Puppets on display at the Chiang Kaishek Memorial for a Folk Arts Festival.
Puppets on display at the Chiang Kaishek Memorial for a Folk Arts Festival.
Religion is thriving in Taiwan. Political candidates sometimes secure their promises by publicly beheading a cock, thus making their oath directly to the gods. New temples have popped up everywhere; many are unlicensed, but the government has problems closing them because no workers are willing to tear them down. When Wang Yong-ch’ing, one of Taiwan’s largest industrialists, visited Mai-liao (Yun-lin county) in 1991 to head off local environmental protests against his proposed construction of a naphtha cracker, he went first to make offerings (and monetary gifts) to the leading local temples. Buddhist clergy often preach for hours on television, and movies about various gods and temples are frequent. These examples attest to the health of religion in Taiwan and to the ways in which it is embedded in everyday life.
Religion has both shaped and reflected Chinese society in Taiwan from its beginnings. Early settlers brought tablets commemorating their ancestors with them, and built Earth God temples (Tho-te biou) as soon as they settled into villages. Larger temples soon branched off from mother temples in Fukien and became organizing points for Taiwan’s social groups, from the family to entire regions and subethnic groups. Temples helped mobilize people to battle aborigines and competing Chinese groups and later to fight the Japanese occupiers in 1895. Other kinds of temples commemorate the dead from those battles.
Much of this activity is not “religion” in the usual Western sense of the term. Most Taiwanese religious practice takes place without regard to formal church organization, trained clergy, or sacred texts. The term “religion” itself (cong-kau) was borrowed from the West (via Japan) within the past century.1 Many rural Taiwanese who perform daily rituals thus describe themselves as having no religion; a few do not even recognize the term. They say they just “carry incense.”2 Taiwan’s former frontier conditions encouraged this kind of decentralized religion, with no higher authority to impose an interpretation. There were also more formally “religious” traditions—Buddhism, Taoism, pietistic sects, and eventually a little Christianity—but even these were far from the centers of doctrinal and ritual power on the mainland.
The embeddedness of religious practice in Taiwanese daily life has linked it closely to changing notions of identity. The close ties among religion, kinship, and community have made temples and rituals an arena in which we can see historical changes in contending notions of self and society, especially in the absence of a higher religious authority that could attempt to impose a set interpretation. Religious practice has both shaped and been shaped by Taiwan’s history and speaks especially clearly about ethnic identities over time, the changing nature of social marginality, and the current dilemmas of modernity.
This chapter has three broad sections. The first outlines the broad range of religious possibilities in China generally and Taiwan specifically. The focus is primarily on everyday religious practice, including some exploration of more formalized religious traditions and of the sectarian movements that have periodically been so important there. The second section briefly traces major religious and social changes over the past several centuries, and the third takes up two specific examples that help reveal the changing role of religion in Taiwanese life. The first is the annual ghost festival, whose performance speaks to changing ideas about marginality. The second includes a set of more or less Buddhist sects that have become prominent in Taiwan, especially the Compassion Merit Society, which has attracted millions of members in the past twenty years. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about one of the issues implicated by the arguments over “Taiwanese” identity so common in Taiwan today—the degree to which it is sensible to argue for a uniquely Taiwanese religion.
Taiwanese religion is conducted above all by families. Even major community rituals tend to take the family as their most fundamental unit. One worships at home or in a temple by burning incense as a minimal offering. There need be no congregations, no preachers to explain dogma, no priests to lead worship. This section begins with a discussion of this kind of daily religious practice—“popular religion,” if this term is understood to include all classes of society. Taiwan also has priestly traditions in Buddhism and Taoism, discussed subsequently, along with other kinds of religious movements.
Most Taiwanese religious ritual involves spirits of the dead in one form or another. In its most obvious form in all Chinese societies, this involves the commemoration of ancestors (gongma) by male descendants and their wives. Worship of ancestors was not always universal in China, but had long been standard practice by the time Taiwan was first heavily settled by mainland immigrants in the seventeenth century. In theory Chinese families extended back in time for millennia and would continue on indefinitely in a line traced from fathers to sons. Ancestor worship was one of many media that made such a view meaningful; it commemorated the patriline in tablets on a prominent altar in the front room of the house (and sometimes in communal lineage halls) and required periodic worship.3 Marriage ritual made many of the same points by physically removing the bride from her natal family, ritually purifying her as she crossed the threshold into her husband’s house, and having her worship his ancestors as one of her first married acts.
In actual practice, things were considerably more complex. Areas of Taiwan that had been settled relatively late, especially when little land was available, often had to compromise patriliny to survive. In some villages it is not uncommon to see three or four different surnames commemorated on the same altar and to hear genealogies that accentuate ties through marriage. If it were not China, one would be tempted to say they were not patrilineal at all.4 This can happen when husbands live with their wives’ families and give some of their children their wives’ surnames, but continue to worship their own ancestors.5 It also happens when wives come carrying the tablets of their own ancestors, because no one else remains to worship them. Ancestral altars in some areas thus do not look at all patrilineal. These exceptions to patriliny were suppressed in better-endowed areas, where strong lineages developed; village lineage leaders banned such tablets to dark corners of dusty rooms. In areas without these strong patrilineal networks, however, ties of marriage provided crucial support systems, and people easily sacrificed the patrilineal consistency of their ancestral altars for the realities of their lives.6 In the absence of a lineage elite, the only authorities to promote a more unified vision of ancestor worship were prescriptive texts on family rituals, which could easily be ignored.
The frontier history of Taiwan, where lines of authority were sometimes difficult to establish, encouraged this kind of broad variation even in ancestor worship, which most Chinese (and foreigners) consider a defining feature of their values. Clearer state authority was finally established only by the Japanese occupiers, who had a very different culture of the family in spite of a shared Confucian heritage. It is thus no surprise that marriage ritual also varied widely from the norms established in elite manuals of ritual propriety, with an undercurrent that challenged the clear transfer of the bride from her father to her husband that those books of family ritual promoted. Newly engaged brides, for example, engaged in a silent battle with their future mothers-in-law—as the mother-in-law tried to place a ring over the bride’s finger, the younger woman bent the joint to keep the ring from going all the way on in a silent battle of the wills.7 Eventually, mothers-in-law just gave up the fight. Taiwanese religion typically experienced such arguments between what we might call an “official” set of rituals, laid out in popularizing texts written by neo-Confucian elites and promoted by local gentry, and an unofficial array of possibilities realized in daily life.8
A similar dynamic occurs in the worship of gods (sin). Most gods are also the spirits of dead men and women, but unlike ancestors they are incorporated by social communities of various sorts. These communities range from geographically defined neighborhoods with their Earth Gods (Tho-te Kong) to township-sized regions with their own patron deities, who were often affiliated with the local settlers’ place of origin on the mainland. Certain crafts had their own gods, and so did sworn brotherhoods.
Most Taiwanese temples have strong geographical ties, drawing their supporters from the area under their god’s jurisdiction.9 Important community temples usually unite their regions by collecting various fees to run rituals, through periodic tours of their territory (with the gods carried in sedan chairs, which are now often put in trucks), and most obviously and importantly by housing gods who are thought to promote the legitimate interests of the community and its households. Gods’ ties to local symbolic and political power are clear. Temples resemble (but expand upon) magistrates’ yamens, and one communicates with gods through various bureaucratic means, from written petitions to bribes.10 Many gods dress as imperial bureaucrats, and their periodic tours through their territory resemble the ones magistrates used to make. Many of them have official titles granted by past emperors. The committees who run temples usually include local elites and often represent one of the community’s major political factions.11 Most gods are also said to represent upright moral values; they protect the legitimate interests of their communities, but will not help supplicants with shady needs.
