When the famous monk announced that it was time to go outside, my heart leaped. I had spent the past eight hours inside a hilltop temple in the small town of Keelung just north of Taipei, trying to chant Buddhist scripture and performing a variety of rituals that I hadn’t understood, so I was thrilled by the chance to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. Plus, if the inside part of the temple ceremony was over, that meant it was getting closer to the time when the monk would lead the two hundred or so parishioners in the practice of “mercy release,” which is what, after all, I had come to the temple to see.
I stood up and followed the directions of the super nice middle-aged Chinese lady named Jen, who had been helping me figure out what was going on all day long. Unfortunately, what I had to do next was no easy matter. Jen told me I had to bring with me not only the two pieces of white bread that I had squished around strands of my own hair, but also the little cup of salt water, the packet of jasmine, and the prayer book. These were hard enough to juggle even before Jen informed me that I could not let the impure bread touch the book. Or was it the book that was impure? And could the bread touch the jasmine? I wasn’t sure. Just to be safe, I tried holding all the things without any of the things touching any other of the things, but then someone handed me two burning sticks of incense, and any chance of holding all the things the right way went out the window. And then it started to rain. When my too-big khaki pants started to fall down, I felt like throwing everything on the ground and sprinting for the exit.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of mercy release. That’s okay—I hadn’t heard of it either until I started researching this book, but it turns out to be one of the most bizarre religious practices I’ve ever learned about. The practice has its roots in ancient Buddhist scripture, which teaches that if you see an animal that has been captured or is trapped in some way, you should release the animal, both for the animal’s own sake and to improve your own karma. Some Buddhists still practice mercy release in this way, but these days, some Buddhist temples have turned this simple, admirable activity into big business. They hand over big bucks to buy huge numbers—we’re talking thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions—of small animals, mostly fish, birds, frogs, and turtles, which the Buddhists then release into the environment, where, if the creatures haven’t died already, they are promptly captured again and sold back to the temples and groups to be released once more. In return, the religious organizations receive tons of money in donations from parishioners for the opportunity to participate in the ritual, which many believe will bring them good karma in their future lives.
Although releasing a couple of animals into the environment here and there won’t likely harm the environment at all, the veritable “karma mill” that has been created by these large Buddhist organizations does cause significant environmental injury in a couple of ways. First, many of the animals die while being captured, stored, transported, or released. According to one estimate, over two hundred million animals are released every year in Taiwan alone, and many of these are injured or killed in the process. The Humane Society International describes some of the harm that the animals can endure:
Animals trapped for mercy release can sustain fatal injuries from the nets or snares. Others suffocate or starve during transport, when they’re kept in tightly packed crates for days or weeks. Animals who survive to be released often collapse from exhaustion, illness, or injury or become easy prey for predators. Many die after they’re released into inappropriate habitats. For example, freshwater turtles may be let loose in the ocean, and saltwater fish may be placed in ponds or rivers. In some cases, hunters wait just beyond the ceremony sites to recapture the animals so they can be resold.
The “karma mills” can cause significant environmental injury in another way. Because many of these animals are released into unsuitable habitats, they can harm those habitats or even destroy them, along with the other animals that call these habitats home. Again, Humane Society International describes the problem: “Mercy release can also harm ecosystems. Animals may be released outside their natural ranges, sometimes thousands of miles from where they were captured and in groups large enough to establish breeding populations. They can spread diseases to native species, compete for food and territory, or mate with indigenous animals, threatening gene pools.” One of the rare scientific studies on the effects of mercy release, for example, studied the effect of the practice on American bullfrog populations in Yunnan Province, China, and concluded that “religious release is an important pathway for wildlife invasions and has implications for prevention and management on a global scale.”
