard S. Ministers of Modernization: Elite Mobility in the Meiji
Restoration, 1868-1873. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1964.
Smith, M. K. “Communities of practice.” In The Encyclopedia of Informal Education,
www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm, 2003, 2009.
Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong
Xiuquan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
________. The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836-1864. Waco, Tex: Markham Press
Fund, Baylor University Press, 1998.
219
Spindler, George Dearborn. Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological
Approaches. Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 1997.
Spindler, George Dearborn, and Lorie A. Hammond. Innovations in Educational
Ethnography: Theory, Methods, and Results. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates,
2006.
Spindler, George Dearborn, and Louise S. Spindler. Fifty Years of Anthropology and
Education, 1950-2000: A Spindler Anthology. Mahwah, N.J.: L.Erlbaum Associates,
2000.
________. Interpretive Ethnography of Education: At Home and Abroad. Hillsdale, N.J.: L.
Erlbaum Associates, 1987.
Spradley, James P. Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1980.
Stengs, Irene. Worshipping the Great Moderniser: King Chulalongkorn, Patron Saint of
the Thai Middle Class. Singapore: NUS Press, 2009.
Stevenson, Dan. “Text, Image, and Transformation in the History of the Shuilu fahui, the
Buddhist Rite for Deliverance of Creatures of Water and Land.” In Weidner, Marsha
Smith (ed.). Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, 2001.
Stone, Jacqueline Ilyse. Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval
Japanese Buddhism Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
Strauss, Julia C. Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China,
1927-1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
220
Swanson, Paul L., and Clark Chilson. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 2006.
Tʻang, Liang-li. The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution. London: G. Routledge &
sons, ltd, 1930.
Tang, Wenfang, and Burkart Holzner. Social Change in Contemporary China: C.K. Yang
and the Concept of Institutional Diffusion. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2007.
Tarocco, Francesca. The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the
Dharma. London: Routledge, 2007.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1989.
Taylor, R. I. D. Education and University Enrolment Policies in China, 1949-1971 /c
Robert Taylor. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973.
Teng, Ssu-yü. The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers: A Comprehensive Survey.
Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971.
Tien Hung-mao. The Great Transition: Political and Social Change in the Republic of
China. Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1989.
________. ed. Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave.
Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1996.
Thomson, James Claude. While China Faced West: American Reformers in Nationalist
China, 1928-1937. Harvard East Asian series, 38. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1969.
221
Ting Jen-chieh. “Helping Behavior in Social Contexts: A Case Study of the Tzu-Chi
Association in Taiwan.” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1997.
Tong, Yanqi. “Environmental Movements in Transitional Societies: A Comparative
Study of Taiwan and China.” Comparative Politics 37, no. 2 (Jan., 2005): 167-188.
Totman, Conrad. The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Travagnin, Stefania. “Ven. Miaoqing and Yuantong Chan Nunnery: A New Beginning
for Monastic Women in Taiwan.” In Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed. Bridging Worlds:
Buddhist Women’s Voices Across Generations, Taipei: Yuanquan Press, pp. 83-96, 2004.
________. ‘Master Yinshun and Buddhist Women in Taiwan: Fayuan and Yitong Nunneries,
Disciples of Guanyin in Northwest Taiwan’. In Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed. Out of the
Shadows: Socially Engaged Buddhist Women. Delhi: Indian Books Centre, pp. 198-210,
2005.
Tsang, Chiu-sam. Society, Schools & Progress in China. The Commonwealth and
International Library. Education and Educational Research. Oxford: Pergamon Press,
1968.
Tsang, Steve, ed. In the Shadow of China: Political Developments in Taiwan Since 1949.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1993.
Tu, Weiming. Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and
Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1996.
Tuttle, Gray. Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005.
222
Vásquez, Manuel A. More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Vogel, Albert W., John T. Zepper, and David L. Bachelor. Foundations of Education; A
Social View. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970.
Wang, Q. Edward. Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to
Historiography. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2001.
Wang, Y. C. Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872-1949. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1966.
Wagner, Rudolf G. Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping
Rebellion. [Berkeley]: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley,
1982.
Wakeman, Frederic E., and Richard L. Edmonds. Reappraising Republican China.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Walton, Linda A. Academies and Society in Southern Sung China. Honolulu: University
of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
Wax, Murray Lionel, Stanley Diamond, and Fred O. Gearing. Anthropological
Perspectives on Education. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Weber, Max, and Stephen Kalberg. Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on
Modernity. Modernity and society, 3. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005.
Weidner, Marsha Smith. Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.
223
Welch, Holmes. Buddhism Under Mao. Harvard East Asian series, 69. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
________. The Buddhist Revival in China. Harvard East Asian series, 33. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1968.