Yet even gods have another side, hidden beneath the trappings of bureaucratic legitimacy and imperial blessing.12 A great many are characters who are not at all like civil officials—women (like Ma Co or Koan Im), Buddhist or Taoist hermits and eccentrics (like Co Su Kong or Ji Gong), or warriors (Koan Kong or Siong-te Kong). Many also have origin stories that accentuate their challenges to more commonly accepted values. Nearly all the goddesses, for example, committed the most unfilial act of not having children, and many actively refused marriage.13
Both local elites and the state tried to clean gods up as they grew influential. The emperor could promote particular deities and temples by granting titles or by giving commemorative steles. Ma Co, originally a goddess of fishing areas on the Fukien coast, was eventually promoted to be Empress of Heaven, and she is commonly referred to by that title in the Hong Kong area. Yet only a few officially constructed temples to her in Taiwan use the formal title. Taiwan’s many important temples to her, like Taiwanese in their common discussions of this goddess, continue to use her original local title—Ma Co, the Ancestral Mother.14 Much like in ancestor worship, there was no centralized control over ritual in practice, in spite of imperial legal regulations about who could worship and how. Even local elite attempts at control over ritual could have little effect, as when the management at the Co Su Kong temple in San-hsia attempted to promote vegetarian offerings at a major ritual and was simply ignored.15
The extensive use of spirit mediums in Taiwan made attempts at control over interpretation even more difficult. Gods possess mediums all over Taiwan, usually speaking directly through the medium, but sometimes causing him (or occasionally her) to write characters. Some areas, especially in southern Taiwan, have troupes of mediums who cut themselves with swords or other exorcistic weapons. Mediums are especially difficult to control because the god speaks directly to the listeners. There is no place for intervening interpretive control because the god is right there.
Some dead spirits are never incorporated as ancestors or gods; they have neither regional nor kin communities to worship them. These are the ghosts (kui), who live a miserable existence and occasionally cause trouble for the living. They are the improper dead: people who died with no children to worship them, or violently, or far from home where no one knew them. Note that this also describes the beginnings of many gods. In a broad sense, ghosts are everyone else’s ancestors and kin. Some of them eventually become incorporated as gods because they have shown themselves to be particularly efficacious and powerful.16 The rest are ignored unless they are said to make someone sick, or unless their unidentified bones are buried in a small ghost shrine at the battlefield where they died, on the shore where they washed up, or by the road where they were accidentally disinterred. In such cases the shrines receive annual worship and may also receive an occasional stick of incense from someone like a gambler or prostitute, whom most gods would not help in their line of work.
The very willingness of ghosts to grant immoral requests marks the low degree of officializing control over them. The extensive historical variation in the annual festival for the ghosts is discussed below. This variation reflects in part the inability of the various states that have governed Taiwan to control interpretation of the ritual in spite of many attempts. In part they also show how easily people could reinterpret their own rituals in the absence of any higher theological authority like Catholic priests. This was typical of Chinese religion in many areas, but Taiwan’s history of weak control from Peking followed by fifty years of foreign occupation greatly encouraged it.
Very little of what is discussed here so far is uniquely Taiwanese. Most of the major gods branched off from temples on China’s southeastern coast and served emigrants from particular areas on the mainland. Thus Ma Co, Kaizhang Shengwang, Co Su Kong, and many others are closely affiliated with emigrants from particular counties on the mainland, even when (like Ma Co) they have also attracted a more general following. Taiwan has also developed some gods of its own, most importantly the cult of Koxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-kung), but also including other historical figures.17 Yet even these newer temples do not differ fundamentally from the kinds of gods and the modes of worship common on the southeastern coast of the mainland. As discussed below, however, the kinds of decentralized variation that Chinese religion in general allowed, and that Taiwanese religion in particular encouraged, fostered significant and revealing changes over time.
Even a quick summary of Buddhism or Taoism in China cannot be attempted here. Instead this section discusses the kinds of religious options that Buddhism and Taoism created for people in Taiwan and how they related to those traditions on the mainland. As might be expected from a relative frontier of China, the monastic traditions in Taiwan remained undeveloped. There were no Taoist monasteries at all on the island, and Taoists desiring official ordination had to travel to the mainland.
Taoists were trained anyway, of course, following typical patterns of transmission from father to son and master to disciple. Indeed, Taiwan developed its own minor branches of Taoism based on the traditions of different masters. All roughly followed the Cheng-yi school of Taoism (centered on Mount Lung-hu in Kiangsi), but local priests emphasized instead local differences. In northern Taiwan, for example, the primary split was between followers of the Lau family school and the Lim family school.18
Unlike popular religious practice, however, Taoism had a core of texts that were transmitted over the generations and periodically renewed by those who did make the trip to Mount Lung-hu. Thus even in the absence of any effective central religious control, Taoism maintained a kind of unity that was less possible in popular practice. These priests and their texts were closely integrated into local communities. They had families and lived in ordinary neighborhoods. They earned an income by performing rituals locally, from minor cures to major rites of community renewal.
For most people, Taoists imply a kind of ritual escalation; they provide more powerful access to gods or control over dangerous spirits than people can manage on their own. This creates a great deal of ritual overlap, as both Taoists and laymen generally find themselves sharing those rituals that laymen cannot perform on their own. At the level of interpretation, however, the differences are very clear. Taoist ritual, for the Taoists themselves, is not simply an intensification of local god worship. Taoism erases the local emphasis that is so strong in community temples and in the stories of most gods. For the priests, local gods are simply minor functionaries in a vast bureaucracy of gods, in which the Taoist himself is empowered to approach the highest deities (the Three Pure, who are not worshiped at all by others) and to command armies of lower spirits. In the most important rituals, the Taoist uses meditational techniques to achieve a unity with the highest gods and ultimately with the primal force of the Tao itself.19 Nearly all rituals that Taoists share with laymen have such multiple layers of interpretation.
Unlike Taoism, Buddhism in Taiwan did have monks and nuns who left their secular families for lives of monastic discipline. Yet Taiwan was never a major center of Buddhist learning until after 1949, when important clergy came to Taiwan with the retreating Nationalist government. Many of these top clergy worked closely with the state, which helped them establish new Buddhist schools and temples. Buddhism after 1949 thus experienced a kind of refocusing around these new institutions, in a way that Taoism never matched. The new institution-alization of Buddhism helped paved the way for the revival of the past two decades.
The Buddhist belief system also differed significantly from the others. For example, it collapsed distinctions among gods, humans, and all other kinds of beings by emphasizing how none of them had left the cycle of reincarnation.20 Unlike Taoism, it also attempted to bring lay believers into the fold by gradually changing ritual practice and encouraging people to recite sutras. Taoists instead maintained their texts and techniques as trade secrets.
Partly as a result of this push from Buddhism, Taiwan has had lay Buddhist organizations from the beginning. These usually revolved around small Buddhist “vegetarian halls” (ch’ai-t’ing), often with no ordained clergy.21 Many of their followers were women who took vegetarian vows, but remained living at home with their families. Such organizations continue, but have been overtaken recently by other kinds of lay Buddhist organizations, usually based on loyalty to a single member of the clergy and his or her organization.22
Like much of China, Taiwan also developed a range of sects with important religious content. These fell into two broad types in China as a whole—groups based on oaths of sworn brotherhood flourished first in the south, and groups with more Buddhist connections, often centered on worship of a goddess, spread down from the north. Taiwan was the origin of the Heaven and Earth Society (Ti’en ti hui), one of the most important of the sworn brotherhoods.23 This group and others like it in Taiwan became best known as foci for rebellions. They offered a set of ties beyond kinship that could cement people together and thus provided one of the few nonlocal resources through which people could be mobilized.
Voluntary religious brotherhoods had long borrowed the languages of kinship and religion to unite groups. Oaths of loyalty were sworn in front of gods, and religious activities might be one of the most important group activities.24 The Heaven and Earth Society wedded this tradition to Ming dynasty loyalism against the Ch’ing. Given Taiwan’s long resistance to the Ch’ing, the island was a good breeding ground for such discontent. The oath itself became highly elaborated, and religious secrecy made for an effective organization. Heaven and Earth Society activities were not at all confined to opposing the Ch’ing; these organizations eventually developed into the triads best known as criminal groups in the Hong Kong area.25 In Taiwan, even where they rebelled, they tended to merge into factions based on the usual Taiwanese distinctions between people from different places of origin.