To learn what I could about mercy release, I had chosen to visit Taiwan instead of the many other countries where it takes place—Thailand, mainland China, Australia, even the United States—because Taiwan is where the practice has become most prominent and controversial. I had also lived in Taipei for a year after college, and I was curious to see how the place had changed in the past twenty years. My memory was that it was a chaotic and polluted city that was an incredibly fun place to live as a young person who liked staying up late, dancing to 1990s grunge, and drinking cheap booze. But who knew what I would think of it as an old person who likes getting up early, listening to jazz, and drinking cheap booze? In addition to getting a better understanding of mercy release, I also had set myself a somewhat difficult goal to achieve in the six or so days that I was going to spend in the island nation, namely, to witness firsthand someone or some group of people actually engaging in the practice. I had no idea how I was going to go about attaining this goal, short of sitting by some random river and waiting to see if anyone would come by and throw a thousand turtles into it. I did, however, have a couple of contacts who could probably point me in the right direction, so I showed up in Taipei and hoped for the best.
I first learned about mercy release while communicating over e-mail with a Taiwan-based writer named Steven Crook. Crook explained the practice to me, and although I could hardly believe it, a quick web search confirmed its reality. It didn’t take much more searching on the Internet to learn that the person to talk to in the United States about mercy release was Iris Ho, wildlife program manager at the Humane Society International in Washington, DC. For years, Ho has worked on all sorts of important and high-profile issues involving animal rights, such as protecting elephants from ivory hunters, stopping poachers who kill rhinoceroses for their horns, and convincing Chinese restaurants to stop serving shark fin soup. She is also the society’s point person on the mercy-release issue.
When I talked with Ho on the phone in early 2013, she explained to me the vast scope of the problem. Apparently, practitioners release hundreds of millions of animals every year, resulting in countless deaths and enormous damage to aquatic and other habitats. She told me that although mercy release is widely practiced in mainland China, the practice is most openly studied and debated in Taiwan. Ho also said that public opinion in Taiwan is largely against mercy release, but that it persists nonetheless, with supporters claiming that the practice is not only within their religious freedom rights but also actually good for the country. Indeed, Ho told me that one prominent supporter had claimed that an enormous typhoon had recently missed hitting the island because mercy release was practiced there so often. According to Ho, although the practice is mainly carried out by big temples, lots of individuals do it on their own as well. On a recent trip to Taiwan, Ho said, she and some of her fellow animal rights advocates one day randomly ran into a bunch of people who had bought some fishes at a seafood restaurant and were releasing them into a nearby stream. Ho said that the releasers were “so happy” and tried to get Ho and her compatriots to join them. “Just do it,” they said. “It’s so good for you!” Ho and her compatriots demurred.
Most interestingly, Ho explained to me that to combat the corrupt and dangerous big-business model of mercy release, animal rights groups have started working together with more kind-minded Buddhist organizations to organize small-scale alternatives that truly embody the spirit behind the ancient mercy release teaching without causing any environmental damage. Recently, for example, the Venerable Benkong Shi, an American Buddhist monk from New York, and Lorri Cramer, a rehabilitation specialist with the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society, became aware around the same time that Buddhists around New York City had been releasing turtles in large numbers into inappropriate habitats, including Central Park. The two came together to plan events they call Compassionate Release, where they release turtles that have been rehabilitated from injuries back into the wild. The ceremonies involve far fewer turtles and don’t harm the environment. Cramer and Shi hope that Buddhists who practice the dangerous version of mercy release will begin participating in their ceremonies instead. According to Ho, the main theme of a recent major conference on the issue of mercy release that was held in Taiwan centered on developing alternatives like this one, and apparently, the topic was going to come up again in a couple of months at a conference in Baltimore. I went right out and bought my ticket to the Charm City.
The conference was the twenty-sixth International Congress for Conservation Biology, and in case you were wondering, its mascot was a stuffed blue crab named “Clawdia.” I went all the way to Baltimore just to attend a single session, which was loquaciously titled “The Impact of Animal Release on Biodiversity and Human Health: Exploring Opportunities to Bridge Conservation and Religion.” I sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs and waited to see how many people would in fact show up for a panel on this obscure topic. As it turned out, attendance wasn’t so bad—maybe twenty-five or thirty people came to hear the panel of seven discuss the problem of mercy release and what scientists could do about it.
Chairing the panel was Stephen Awoyemi, a Nigerian scientist who, among other things, was the chairperson of the Religion and Conservation Research Collaborative, a committee of the Religion and Conservation Biology Working Group of the Society for Conservation Biology. Awoyemi’s collaborative had recently issued a policy paper and a related letter in the prestigious journal Science, urging Buddhists to embrace alternatives to the dangerous large-scale practice of mercy release, such as adopting a cow that was otherwise destined for slaughter. The publications also made it clear to critics of Buddhism that some Buddhists groups have already begun to take such steps.