________. The Practice of Chinese Buddhism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1967.
Weller, Susan C. and A. Kimball Romney. Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative
Research Methods, v. 10. Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Publications, 1988.
Weston, Timothy B. The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and
Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929. Berkeley Series in Interdisciplinary Studies of
China, 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
White, Merry I., and Susan Pollak. The Cultural Transition: Human Experience and
Social Transformation in the Third World and Japan. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1986.
Wilson, George M. Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Woo, X. L. Empress Dowager Cixi China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a
Formitable Concubine: Legends and Lives During the Declining Days of the Qing
Dynasty. New York: Algora Pub, 2002.
Wright, Ann, Nicki Calabrese, and Julie J. Henry, “How Service and Learning Came
Together To Promote Cura Personalis,” International Journal of Teaching and Learning
in Higher Education 20, no. 2 (2009).
224
Wright, Mary Clabaugh. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism; The Tʻung-chih
Restoration, 1862-1874. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
Wu, Jiang. Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in SeventeenthCentury China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Wu, Junsheng. Dewey's Influence on China's Efforts for Modernization. St. John's Papers
in Asian Studies, no. 24. Jamaica, N.Y.: Center of Asian Studies at St. John's University,
1978.
Xu, Di. A Comparison of the Educational Ideas and Practices of John Dewey and Mao
Zedong in China: Is School Society or Society School? San Francisco: Mellen Research
University Press, 1992.
Yamaori, Tetsuo, “Aum Shinrikyo Sounds the Death Knell of Japanese Religion,” Years of
Trial: Japan in the 1990s, eds. Masuzoe Yoichi (Tokyo: Japan Echo, 2000).
Yang, David C. A Summary of the Educational History of China. Thesis (M.A.)--Florida
State University, 1951.
Ye, Weili. Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States,
1900-1927. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Yeh, Wen-Hsin. Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern
China, 1843-1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Yu, George T. Party Politics in Republican China: The Kuomintang, 1912-1924.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
225
Yu, Jimmy. “Master Sheng Yen and the Modern Construction of Chan Buddhism.” The
30th Anniversary of Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies: Flowering Fields and
Fruitful Harvest (2010): 154-176.
________. “Pure Land Devotion in East Asia.” In Blackwell Companion to East and
Inner Asian Buddhism. Forthcoming.
________. “A Tentative Exploration into the Development of Master Sheng Yen’s Chan
Teaching.” In Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal (2010) Taipei: 23:3-38.
________. “Venerable Sheng Yen’s Scholarship on Late Ming Buddhism.” The Second
International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Buddhism and the Thought of
Master Sheng Yen. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publications, 2010.
Yu, Li. “Training Scholars Not Politicians: Zunjing Academy and the Introduction of
Han Learning to Sichuan in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 37
(2003): 919-954.
Yu, Xue. Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle Against
Japanese Aggressions, 1931-1945. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Yü, Chün-fang. Kuan-Yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000.
________. The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming
Synthesis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Zanasi, Margherita. Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
226
Zarrow, Peter Gue. China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949. Asia's Transformations.
London: Routledge, 2005.
Zelin, Madeleine, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella. Contract and Property in
Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Zhang, Guocai. Higher Education Research in China: An Annotated Bibliography.
R.I.H.E. International Publication Series, no. 2. Hiroshima, Japan: Research Institute for
Higher Education, Hiroshima University, 1989.
Zhang, Huajun. Unique But Inclusive Individuality a Dialogue with John Dewey and
Liang Shuming Toward Educational Reform in China. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State
University, 2009. http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04132009-050329
Zhang, Zhan, “Cixi and Modernization of China,” Asian Social Science 6, no. 4 (April
30, 2010): 154-155.
Zhou, Cezong, and Cezong Zhou. Research Guide to The May Fourth Movement;
Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, 1915-1924. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1963.
Zou, Yali, and Enrique T. Trueba. Ethnography and Schools: Qualitative Approaches to
the Study of Education. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China. The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism
in Early Medieval China. Leiden: Brill, 1972 (originally published 1959).
________. “Perspectives in the Study of Chinese Buddhism,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society 2 (1982): 161-176.
227
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Daniel R. Tuzzeo
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Education
August 2009 – April 2012, The Florida State University
Master’s Program in the Department of Religion, History and Ethnography of Religions
•
Academic advisor: Professor Jimmy Yu
•
Thesis committee: Professors Bryan Cuevas, Joseph Hellweg, and Jimmy Yu
•
Thesis title: “Education, Invention of Orthodoxy, and the Construction of Modern
Buddhism on Dharma Drum Mountain”
December 2008, The Florida State University
Bachelor of Science in Anthropology, Minor in Religious Studies
228