The Buddhist-oriented sects are most closely associated with the White Lotus and similar rebellions in northern China. As Jordan and Overmyer have shown, however, most of these sects, most of the time, showed no inherent tendency to rebel.26 Instead, these groups center on the worship of a deity, often the Eternal Venerable Mother (Wusheng Laomu), who was seen as a creator/mother figure for humanity, but who also drew heavily on Buddhist imagery of compassion and nurturance. They typically feature spirit writing sessions where deities from various traditions (typically Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam) explain the syncretic unity of all religions or expand on morality and ethics, often via commentaries on classical Chinese texts like the Analects. These sects have become increasingly popular in Taiwan since 1945, although some of them were illegal (because of their reputation for rebellion on the mainland) until the 1980s. All these sects move away from the local particularism of most Taiwanese daily worship. Shared belief unites followers, rather than shared place of residence or kinship. Both their voluntarism and their universalism are reminiscent of Protestant Christianity.
The danger of the kind of quick summary and classification of Taiwanese religion in the preceding section is that it loses sight of Taiwan’s historical dynamism. Taiwanese religion has not been static precisely because it ties closely to issues of identity and daily life. Religious organization in Taiwan has close ties to local power, to the creation of self-understanding, and to notions of how the world itself works. A great deal is at stake in religion anywhere, and it should be no surprise that ritual and belief become subject to pressures from changing ways of life. Religions may present themselves as unchanging truths, but they are never so immobile in practice. This is especially true in a place like Taiwan, where the absence of a powerful clergy with interests in maintaining a religious status quo made for very minimal pressures to preserve an orthodoxy in religious ritual or interpretation. The cumulative result of this structure over several centuries of drastic change on both Taiwan and the mainland is a gradual drift in emphasis and interpretation, especially during the time—nearly a century—when the two places were politically isolated.
We know very little about religious interactions between Taiwan’s aboriginal populations and early Chinese settlers from the mainland. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that such interactions were not unusual. First, we do have one strong case for the reverse process—where Han religion powerfully influenced but did not overwhelm aboriginal religion. This occurred among the Siraya in southwestern Taiwan, for whom John Shepherd has documented a remarkable combination of borrowing, retention of earlier ideas, and reinterpretation of both Han and aboriginal practice.27 Second, we know such exchanges influenced Han as well as other groups in internal frontiers outside Taiwan. In parts of central Kwangsi during the nineteenth century, for example, we know that Han (mostly Cantonese and Hakka) immigrants worshiped important Yao deities and drew on Yao traditions of healing.28 Finally, there are a few hints about direct Han borrowings in Taiwan, often associating a kind of black magic with aborigines. Gary Seaman documents one of the clearest, in an association between a “black dog demon” cult and aborigines in a part of central Taiwan.29
At the very least, these hints imply a kind of association between marginal places and dangerous power, which is not unusual in China. Distant mountain peaks house important pilgrimage sites as well as internal frontiers with aboriginal populations. Both draw on an uncontrolled power at the edges of civilization. It is not a coincidence that drawings of non-Chinese groups in old gazetteers often resemble drawings of ghosts in clothing (usually animal skins) and body shape (usually grotesque). This power can be incorporated into Chinese religion as a kind of dangerous magic. The extent to which this process actually occurred in Taiwan and the possibility of its long-term influence will not be clear without much more research.
The close ties between religion and local social organization appear clearly in ritual activity. Local settlements everywhere in Taiwan usually began to worship the Earth God early in their history.30 Daily worship in these small temples typically rotates among all the households of the area, and they are thus both symbols of community unity and active markers of membership. Building a new Earth God temple is generally a declaration of independence by a new social community.
Early settlers also established a wide variety of god-worshiping associations (sin-bieng hoe).31 These were shareholding organizations that united groups of all kinds, including irrigation associations, trade groups, kinsmen, local defense arrangements, pilgrimage groups, rotating credit associations, and sworn brotherhoods. The diversity of these groups and the ease of establishing them helped create a pool of religious possibilities, whose specific organizations would wax and wane as social conditions changed. The “belief sphere” of these groups could change its scale, and even the membership criteria sometimes changed over time.32 Lin Mei-jung, for example, shows how the Chang-hua Ma Co belief sphere became a combination of Hokkien from Chang-chou and Hokkienized Hakka, united against Hokkien from Ch’uan-chou.33 Wang Shih-ch’ing has a permutation on this theme, with a combination of Chang-chou and Ch’uan-chou Hokkien against local Hakka represented through an Earth God temple.34
Some of these temples grew into major community temples with geographic bases of support. Most often these were temples to gods associated with the subethnic groups that settled each area, and they usually became prominent when they were associated with rising economic centers or served as defense organizations. Occasionally lineage or other temples also developed a more strictly geographic base over time. Indeed the general trend in Taiwan over time has been for temples and god associations to emphasize geography over other forms of community, although all kinds of temples continue to exist. This has been especially true since the nineteenth century, as ethnic feuding ended and the religious functions of defense and ethnic solidarity lost their importance. Throughout most of the twentieth century, place of residence has been the most important local organizing principle in religion. The major religious organizations in Shu-lin (in northern Taiwan), for example, generally began with lineage or subethnic roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only one still retains its ethnic character in this ethnically mixed community. All the others have developed broader community bases, and some have even changed temple loyalties to reflect place of residence over place of origin on the mainland.35
Taiwan has, however, become a much more mobile society in the past two decades. So far people have retained some loyalties to temples in their family’s home town. Yet there has also been a clear increase in the popularity of religions with more universalistic deities instead of the insistently local community gods discussed here. The data are not yet clear enough to say that another major change in the social base of religion is occurring, but the current situation is suggestive.
As some temples grew into major community centers, they also developed ties to local politics. Temples control many local resources: an ability to organize the entire community, the right to tax, and sometimes significant financial resources (money from donations, or land in the Ch’ing dynasty). As one might expect, local elites were attracted both to the social and financial resources of large temples and to their symbolic claims of patronage for the community. Temples were (and are) often run by committees on which local elites are well represented. Many temples often choose an annual “incense pot head” (lo-cu) in a way that favors the wealthy. Temples have thus been natural centers for military actions (for example, against the Japanese arrival in 1895) or for factional politics.36
The Japanese occupation that began in 1895 put enormous pressure on popular religious practice in Taiwan. Although Taiwan was not able to put up a powerful or unified challenge to the Japanese takeover of the island, there were many cases of local armed resistance. These often naturally centered on community temples, with their ability to draw residents together around the local elite. The Japanese destroyed many of these temples in reprisal.37
At first popular religion in general, however, was neither actively encouraged nor repressed.38 Destroyed temples were reconstructed, although large and expensive reconstructions were not generally allowed, leading to pent-up demand for temple rebuilding after the Japanese left in 1945. Yet this relative laissez-faire attitude changed considerably during the 1930s. By this time a generation of young Taiwanese had been educated in Japanese, and the buildup to the war effort in Japan created further pressures for Japanization. This meant that the colonial government began to repress popular religion. The process peaked when local governments removed the god images from popular temples in a number of towns; Chung-li was the most infamous one. The finer images ended up in Japanese ethnological museums, while the rest were burned. This, the government announced, indicated the promotion of local gods to heaven as Shinto deities.39
The Japanese backed away from this policy of total repression almost immediately, but they did actively promote alternatives, especially Shinto and Japanese Buddhism (which was intended to unite their Asian empire). Shinto temple construction increased rapidly from the 1930s until Taiwan’s retrocession to China after World War II. The township of San-hsia, for example, came under the administration of a regional Shinto shrine built in 1938.40 Construction was just about to begin on a township-level Shinto shrine when the war ended in 1945, and all such plans came to an end. Ironically, the lumber already purchased for the construction of the shrine was put to the massive reconstruction of the local community temple, which began in 1947. An earlier incarnation of that temple had been destroyed by angry Japanese troops in 1895, after playing an important role in organizing an ambush of the invading troops.