But now, at the conference, the panelists gave a series of presentations uneven in their ability to hold the audience’s interest. An academic argued that the current practice of mercy release is a deviation from true Buddhist teachings. A prominent wildlife advocate from the Chinese mainland gave a presentation on the grim situation there. The presentation included a picture of a temple in Shanxi, where bags holding over ten thousand snakes, one-third of which had already died in the bags, were waiting to be opened as part of a mercy-release ceremony. Two women from Taiwan—a Buddhist named Li-Yi from a group called Bliss and Wisdom International and a scientist named Fang-Tse (Elaine) Chan from the Endemic Species Research Institute—explained how their two organizations had worked together to organize over thirty small-scale releases of rehabilitated animals as an alternative to the awful large-scale releases that are prevalent all over Taiwan.
The highlight of the program, though, was the Venerable Benkong Shi, the New York monk. Shi is a big white guy in his sixties who looks, with his bald head and Buddhist garb, sort of like Jeffrey Tambor in a bathrobe. He speaks with a strong New York accent, and he definitely has a sense of humor about himself. When he learned about the turtles being released in Central Park and openly criticized the releasers as “ignorant,” for example, he soon realized that “being a white man dressed as Kung Fu didn’t help” him stop the practice. Shi explained that shortly after he had publicly criticized the Central Park release, he woke up one morning to find that someone had left him a tiny turtle at his door. Not knowing what to do, he called the Turtle and Tortoise Society and asked for advice. The staff told him to take care of it for the next eighty or eighty-five years, because that’s how long turtles can live.
Shi was attending the conference as a kind of ambassador to the scientific community from the religious world. Stressing that mercy release has gone beyond Buddhism and entered Chinese culture more broadly (indeed, one academic paper I read says that even some Christian churches in Taiwan have practiced it), Shi explained that the believers who do the mass releases truly, deeply believe that they are helping and that good things will come back to them from releasing the animals. But he said that temples are happy to learn how to work with conservationists and that conservationists should reach out to them. “Let’s work together,” he said. “Knock on our door. We won’t shoot you.”
I was lucky enough to be invited to join Iris Ho and the panelists at lunch afterward and even luckier to be seated near Elaine Chan, who was extremely friendly and funny and happy to tell me what she knew about the mercy-release situation in Taiwan. While negotiating the grotesquely US-sized portion of food on her plate, she told me about the king of all mercy releasers—a Taipei-based monk named Hai Tao. The monk’s enormous following owes itself not only to his personal charisma, but also to the fact that he runs a twenty-four-hour-per-day television station called Life TV, which allows him to easily spread his message around the world. According to Life TV’s website, “Besides broadcasting the orthodox Buddhist programs and advocating the values of no killing, life release, Buddha-remembrance and vegetarianism, Life TV also serves as the great information integration platform for all Ven. Hai Tao’s missions. . . . Through 24-hour broadcast, Life TV intends to allow all of the sentient beings, visible or invisible, to benefit from the Dharma teaching.” It was clear from the way that Elaine (and others at the table) talked about Hai Tao that a lot of people think he is ridiculous. Not to mention dangerous. Kind of like how we liberals in the United States used to talk about Jerry Falwell. Hai Tao, in other words, is the mercy-release reformers’ public enemy number one.
Elaine also told me that if I made it to Taiwan, I could come to the town where she works—maybe a hundred miles south of Taipei—and she and other people from her office could drive me around to try to show me some mercy release in action. Perhaps, she further suggested, her office might be doing one of their rehabilitation releases along with Bliss and Wisdom International while I was there, and I could check that out. As it happened, a few weeks before I made my trip, Elaine told me by e-mail that indeed they would be releasing a rehabilitated macaque while I was there. Even though I wasn’t sure what a macaque was, I was psyched that I would actually get to see a good-style animal release in Taiwan. Imagine how much more excited I was when I learned that a macaque is not a small, colorful bird, as I thought, but a small, funny-looking monkey!
I arrived for my week in Taipei after my visits to Singapore and Hong Kong, and I quickly realized that the city was wildly different from how I remembered it in the early 1990s. For one thing, there is now a subway, which has completely changed the place. It used to be that getting around town was nearly impossible; the traffic there would make someone yearn for the calm, orderly streets of Mumbai. Now the city is both much easier to navigate and a whole lot less polluted. Sadly, most of the bars and clubs that I remember from my time living there were gone, although it is doubtful I would have ventured onto the dance floor anyway, because I’m not sure that people over the age of thirty-five are actually allowed to dance anywhere these days other than at weddings. Although I didn’t recognize either the traffic or many of the bars anymore, the August weather was familiar—the temperature regularly hovered above ninety degrees, the humidity was approximately 173 percent, and a fierce typhoon was bearing down on the island.
My first day in Taiwan was devoted to meeting people and talking about mercy release. First up was Wu Hung, the world-famous animal rights advocate who runs the Environment and Animal Society, or EAST, the leading anti-mercy-release organization in Taiwan. Wu, or Chu Tseng-hung, as he’s also known (Wu Hung is his Buddhist name), had been a Buddhist monk before deciding to devote himself full-time to the protection of animals. In his role as the head of EAST, Wu has worked on issues like protecting domestic animals from abuse, encouraging the humane slaughter of food animals, cracking down on the sale of bear bile, and promoting the safe operation of Taiwanese zoos. (In 2007, a crocodile at a zoo in Taiwan’s second-largest city bit the arm off of a veterinarian.) When I visited him, he and his coworkers were preparing for a press conference the following day. Wu intended to criticize the government’s plan to infect a bunch of beagles with rabies so it could study how the disease spreads among different species. The government had hatched the plan because of the recent reemergence of the disease in the nation, and the proposal had quickly attracted much negative attention from activists around the world, including, of course, Alec Baldwin.
When I arrived at Wu’s office, exhausted and dripping with sweat from searching the nearby streets for the right address, I was promptly greeted by a white and black office cat named Jing Jing and provided with a nice tall glass of water. Wu came in shortly after, sat down at the table where I was also sitting, and promptly smashed a small bug into oblivion on the table’s surface, which I thought was odd.
Since Wu had been a monk, I was curious whether he thought there were any good arguments from within the Buddhist tradition in favor of the big-business model of mercy release. According to Wu, who many years ago as a young monk had even engaged in the practice, releasing frogs into a river, the practitioners of mass mercy release like to quote the sutras to defend their actions, but they usually either change key words in the passages or otherwise explain the sutras incorrectly. He said that although many Buddhists continue to participate in mercy release on a large scale, “most disagree that this is how you should practice your beliefs.”
Wu explained to me how the government in Taiwan—at both the local and the national levels—has started taking steps to regulate mercy release in the country. A couple of large cities apparently have clear and specific regulations for releases. At least one other midsized county has adopted a purely symbolic “regulation” that has nonetheless helped decrease the practice within its borders. A few years ago, the national government gave a large grant to Li Mau Sheng, a law professor at National Taiwan University, to prepare a report on the nature and extent of the practice within Taiwan. On the basis of Dr. Li’s report and investigations carried out by EAST, the Forestry Bureau has issued a proposed regulation that would give the bureau the power to closely regulate mercy release throughout the entire country.
Still, Wu recognizes that the big money involved in mercy release will make it hard to crack down on Hai Tao and others like him. With events like the Ganesh festival in my mind, where it seemed that the law could only play a minor role in reducing the environmental impact, I asked Wu if this was a problem that required legal intervention. He was quite clear that the law was needed. “This is a business, not a Buddhist practice,” he said. “And if it’s a business, then we need a law, we need to regulate it.” Moreover, with the amount of money at Hai Tao’s disposal, Wu worries that even the legal system might not succeed. “He’s a businessman,” Wu told me. “He knows there’s a market; he will reject the legislation. The people with the money have too big an influence. It’s a loophole in democracy.” I completely understood what he was saying and indeed just barely stopped myself from flying into a rage about the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.