In spite of all this, Taiwanese were able to continue worshiping in their own ways. The colonial government quickly backed away from drastic acts like burning god images; they apparently feared needless unrest. At the same time, people became very creative in learning how to maintain rituals that were being discouraged. For example, the annual ghost festival in the seventh lunar month had been the occasion for massive and sometimes riotous gatherings of people, where apparently rootless young men sometimes rampaged for offerings to the ghosts.41
The late Ch’ing government had made this illegal for obvious reasons, but was unable to enforce the law. By the 1920s, these rootless young men were gone, for both political and economic reasons. Yet many areas retained the ceremony with all its furor by turning it into an “athletic competition” between village teams striving to grab the best offerings from high towers.
Through a similar maneuver, offerings of fattened whole pigs at a local god’s birthday celebration took on the veneer of an agricultural competition.42 This allowed villagers to claim that force feeding pigs to be as huge as possible was an exercise in agricultural modernization rather than a wasteful superstition. Creative responses like these enabled people to insist that they were responding to government preferences, while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the festival life they valued.
Theorists of modernity used to expect that the dominance of a successful capitalist economy would mean the inevitable secularization of religion toward a rationalized civil philosophy. Taiwan’s rapid economic success in the past few decades has empirically disproved this hypothesis. The number of temples per capita has been increasing since the 1970s and has probably never been as high as it is now. Religious activity is hard to miss, and nearly everyone takes part in some form.
Taiwan was in many ways already a commodity-based economy in the nineteenth century, with many farmers selling tea, camphor, sugar, and rice to distant markets.43 Under Japanese rule public education, transportation, and security were greatly improved, and many new scientific agricultural practices were introduced. Although they discouraged the growth of large Taiwanese entrepreneurs, the Japanese did a great deal to set up the postwar economic boom. As other chapters in this book show, the 1970s and 1980s in particular saw spectacular growth in personal incomes, so by the 1990s Taiwan could no longer be considered a developing country.
Popular religion has played an interesting role in debates over the importance of cultural causes of this success. On the one hand, some have argued that religion offered inappropriate values. Max Weber and others, for example, argued that the “enchanted garden” of China’s religion discouraged the ascetic secular rationalization Weber emphasized for Europe. Religious practice also encouraged exactly the kinds of ascribed, particularistic ties of family and community that earlier modernization theorists believed stood in the way of development, and it emphasized a kind of feudal hierarchy of gods.44 On the other hand, many authors argue that the traditional values of ancestor worship—filial piety, cooperation, and long-term security—foster petty entrepreneurs by encouraging hard work, valuing independence from others, and cushioning the risks of private enterprise.45 Others have suggested that popular religion supports appropriate values like loyalty, strengthens the informal social networks critical for raising credit and dealing with related enterprises, and provides experience with shareholding corporations via god societies.46
Any conclusion that Taiwanese religion simply helped or simply hindered capitalist development would clearly be misleading. The variation that was always inherent in local religion gave it aspects that would have both positive and negative effects in a changed economic environment. These have mixed in new proportions as times have changed, but without altering the most basic ideas.
There was, for example, always an individualistic undercurrent, especially in ghost worship. The very definition of ghosts rests on their existence apart from any normal social ties: They are the unincorporated dead, part of no larger social group. One worships for personal gain, not for family or community. Ghosts’ individualizing function contrasts with the community base of gods, and their faceless anonymity and insistence on keeping the terms of a bargain recalls the market in ways that political petitions and tribute payments to gods do not. The ghostly side of Chinese religion grew very rapidly in the 1980s, at the point when many Taiwanese for the first time had achieved some significant wealth, but when the market economy also appeared particularly threatening and capricious, with few productive outlets for capital.47
The most utilitarian side of Taiwanese religion also appears to have grown. Spirit medium cults, usually based in private altars, provide personal help with none of the communal functions of major temples. Such cults have greatly increased recently in Taiwan. The horde of different gods that has begun appearing on private spirit medium altars—as many as forty or fifty different images in recent years—reinforces the utilitarian functions of such cults.48 With each deity having its own specialty, these temples can meet the needs of a wider variety of clients, just like a shop that expands its selection of wares. Not coincidentally, spirit medium shrines themselves are profit-oriented petty capitalist enterprises.
The clear rise of organized sectarian religion in the past few decades also relates to the changing social and economic systems. The best-known pietistic sect is the Way of Unity (Yi-kuan tao), which has perhaps half a million regular followers.49 Many of the sects have strong business support, and anecdotal evidence suggests that a disproportionate number of businessmen are sectarians.50 Membership appears to have grown rapidly just during the period of Taiwan’s most rapid economic growth, but the statistics may be misleading because the Way of Unity was illegal until 1987.
These sects claim a particular talent for capitalism, even more than everyday religion. While they drop some of the symbolic bolstering of a commodity economy in popular religion, like paper spirit money, they insist on a thorough moral accounting of their followers’ entire lives, much like the Calvinists whose relation to capitalism Max Weber discussed.51 As Berling writes about an earlier sectarian text, followers seek “self-improvement through morally responsible activity, including work.”52 Converts in these sects try to accumulate enough merit to achieve individual salvation; merit accrues to individuals, not families.53 Even personal spirit-writing revelations usually apply only to the individual involved, with no attempt to force revelations on others.54
Sectarians also heavily emphasize explicit, textually validated values, much like Protestants, but unlike most popular religious practice.55 Many spirit-writing sessions produce commentaries on Confucian and Taoist classics, and these may be discussed in regular meetings that resemble a combination of Protestant preaching and Sunday school. Constant themes include conservative standards in Taiwan like filial piety, respect for authority, and keeping appropriate relations of hierarchy between men and women, seniors and juniors, parents and children. At the same time, the sects share the utilitarian concerns of popular practice; they stress health, economic success, and similar issues.56
Various more strictly Buddhist sects have also grown enormously during the past two decades. They share at least two important characteristics with the pietistic sects like Yi-kuan Tao, both of which could be described as characteristically modern. First, all these religious organizations appeal to universalizing deities that claim relevance to all humanity, not just to their local turf. This feature is congruent with the new mobility of the population in its new realm of action on the national and world stages. It is difficult to argue for direct cause and effect here, but there is clearly what Weber called an elective affinity between religion and this feature of modern society.
Second, both Buddhism and pietistic sects offer reinvigorated systems of values for people who feel that values are disappearing from the world. Unlike most popular practice, which typically keeps its mixed moral messages implicit in practice, these groups offer explicit and systematic values. The perception that modernity destroys older communitarian values is widespread. It has been documented from areas just undergoing a market transformation, but is just as typical of societies like the United States with its regular complaints about the loss of family values.57 Periodic revivals of such apparently nonmodern values have been a feature of modernity from the beginning, ranging from the nineteenth-century (and current) religious movements to the Romantics.
None of this means that there has been any fundamental transformation in Taiwanese religion, at least not so far. The very amorphous quality of popular religious practice has allowed it to adjust easily to changing times. Had it ever achieved a truly systematic orthodoxy, this religion might have faced a crisis during Taiwan’s centuries of constant transformation. Instead, there has been a regular reproportioning and reinterpretation of the complex elements that had always been there.
To make this discussion more concrete, let us expand on two cases that exemplify religion changing over time. The first is the ritual treatment of ghosts in temples and in the Universal Salvation (Pho To), the major annual rite held for their benefit. Ghosts over the past century have retained their position of marginality to the social system and its moralities. Within that framework, however, evolving interpretations of ghosts have grown along with changing social experience and are reflected in ritual performance and even the scale of temples to ghosts. The second case is lay Buddhism, where existing resources have also taken on new forms, especially in the past few decades. Most striking has been the growth of an enormous charitable Buddhist group, with 3 million members and an annual charity budget of more than U.S.$20 million.