When I asked Wu if he thought I might have a chance to witness a mercy-release event during my week in Taiwan, he seemed doubtful. He asked one of his assistants to check to see if anything was planned, but the assistant initially came up empty. Wu said that usually, the big releases take place on the birthday of certain Buddhas, and there wasn’t going to be any such birthday while I was there. Unfortunately, it seemed as though I had just missed a large and therefore incredibly dangerous release on the country’s western coast—a release that involved over three hundred thousand fish.
But just as I was softly whining about my bad luck, Wu’s assistant came up with something. It turned out that Hai Tao was in fact in Taiwan, just back from an overseas jaunt, and was going to be involved in some sort of ceremony the very next day. All that the office could come up with was a small advertisement from a website that featured Hai Tao’s image and a few bits of information—the time and address of the event: eight o’clock in the morning at a temple in the district of Qidu in the city of Keelung. Wu said he had no idea at all what might be happening there, but maybe I should check it out. Who knows, maybe they would be releasing some unlucky animals, and I could learn something.
There was no way I was going to give up the possibility of seeing this infamous monk in person, so I decided that I would go and see what I could see. Plus, since I was also interested in studying joss paper burning in Taiwan, and since Keelung was supposed to be a place where a lot of joss was burnt, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. Well, that might not be the best way to put it, but you get the idea.
Later in the afternoon, I took a cab to the campus of National Taiwan University, or Tai Da, the top university in the nation, to talk with Dr. Li Mau Sheng, the law professor who had written a massive report on the practice of mercy release for the government. It didn’t take long to realize that this guy was a bit quirky. If the sign that read I LOVE SMOKING on his door, for example, hadn’t tipped me off, it would have soon dawned on me when the professor started popping out of his chair and practically dancing with excitement while talking about his report (apparently, there are actually two places where old people can dance—weddings and in their own offices). Funny, garrulous, and obviously quite brilliant, the Danny-DeVito-ish professor explained to me the nature of his work and his predictions for whether the legal system would be able to control the abuses of mercy release.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really understand much of what he said. My Chinese having gone to hell in the past twenty years, Mr. Wu had kindly agreed to translate for me, but even though he did a great job, a lot was lost in translation, and my notes are a bit of a scramble. A couple of main points, though, were clear. First, part of the reason Li worked on the report (other than being asked to by the government, which enjoys a close relationship with Tai Da) was that he feels empathy with the animals that, as he put it, “are released and then die.” Second, Li supports a focused effort to deal with the problem—a single law administered by a single agency, rather than a networked or piecemeal approach in which different agencies attack different parts of the problem (transportation, care and handling of the animals, etc.) under different legal instruments. The government apparently agrees with him on this point, even though, as Li suggested to me, the worst abuses of mercy release might very well be controlled—theoretically, at least—through the application of various existing laws administered by different agencies.
Finally, however, Li is cynical about whether having a law controlling mercy release on the books will have any practical effect. According to him, the large government bureaucracy in Taiwan, which is responsible for enforcing the laws passed by the legislature, is insufficiently educated, understaffed, and largely ineffectual. Li makes an important point about the power of law to effect change—the law on the books is one thing, but the law in action is something quite different. Still, Li suggested that perhaps just having the law on the books would do some good. As he put it, “The government is preparing a weapon to scare Hai Tao. Maybe he will reduce his practices or move them overseas.”
For my last meeting of the day, I headed over to the Bureau of Forestry to talk with some of the government officials who were championing the national law that is based on Professor Li’s work. As with almost all my encounters with government officials during my travels (except for the unnerving Mumbai cop), I found the four people I met with at the bureau to be friendly, helpful, and generally devoted to doing the right thing. I sat down in a pretty typical government office to sip tea and talk with Lin Kuo Chang, the chief of the Wildlife Conservation Section, and three other bureau employees to find out what they thought about the law’s necessity, its prospects for passage, and the likelihood of its success. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they seemed far more optimistic than Professor Li had been earlier in the day.
As for necessity, Lin and his fellow foresters agreed that the country needs a law. According to them, the number of animals being released has increased dramatically over the past ten years because of the commercialization of the practice. Lots of people, they emphasized, are making way too much money in the mercy-release business by capturing, transporting, and selling the animals, and of course, a temple collects even more money from its parishioners when it stages a mass release. When I asked the group what the Buddhist organizations say about their releases, a super sweet fifty-something lady with a blue flowered dress laughed and answered, “They think that the more the better—they think they are doing a very good thing for Taiwan.” In response to my question about whether anyone has raised a religious-freedom objection to the proposed legislation, Mr. Lin told me that no one had raised it as an issue yet, but added, “It’ll come up when we fine them.” The proposed fines are indeed steep—up to fifty thousand new Taiwanese dollars (roughly fifteen thousand US dollars) for an unauthorized release, and even more if the release damages the environment. No wonder many religious groups are opposed to the law and insist that they should be able to self-regulate without government interference as they have done historically. “I don’t want to say they’re stubborn,” said one of the women at the table. “But they don’t want to accept other people’s views.”
The government officials recognize that they’re dealing with a sensitive issue. “We’re trying to balance religion and the environment,” said the same woman, “trying to find a way in the middle. We’re not against religious culture.” They are optimistic, though, that they will succeed in getting the law passed. Not only is the public on their side, but many Buddhist groups are as well. The government hopes to cooperate with Buddhist groups and encourage them to do more of the small-scale eco-friendly alternative releases. Moreover, like everyone I talked with that day, the four government workers thought that just the process of introducing and debating the law would do some good by increasing awareness of the dangers of mercy release and getting the issue out into the open.
If mercy release had really been responsible for an earlier typhoon’s missing the island, as that one Buddhist had told Iris Ho on her visit to Taiwan the year before, why then, with mercy release becoming more and more prevalent in the past couple of years, was there a giant typhoon making its way right for Taiwan when I was there? The typhoon was predicted to hit in two days, which, unfortunately, was the same day that I had planned to go south to see Elaine Chan and the nice Buddhists release the funny monkey. When I got home from my long day of interviews, I was therefore not surprised to find an e-mail in my inbox from Elaine telling me that the release had been canceled. The change of plans made me sad. Admittedly, however, it probably made the monkey even sadder.
I still had one day until the typhoon arrived, so the next morning, I made my way to the smelly main Taipei train station and headed off to Keelung to try to get a look at the notorious Hai Tao. As I walked the mile or so from the Keelung station through the light drizzle to the hilltop temple, I wondered what I might find when I arrived. I seriously had no idea whatsoever of what was awaiting me. The temple wasn’t on the radar of any guidebook or English-language website, and the little advertisement that Wu Hung had given me about the event offered no clue. I tried running the Chinese from the ad through Google Translate and got the following, which was not helpful:
Haitao Master Chi Yan Temple in Keelung France 8/20 8:30 organize Eight Precepts, nursing students, lighting, medicine for cum compassion soup puja; at 16:00 on the 21st successful midyear Jizo France cum Kai Kenda Monsanto soup puja; respectfully Haitao master Principal Act, address: Keelung District, No. 48, Lane 65, new Street), Tel: 02-24,562,057.
I envisioned coming upon an intimate gathering of believers crowded around the charismatic leader’s feet—some of the followers perhaps nursing students slurping soup—but in any event, a gathering where I would, no doubt, not be welcome. Approaching the temple hall where the event was taking place, however, I quickly realized that “intimate” would not be an accurate way to describe the gathering. About two hundred people were milling about the temple’s gilded main room, most of them trying to find a good seat among the rows and rows of little blue plastic stools set out for that purpose. A surprisingly large number of workers wearing blue Life TV vests were assisting the parishioners, making last-minute adjustments to the many television cameras that would presumably be broadcasting the event, and otherwise making sure the proceedings would begin smoothly. A bunch of monks were seated in the front of the room. At first they were wearing brown robes, but at some point, they suddenly changed into black robes. The room was filled with flowers.
My hope was that I could hang back and watch inconspicuously from the sidelines or something, maybe leave if the ceremony turned out to be uninteresting or otherwise unlikely to involve the release of small animals into inappropriate environments. But as soon as I showed up, some older ladies who seemed happy to see me ushered me to a blue stool on the middle aisle about ten rows back from the front. I had little choice but to smile and thank them and take my seat. Soon the ceremony started with some group chanting and the banging of gongs, and I knew I was in it for the long haul.