It is typically very difficult to trace popular religious practice back very far because the elites who wrote most of the texts tended to downplay it. We know that ghosts were worshiped in small shrines (iu-ieng kong biou), typically raised where unidentified bones have accidentally been exhumed or where unidentified bodies are found (battlefields, shipwrecks). Such shrines were never large or famous, but received occasional worship to keep the ghosts from causing trouble. They were said to be popular among people with the kinds of immoral requests that community gods would not grant—involving gambling or prostitution, for instance. These little temples are still very common everywhere in Taiwan.
A few good descriptions survive of the annual ghost festival dating from the middle and end of the nineteenth century, however, as do some earlier scraps of information. The contrast between these descriptions and the performances that could be witnessed a century later is striking, even though the priests conducting the ritual come from the same traditions and use the same ritual texts as they ever did. At least in some areas, the performance in the late nineteenth century frequently turned violent. Massive crowds would gather for the culmination of the priestly rituals, when the head priest ritually transformed the massive amounts of food offerings into even more massive (but invisible) amounts that could feed all the gathered ghosts. The real food offerings were piled onto raised platforms topped with poles that rose dozens of feet into the air. Masses of unruly young toughs would fight each other trying to steal the food offerings and the flags at the tops of the poles. The offerings were thought to bring good luck, and there was a market for the flags. The event was always partially out of control, and sometimes deteriorated into a riot, even as late as the 1920s. One Japanese colonial account describes how the platform of offerings was filled with people, “pushing and screaming, and robbing each other. Some people were pushed down the platform. They say that with the ghosts’ protection they will not be hurt, but in fact large numbers are always hurt and killed.”58
In all likelihood these violent performances became widespread only in the nineteenth century, although there is no way to prove the assertion. Certainly brief earlier mentions of the ceremony in Taiwan and descriptions from Fukien do not describe it in these terms. I have argued elsewhere that the rioters themselves took on the role of ghosts—they were socially marginal people acting just like starving ghosts desperate for their offerings.59 By the late nineteenth century, parts of Taiwan had recreated a level of frontier violence that had not been common for a century. This was largely the result of the new camphor trade, which brought single young Chinese men deep into Taiwan’s mountains for the first time. The new trade caused several kinds of social disruption: It fostered renewed battles with aborigines whose safe mountain strongholds were now being threatened; it created large numbers of unattached young men; and it encouraged them to organize a black market trade in defiance of the government monopoly on camphor.60 These young men appear to have been the heart of the violent form of the Universal Salvation.
The riotous scenes disappeared sometime in the 1920s. By the time I first saw the ceremony in the 1970s there was no hint of violence, and the food offerings were being placed on ordinary tables. Concentration had moved from theft of the food offerings to the point of the ceremony when the priests toss out grains of rice and coins for the ghosts. These are caught by the human audience in front of the priests and bring good fortune. The spectators jostled and elbowed to get the thrown offerings, in a way vaguely reminiscent of the riots of much earlier. Yet the participants were no longer rootless young men; they were now primarily the old reproducing ghostly behavior in front of the altar. This was not a fundamental rethinking of the nature of ghosts. The riots had died out largely because that particular kind of marginal person was gone—the Japanese had discouraged Taiwanese camphor production, and chemical substitutes had undermined the world market for natural camphor by the early twentieth century. By the 1970s, however, the old had become a new kind of marginal persons, often feeling abandoned by a younger generation over which they had lost earlier kinds of parental authority to arrange marriage or to control major economic resources like farmland.61
By the 1990s two further uses of the ceremony had turned up. First, there has been a nostalgic revival of the earlier form, where offerings are placed on raised altars and people compete to grab them (but without the riot at the end). The eastern city of I-lan has led the way in this, encouraged by the local government, which wants to play up its preservation of tradition in the hope of building a reputation among tourists.62 The effectiveness of such a strategy again shows a facet of modernity in the search to rediscover the pleasures of an idealized and romanticized past.
The second modern elaboration of the ceremony has been more strictly political. The Taipei county government, which has been under the control of the political opposition, has twice sponsored its own Universal Salvation. In part this is an appeal to specifically Taiwanese tradition. It implies a critique of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) government, which had discouraged such large and expensive religious festivals until democratization made such policies unpopular. In part it also offered a chance to appeal to quite modern causes. It included, for example, a ceremony for the salvation of the “dead” Tam-sui (Tan-shui) river—both appealing to the environmental movement and criticizing the industrial policies of the national government. It remains to be seen, however, whether such purely political uses of the festival will achieve any long-lasting significance.
Ghost shrines themselves have undergone a startling elaboration, especially during the economic boom of the 1980s. Apparently for the first time in Taiwan’s history, some of them have grown to be among the most popular temples in Taiwan. These include the graves of a Japanese period outlaw, of a soldier turned bank robber, and of seventeen unidentified dead bodies and a dog that floated ashore in northern Taiwan. Like any ghosts, these will grant all kinds of wishes, not limited by any accepted standards of morality. All of them defied the government in some way (the two outlaws in life, and the seventeen dead bodies through their shrine, which halted construction of a nuclear power reactor). All of them earned a reputation in the 1980s by helping people choose winning numbers in an illegal lottery that swept the island. More important, they appealed to an image of the market at a time when people had a lot of cash but little direction for productive investment—an image of a tooth-and-claw world where those who get ahead do it without regard for anyone else, and with a great deal of serendipitous luck.63 Ghosts are the ideal vehicle for such a view of the world.
This series of changes shows how the interpretation of ghosts has evolved over many decades, but without ever fundamentally altering the useful idea of ghosts as the unincorporated dead. Precisely because no one is in a position to successfully impose an interpretation on popular religious practice (although there have been many attempts), it has thrived in a changing world by allowing people to reproportion the many discontinuous possibilities it always included.
The history of Taiwanese lay Buddhism remains to be written. Buddhism itself, of course, has as long a history in Taiwan as does Chinese settlement. Monks and nuns have always taken on lay followers, who in turn provided an important means of financial support to Buddhist temples. These lay Buddhists often took some vows, emphasizing vegetarianism as the pre-eminent symbol of dedication to the Buddha. The “vegetarian halls” of women who ran their own small temples without any formal clergy involvement were mentioned above. This kind of lay involvement was often ideal for women, who could become deeply involved with Buddhism in this way without threatening their filial duty through vows of chastity. A few would bear and raise children to adulthood and then take full vows as Buddhist nuns.
Buddhism’s particular appeal rested largely on its differences from other religious possibilities in Taiwan. Buddhism’s complex cosmology reduced ultimately to two kinds of beings: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, who had transcended the wheel of reincarnation, and everything else, from insects to humans to gods, who still suffered rebirth.64 This contained the potentially radical implication that all the divisions of daily life—rich and poor, city and country, man and woman, even god and human—were ultimately empty. The Confucian hierarchy is at least potentially undercut by such a cosmology. In addition, Buddhism held up the ideal of the Bodhisattva, who had transcended this world, but swore not to leave it for nirvana until all humanity had been saved. This ideal was embodied in the Bodhisattva Koan Im, who has always been one of Taiwan’s most important deities.
Koan Im is invariably depicted as a woman in long robes in Taiwan, although historically s/he appeared as a male in early Chinese representations, and I have had nuns tell me that s/he is beyond gender distinctions. This fits the idea of loving nurturance associated with the Bodhisattva, and Koan Im is sometimes shown holding a baby. Both sides of Buddhism—the erasure of worldly distinctions of rank and the nurturing ideal—help to explain the particular popularity of Buddhism among women in Taiwan.
We know very little about the sociology of lay Buddhism before the Nationalist period in Taiwan, except that women appeared to be especially active. After 1945, however, and especially from the 1970s on, Buddhism has been increasingly influential in Taiwan. Well-known monks and nuns began to draw large crowds for lectures and now regularly preach on television. College students were attracted to the subtleties of Buddhist philosophy and especially to the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism, which had not been an important tradition in Taiwan earlier. Tibetan Buddhism offers them both an interesting intellectual world and the same sense of mystery and power that made Buddhism attractive to Romantics and transcendentalists in the nineteenth-century West.65
Some Buddhist clergy and monasteries have also attracted immense followings beyond intellectuals. Only one is discussed here, the Buddhist Compassion Merit Society (Tz’u-chi kung-te hui). This group now claims about 20 percent of Taiwan’s population as contributors. It runs a hospital and a medical school in eastern Taiwan, has a larger welfare budget than the city of Taipei, and now has branches across the world, including at least five in the United States (with a free clinic in Los Angeles). It was founded in 1966 by a nun, the Rev. Cheng-yen, and a handful of followers. Cheng-yen says she was inspired to social action by two experiences—an aboriginal woman’s miscarriage after she did not have enough money to be admitted to a clinic, and a visit from some Christians who criticized Buddhism for not helping anyone.
The original group of followers contributed a few cents a day of their shopping money and did piecework (originally sewing shoes) to raise a little more money. This very modest income was dedicated to helping the poor, especially to medical help. The massive popularity of the group began in the 1980s, by the end of which they had millions of members and a large core group of avid devotees. Followers make financial contributions in any amount. Some give just a few dollars, but there are many who give tens of thousands (in U.S. dollars) each year. Mere “checkbook membership,” however, is discouraged. Cheng-yen pressures all followers to spend time volunteering—visiting the sick, identifying and taking help to the poor, or recruiting new members. Many of the wealthiest followers endure a long waiting list to put in a stint as candy stripers at the hospital. Members also meet regularly, where they listen to testimonials from each other about how their lives have improved since joining, and then hear from Cheng-yen herself, either in person or on videotape.
Buddhist ritual and Buddhist philosophy play only a minor role. Followers are not expected to recite sutras at length or to repeat the name of a Bodhisattva over and over, nor is there much explication of Buddhist thought. Instead the emphasis is consistently on action in the worlds—the Bodhisattva ideal made concrete. When Cheng-yen cites sutras, it is almost always to illustrate this idea of action in daily life. Followers are expected to cut down on personal consumption, be frugal in the broader world (for instance, by promoting recycling), and help the poor through contributions and work. This worldly emphasis differentiates the Compassion Merit Society from most other Buddhist groups and from the pietistic sects like the Yi-kuan Tao, which concentrate on text and ritual.
The Compassion Merit Society stands out in addition for its strongly female membership. Perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the members in Taiwan are women, although no formal rules of membership hint at any bias against men. To an extent, men feel the brunt of the group’s discipline more than women; there is a prohibition on alcohol that appeals greatly to wives unhappy with their husbands’ drinking, but that takes away an important business tool from men. More important, however, are surely the special opportunities that the group offers to the relatively wealthy housewives who make up the core membership. These are women who do not need to work for a living (and prefer not to) and who can hire people to perform household chores. This is a new circumstance for the great majority of these women—it is the direct product of Taiwan’s economic success. Yet for many it also comes with a feeling of alienation—that their lives have no point.
Many members of the group talk about their dissatisfaction with lives of conspicuous consumption, about their lack of goals in life, and about problems in their families. The Compassion Merit Society offers them a new kind of orientation, based very clearly on these women’s ideas about femininity and motherhood. It allows them to take the ideas of nurturance, support, and love that valorize their roles at home, and play them out on a worldwide stage. As one informant put it:
I realized that I used to love too narrowly. I had only two children, whom I was killing with my possessive love. And I was never happy with this painful love. But now I have so many children. I see everyone I help as my own child. I have learned that we have to make our mother love into a world love. And we will live a practical life every day! We will be happy every day!66
Here the Bodhisattva ideal is read broadly as a dedication to social service, with a special appeal to women and nurturance. In some ways, the Compassion Merit Society is another in the long line of popularizing Buddhist revivals in Chinese societies. Yet its secular concerns with charity and particular appeal to women also recall similar movements in the modernizing West, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union or various women’s Christian charities that thrived in the nineteenth century among similar classes of women. Its emphasis on nonmarket economics through charity, on avoiding the market pressures for consumption, and on recreating moral values mark the movement off as a reaction to Taiwanese modernity as much as it is a continuation of Chinese Buddhism.
It is difficult to escape the question of identity in Taiwan. Democratization since the lifting of martial law in 1987, a changing balance of power among mainland refugees and native-born Taiwanese, and the continuing tension in relations across the Taiwan strait have combined to foster a great deal of introspection about what it means to be “Taiwanese.” Religious practice has always been tied closely to changing identity in Taiwan, and it should be no surprise that religion forms an important part of current arguments.
Religion could potentially be used to support at least three kinds of identity: as Chinese, as part of a southeastern Hokkien and Hakka culture area, or as uniquely Taiwanese. All three cases are made by various people in Taiwan, although the main line of division is between the national reading and the local Taiwanese reading. In fact, of course, these three interpretations are not mutually exclusive, although their political implications may be—it is easy to imagine Taiwan as a part of China again, or as an independent nation, but the road between is difficult to travel, as the current government can attest.
At one level, Taiwanese religious practice is clearly Chinese. Even its more idiosyncratic developments like the popularity of ghost temples or the rise of the Compassion Merit Society remain comprehensible to Chinese people anywhere. Ancestor worship is widely shared and probably varies less across the Taiwan strait than within the mainland. Many of the same gods are important to Chinese everywhere—Koan Kong, Koan Im, and others play similar roles everywhere. Structurally, the association of gods with local communities in a nested hierarchy of kitchen gods at home, earth gods in the village, and community gods beyond is also ubiquitous. So is the idea of ghosts as the unincorporated dead, marginal to social categories of kin and community.
The case for a specifically southeastern religion, or ethnically Hokkien or Hakka religious traditions, rests primarily on local gods shared across the Taiwan strait, and on the genetic relationships between temples. Most community temples in Taiwan can trace the incense in their pots back to mother temples in Fukien. They either brought incense directly from these temples or took it from Taiwanese temples with direct ties to the mainland. This transfer of incense brings spiritual efficacy to the daughter temple and also establishes a hierarchy of incense-giver over incense-taker. On the other hand, similar regional networks tie temples together all across China. The case for a regional religious tradition may grow as economic and social links are reestablished, but it does not carry much weight so far.
The argument for Taiwanese uniqueness has been much more important in Taiwan and does have an empirical basis. Many of the regionally based gods have evolved independently on Taiwan to an extent, so that people can point to differences between images now carved on Taiwan and in Fukien. More important, the inherent flexibility and interpretability of ritual have allowed uniquely Taiwanese creations to develop. The Taiwanese versions of ghost worship discussed here may share some basic meanings with ghost worship across China, but they have also developed a particularly Taiwanese constellation of evocations, from the wild performances of the frontier days to the associations with the market in the past decade. The Compassion Merit Society is similarly a part of Chinese Buddhism, but also the creation of Taiwan’s specific experience with modernity. One could as easily develop other examples, like the pietistic sects or the growth of spirit mediums.
Such regional variations themselves necessarily typify religious practice in a place like China, where there were no powerful institutions that could impose a unified interpretation. Taiwan is unique, but so is Szechuan or Shensi. Two opposing processes have affected how different Taiwan is. On the one hand, extensive Chinese settlement began only three centuries ago in Taiwan. Many areas of the mainland have had millennia to develop local traditions. This would lead us to expect relatively little difference between Taiwan and Fukien. On the other hand, Taiwan has been effectively separate from the mainland for almost all of the past century, which was a period of extraordinarily rapid change on both sides of the strait. This has helped encourage more rapid religious transformation. The lack of major structural change in the religion should not disguise how much day-to-day interpretations have evolved over the past century in Taiwan and thus how much they must differ from the mainland.