Now, I’ve been to Buddhist ceremonies before. I’ve visited all sorts of Buddhist temples, from Bangkok to Hanoi to Tokyo. My wife and I even once stayed for several days in a Buddhist monastery somewhere in central Japan, getting up at five thirty in the morning to sit cross-legged during a lovely and peaceful ceremony led by the monastery’s monks. This thing that I had gotten myself involved with in Keelung, however, was like nothing I had ever seen before.
For one thing, during the ubiquitous chanting, everyone was doing these choreographed finger movements that were impossible to follow. It was like being at a line dance but not knowing when to twirl. The biggest difference, by far, however, was all the props. I hadn’t been sitting there more than ten minutes when someone came around to pass out tiny shot glasses filled with what looked like water and maybe a little salt. I had no idea what to do with my liquid, but what I was most worried about was that someone would make me drink it. Was this the proverbial Kool-Aid I’d heard so much about? I had a rough plan to splash the beverage on my forehead and confess my “drinking problem,” Airplane! style, but it never came to that, because soon enough, after people had the chance to inexplicably put their fingers in the water and sprinkle it up into the air and on their neighbors, someone came by to collect the water glasses and replace them with hot little tea-votive-like candles. These were even more perplexing, because apparently there was a specific right way to hold them, and, of course, they were hot. I watched as everyone moved his or her candle around in a prescribed pattern while the chanting continued, and I tried to follow along, but I was hopeless. Soon, someone collected the candles and replaced them with packets of jasmine, which we rubbed all over ourselves. Some people were waving flags. Others had little plastic squirt bottles like the one I spray our cat with when she scratches the couch and were spritzing water into the air so the droplets would fall on everyone’s heads. This went on for at least an hour before there was a break. I was confused and a little damp. Meanwhile, there were no little animals anywhere, and Hai Tao was nowhere to be seen.
During the break, a super-sweet middle-aged lady with a blue dress and long hair came and sat next to me. She spoke excellent English. She introduced herself as Jen, shook my hand, and promptly told me that we could not shake hands ever again because I was a man and she was a woman. For the next six hours, Jen would be my guide to this strange ritual. She was fascinated by the fact that a foreigner had shown up to see Hai Tao.
“Why did you come here?” she asked me.
I told her that I’d heard that the famous monk Hai Tao would be here and that I wanted to see him.
She looked at me weird. “You must have been a Buddhist in a previous life,” she said. “You must have known Hai Tao in a previous life.”
I nodded. “Maybe I did,” I answered, since, who knows, maybe I did.
Jen explained that she came to see Hai Tao as often as she could, and when I faux-innocently brought up mercy release (“I hear that there’s also a part of the ritual where you release lots of captured animals?”), she said that she often participated in such activities. But when I tried, ever so slightly, to press the mercy-release issue, she deflected the question and returned to how remarkable it was that I had shown up at this ritual at all. “This is precious time,” she said to me. “Precious time.”
For the next hour or two, the ceremony continued with a variety of activities—some sermonizing from the monk in the front of the room, a bit of call and response between the monk and the congregation, and some general chanting of sutras. I understood exactly zero percent of what was going on. At one point during the chanting, a chime rang from somewhere, and Jen instructed me to put my prayer book up in the air over my head and to keep it there until the chime rang again, at which point we all lowered our books to our laps. This happened maybe twenty times. When the morning activities were over, the group broke for lunch (surprisingly good and completely vegetarian), and after eating, I stepped outside to get some air and stretch a bit. Before long, a guy whose English name turned out to be York struck up a conversation with me, apparently intrigued by the presence of a non-Asian face at the gathering. Wearing dark glasses and a T-shirt devoted to an Indian guru, York also kind of stuck out in the crowd as being far younger and more casually dressed than most everyone else. He explained to me that he was a software programmer who liked to come to these types of ceremonies once or twice a month to “purify” his “heart and mind.”