The situation has become significantly more complex in the past few years as lines of communication between Fukien and Taiwan have again opened up. One early result of this is that community temples send delegations back to mother temples on the mainland to renew their spiritual authority by taking incense ash. This process itself is open to multiple readings. Superficially it recreates the authority of home temples on the mainland over their Taiwanese descendants, putting the heart of authenticity on the mainland and leaving Taiwan as the dependent. One could easily see this as an affirmation of official government policy favoring a reunification of the Chinese people or possibly as a step toward some kind of southern Min ethnic unity.
Yet such a reading is too facile. Few members of these delegations would admit to having such intentions. Their actions have more important implications within Taiwan itself: these trips establish direct ties to the home temple, and can thus constitute a declaration of independence from intermediate mother temples on Taiwan itself. Thus several Taiwanese temples to the An-ch’i county god Co Su Kong have long claimed to be the original offshoot of the home temple on the mainland, from which the others grew as secondary or tertiary developments. One trip back, however, makes these arguments moot, as each returning temple can now claim direct ties to the original fount of spiritual authority. This attempt at upward mobility within the Taiwanese hierarchy has been seen most clearly in Taiwan’s most famous Ma Co temples. The temple in Ta-chia returned to the home temple on the mainland very early, after which it claimed to be the equal of the temple in Pei-kang, arguably Taiwan’s most famous single temple. It stopped participating in the annual pilgrimage to Pei-kang because it would no longer admit to an inferior status.67
The situation often becomes more complex still as a result of these trips. Taiwanese sometimes see temples whose neglect and abuse since 1949, especially during the Cultural Revolution, leaves them in terrible condition. Some complain about the poor quality of the restorations compared to Taiwanese temples or about how truly fine god images are now carved only in Taiwan. Such complaints begin to move the center of authenticity from the mainland back to Taiwan. After all, some people argue, Taiwanese temples never broke the stream of incense the way mainland temples did. This argument also evokes broader sentiments that Taiwan is now somehow more genuinely Chinese than China after decades of Communist rule. Such feelings that the power relations have been reversed are strengthened when Taiwanese donate huge amounts of money to rebuild mainland temples, as well as when they make business investments.
These return trips thus make a complex case: Power and authenticity appear in the mainland temples through the very act of going on pilgrimages there, but also shift back to Taiwan as pilgrims become the main investors in those temples and their communities, and as they experience a loss of tradition on the mainland. The political message is just as messy. Popular religion generally has been the realm of Taiwanese, not mainlanders, and using religion as the cutting edge of contact across the strait is ironic for both governments. Yet while the celebration of these very localist deities strengthens specifically Taiwanese traditions within Taiwan, it also promotes a kind of de facto reunification in this realm.68
This is a rather unsettled note on which to conclude this chapter, but perhaps that is appropriate for a situation in flux. The ironies, ambiguities, and contradictions in religious flows between Taiwan and the mainland, and within Taiwan itself, result in part from the fluid possibilities of Taiwanese religious practice itself: the relative weakness of the monastic tradition, the frontier conditions, the long separation from the mainland, the speed of social change, and the lack of any effective institutional authority over interpretation.
1. All romanization is in southern Min dialect unless noted otherwise.
2. For a discussion of problems in how the term “religion” is used in surveys in Taiwan, see Chang Mao-kui and Lin Pen-hsuan, “Tsung-chiao te she-hui i-hsiang—i-ko chih-shih she-hui-hsueh te k’o-t’i” [The social image of religion—a problem in the sociology of knowledge] (a paper presented at the Conference on the Psychology and Behavior of the Chinese, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Nan-kang, 1992).
3. Important studies of ancestral worship include Emily Ahern, The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973); Hsieh Jih-chang and Ying-chang Chuang, eds., The Chinese Family and Its Ritual Behavior (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Monograph Series B, no. 15, 1985); David K. Jordan, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Arthur P. Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 131–182.
4. See Stevan Harrell, Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), pp. 117–128; and Robert P. Weller, Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), pp. 31–32.
5. Such uxorilocal marriages were extremely common in some parts of Taiwan, although they completely reverse standard patrilineal practice. See Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), pp. 94–107.
6. On affinal ties, see Bernard Gallin, “Matrilateral and Affinal Relationships of a Taiwanese Village,” American Anthropologist, 62 (1960): 632–642; and Robert P. Weller, “Social Contradiction and Symbolic Resolution: Practical and Idealized Affines in Taiwan,” Ethnology, 23 (1984): 249–260.
7. See Emily Ahern, “Affines and the Rituals of Kinship,” in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, p. 283; Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Pres, 1972), p. 125; and Robert P. Weller, “Social Contradiction.”
8. I borrow this language from Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 34–35; see also Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing About Rites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
9. On the definitions of ritual communities and belief spheres, see Lin Meirong, “Chang-hua Ma-tsu te hsin-yang ch’uan” [The belief sphere of Chang-hua Ma-tsu], Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 68 (1989): 41–104.
10. See Emily Martin Ahern, Chinese Ritual and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
11. On factions generally, see Joseph Bosco, “Taiwan Factions: Guanxi, Patronage and the State in Local Politics,” Ethnology, 31, no. 2 (1992): 157–183; and Tsai Ming-hui and Chang Mau-kuei, “Formation and Transformation of Local P’ai-hsi: A Case Study of Ho-k’ou Town,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 77 (1994): 125–156.
12. See Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, “Introduction: Gods and Society in China,” in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, ed. Shahar and Weller (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. 1–36.
13. See, for example, Brigitte Baptandier, “The Lady Linshui: How a Woman Became a Goddess,” in Shahar and Weller, eds., Unruly Gods, pp. 105–149.
14. James L. Watson, “Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of T’ien Hou (‘Empress of Heaven’) Along the South China Coast, 960–1960,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 300–302.
15. Weller, Unities and Diversities, pp. 56–59.
16. See Yu Kuang-hong, “Making a Malefactor a Benefactor: Ghost Worship in Taiwan,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 70 (1990): 39–66.
17. I have even run across one temple dedicated to Chiang Kai-shek.
18. Some of the flavor of the rivalries comes across in Michael Saso, Teachings of Master Chuang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), which reflects in part the feelings of one important local Taoist.
19. For sources on this aspect of Taoism, see Saso, Teachings; Kristofer Schipper, Le Corps Taoïste (Paris: Fayard, 1982); and Liu Chih-wan, T’ai-pei shih Sung-shan ch’i-an chien-chiao chi-tien [Great propitiatory rites of petition for benificence at Sung-shan, Taipei] (Nan-kang: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1967).
20. Weller, Unities and Diversities, pp. 113–115.
21. There is a limited literature on these vegetarian halls, including Marjorie Topley, “The Great Way of Former Heaven: A Group of Chinese Secret Religious Sects,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 26 (1963): 362–392; Seiichiro Suzuki, Taiwan chiu-kuan hsi-su hsin-yang [Old customs and traditional beliefs of Taiwan] (Taipei: Chong-wen, 1978 [1934]), pp. 38–40; and J.J.M. DeGroot,. Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China (Taipei: Literature House, 1963 [1903], p. 170). These groups deserve further study in Taiwan.
22. I will not discuss imperial state religion here, although it certainly was practiced in the Ch’ing dynasty. See Stephan Feuchtwang, “School-Temple and City God,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 581–608.
23. See Dian H. Murray, The Origins of the Tiandihui: The Chinese Triads in Legend and History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
24. Steven Sangren, “Traditional Chinese Corporations: Beyond Kinship,” Journal of Asian Studies, 43, no. 3 (1984): 391–415.
25. See Cai Shaoqing, Zhongguo jindai huidang shi yanjiu [Research into the history of Chinese secret societies] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987).
26. David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer, The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
27. John R. Shepherd, “Sinicized Siraya Worship of A-li-tsu,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 58 (1984): 1–81.
28. Robert P. Weller, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 47–48.
29. Gary Seaman, Temple Organization in a Chinese Village (Taipei: Orient Cultural Service, Asian Folkore and Social Life Monographs, vol. 101, 1978), pp. 114, 117; Gary Seaman, “The Sexual Politics of Karmic Retribution,” in The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, ed. Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 392–394.
30. See Lin Mei-rong, “Chang-hua Ma-tsu,” p. 95.
31. Sangren, “Traditional Chinese Corporations.”
32. The term belief sphere is from Lin Mei-rong, “Chang-hua Ma-tsu.”
33. Ibid., p. 98.
34. Wang Shih-ch’ing, “Religious Organization in the History of a Taiwanese Town,” in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, p. 81.
35. Wang Shih-ch’ing, “Religious Organization,” pp. 89–91.
36. Seaman, Temple Organization; Weller, Unities and Diversities, pp. 54–56.
37. See, for example, Wang T’ien-tsung, San-hsia ti-ch’u Yi-wei k’ang-Jih shih-liao [Historical materials on the Yi-wei resistance to Japan in the San-hsia area] (San-hsia: author, 1967).
38. It was widely studied by folklorists whose materials have still not been adequately analyzed.
39. T’ai-wan sheng wen-hsien wei-yuan-hui, comp., T’ai-wan sheng t’ung-chih [Complete gazetteer of Taiwan province] (Taipei: Chung-wen, 1980), pp. 292–295.
40. Governor-general of Taiwan, Taiwan ni okero jinja oyobi shukyo [Shinto shrines and religion in Taiwan] (Taihoku: Bunkyokyoku shakaika, 1939), p. 10.
41. This was the part of the ritual called “robbing the lonely ghosts.” See Weller, Unities and Diversities, for more detail.
42. P. Steven Sangren, “A Chinese Marketing Community: A Historical Ethnography of Ta-ch’i, Taiwan” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1979), p. 131.
43. See Lin Man-houng, “Wan Ch’ing T’ai-wan te ch’a, t’ang chi chang-nao” [Tea, sugar and camphor in late Ch’ing Taiwan], T’ai-pei wen-hsien 38 (1976): 1–9; and Ka Chih-ming, “Jih-chu T’ai-wan nung-ts’un chih shang-pin-hua yu hsiao nung ching-chi chih hsing-ch’eng” [The commodification of agricultural production and the formation of family farming agriculture in colonial Taiwan (1895–1945)], Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 68 (1989): 1–40.
44. See Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press, 1951); and Robert N. Bellah, “Epilogue: Religion and Progress in Modern Asia,” in Religion and Progress in Modern Asia, ed. Bellah (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 168–229.
45. Stevan Harrell, “Why Do the Chinese Work So Hard?” Modern China, 11, no. 2 (1985): 203–226; Hsieh Jih-chang, “The Chinese Family Under the Impact of Modernization,” in Anthropological Studies of the Taiwan Area: Accomplishments and Prospects, ed., Kwang-chih Chang, Kuang-chou Li, Arthur P. Wolf, and Alexander Chien-chung Yin (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1989), pp. 273–284; Siu-lun Wong, “The Applicability of Asian Family Values to Other Socioculturel Settings,” in In Search of an East Asian Development Model, ed. Peter L. Berger and Michael Hsin-huang Hsiao (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988).
46. Bernard Gallin and Rita Gallin, “Socioeconomic Life in Rural Taiwan: Twenty Years of Development and Change,” Modern China, 8 (1982): 236–237; Harrell, “Why Do the Chinese Work So Hard?”; Li Yih-yuan, “T’ai-wan Min-chien tsung-chiao te hsien-tai ch’u-shih” [The modern tendencies of Taiwan’s popular religion], Wen-hua de t’u-hsiang [Image of culture], 2 (1992): 117–138; Yu Ying-shih, Chung-kuo chin-shih tsung-chiao lun-li yu shang-jen ching-shen [Modern Chinese religious ethics and business spirit] (Taipei: Lunching, 1987).
47. See Weller, Resistance, Chaos and Control, pp. 146–153.
48. See Li Yih-yuan, “T’ai-wan Min-chien tsung-chiao.”
49. Official statistics in 1991 listed about 1.5 million members of such sects, but they fail to distinguish sects officially registered as branches of Buddhism or Taoism (Tz’u-hui t’ang is the most important) or people who still deny membership because Yi kuan tao had been illegal until 1987.
50. See “Shenmi jiaopai chongshi tianri” [A secret sect sees the light of day again], Yazhou zhoukan, August 5, 1990, pp. 28–39; Chao Ting-chun, “Yi kuan tao ts’ai-li shen pu k’o ts’e” [The immeasurable wealth of the Yi kuan tao], Wealth Magazine, 121 (April 1992): 131. Perhaps 90 percent of Taiwan’s vegetarian restaurants, for example, are said to be run by sect members (Chao, “Yi kuan tao”). The most prominent business example is Chang Jung-fa, chairman of one of the world’s largest container shipping companies.
51. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).
52. Judith A. Berling, “Religion and Popular Culture: The Management of Moral Capital in ‘The Romance of the Three Teachings,’” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, p. 217. Some current sects practice a kind of moral accounting, like the T’ien-ti chiao, which keeps track of good deeds. Many sectarians emphasize appropriate worldly action to realize religious ideals.
53. See Joseph Bosco, “Yiguan Dao: ‘Heterodoxy’ and Popular Religion in Taiwan,” in The Other Taiwan, 1945 to the Present, ed. Murray R. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
54. See Jordan and Overmyer, The Flying Phoenix, p. 273.
55. See ibid., pp. 276–280; Cheng Chih-ming, “Yu-chi lei luan-shu so hsien-shih chih tsung-chiao hsin ch’u-shih” [The new trend in religious worship as seen from biographical travels, memoirs], Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 61 (1987): 105–127.
56. See Cheng, “Yu-chi lei”; Chiu Hei-yuan, Min-chien hsin-yang yu ching-chi fa-chan [Popular beliefs and economic development], Report to the Taiwan Provincial Government (n.p.: Taiwan sheng cheng-fu min-cheng t’ing, 1989).
57. For two examples, see Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Ai-hwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
58. Suzuki, T’ai-wan chiu-kuan, p. 473.
59. Weller, Unities and Diversities, pp. 80–81.
60. See chapter 7 in this volume by Gardella for more information on the camphor trade.
61. I develop this argument in Unities and Diversities, pp. 82–85.
62. This is based on interviews with the I-lan county executive, Yu Hsi-k’un, and the former county executive, Ch’en Ting-nan, in August 1993.
63. See Weller, Resistance, Chaos and Control, pp. 148–152, for more detail on this argument.
64. This simplifies to an extent, but probably captures the understanding of most lay Buddhists in Taiwan.
65. Tibetan Buddhism is similarly popular among intellectuals and professionals in the United States, and for very similar reasons.
66. See Chien-Yu Julia Huang and Robert P. Weller, “Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism” (unpublished paper, n.d.), for an elaboration of this argument. See also Lu Hwei-syin, “Women’s Self-Growth Groups and Empowerment of the ‘Uterine Family’ in Taiwan,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 71 (1991): 29–62.
67. See Hsun Chang, “Incense-Offering and Obtaining the Magical Power of Qi: The Mazu (Heavenly Mother) Pilgrimage in Taiwan” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1993), pp. 203–205; Murray Rubinstein, “The Revival of the Mazu Cult and of Taiwanese Pilgrimage to Fujian,” Harvard Studies on Taiwan: Papers of the Taiwan Studies Workshop, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University), pp. 89–125.
68. For a very sensitive discussion of the implications of religious transactions between Taiwan and Fukien, see Steven Sangren, “Anthropology and Identity Politics in Taiwan: The Relevance of Local Religion” (paper presented at the Taiwan Studies Workshop, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, 1995).