We talked for a bit about Buddhism, and I quickly moved the conversation to the practice of mercy release. He said he practices it regularly, with birds or fish or even worms. He explained that when he releases the animals, he always says certain mantras and parts of the sutras as part of the ritual and that he releases them with the hope that they will become Buddhas themselves. “Now, because they have done something bad in the past, they have been reincarnated low down,” he said, “but I release them and hope that they will come back higher next time.” It was fascinating to hear someone of my own generation—someone who was clearly highly educated—providing his perspective about the practice. Older people blindly following a charismatic leader aren’t the only ones who engage in mercy release.
York said that he did not expect that there would be any mercy-release events on the day of the ceremony, and with that disappointing news, I was about to leave and head back to Taipei when Jen found me and convinced me to stay. Talking about Hai Tao, she was like a kid opening presents at a birthday party after too much cake and ice cream. “Hai Tao is such a good, good man,” she exclaimed, only minutes after she had told me that he refuses to talk to women. She insisted that there would be a release after the ceremony—“there’s always one”—and so I decided to stick it out a little longer.
After lunch, Hai Tao finally showed up. Bald, dressed in flowing golden robes, and wearing rimless glasses, he entered from the back and walked down the middle aisle toward the front of the hall, where he was met with the mass turning of heads and hushed gasps. The effect was sort of what I’d imagine it would be like if William Shatner suddenly arrived at a Star Trek convention. I watched eagerly with the rest of the group as the famous monk took his place at the dais at the front of the hall. Hai Tao ran the second half of the ceremony with a calm and mostly affectless demeanor that made it a bit difficult to understand why so many people are drawn to him. Jen told me that the Buddha had brought her to Hai Tao, which I wondered about, but I didn’t really know how to frame a follow-up question that would further the conversation in a fruitful manner.
In convincing me to stay for the second half, Jen had told me that the afternoon part of the ceremony would be more “mixed up” and would involve more “moving around” than the morning session. But I kid you not when I say that with the exception of two short breaks, the congregation did nothing but sit and chant from a sutra book for the next two hours. For those keeping score at home, that’s 134 freaking pages of sutras. I sat on my blue stool in a daze, listening to the mesmerizing rhythmic sound of two hundred people chanting in unison in Chinese as I hummed along with the beat.
During one of the breaks, Jen approached me and said that if I did what the rest of the group did during the rest of the ceremony I would “get many merits.” “In the future,” she told me, “you will think of today—what we did today was get rid of all the bad stuff and bring in the good stuff. You’re really lucky to be here. Wonderful!” She was so excited, and her enthusiasm was so contagious, that I found myself thinking that perhaps someday I would indeed be reincarnated as a Buddha, or as a bodhisattva, or at least as a successful hedge-fund manager with a huge boat.
The chanting finally over, Hai Tao took the congregation back through everything we had done earlier in the day, complete with the finger movements, the salty water, the hot little candle, and the jasmine packet. This time, Jen tried to help me do everything in the right way, and I probably succeeded about 22 percent of the time. The one addition to what we’d done in the morning involved the bread. Oh yes, the bread! Someone came around and handed each person two slices of white bread. Confused, since I’d been told that there would be no more eating, I looked around for some cheese. But no. This bread was not for eating. Jen directed me to pluck out a strand of my hair, put it on one of the slices of bread, and squish the two pieces of bread together. I followed her instructions and ended up with a mushy mess. Then Jen told me I had to mold the mushy bread mess into a little person. I looked at her incredulously. Are you kidding me? Jen was definitely not kidding. I did the best I could to make the bread look like a guy. The bread looked nothing like a guy. I put my head in my hands and wondered how my life had reached such a point.
And then, just as I thought I had hit the zenith of weirdness, people started rubbing their little bread guys all over themselves. Jen said that “we touch every part of our body” with the bread, and I think she said that it had something to do with promoting our health. All right. If you say so. I patted myself with the bread on my arms and my legs and my chest and then was going for my head when Jen stopped me. “We don’t touch the head! Never the head!” Holy crap! Imagine if I had touched the head?! I’d almost blown it. I lowered my bread and reapplied it to my shoulders instead.
After the chanting, Hai Tao gave what seemed to be a sermon, and then he answered a series of written questions from the group. Perhaps he’s allowed to read questions from women even if he can’t talk to them? After this, Hai Tao announced that it was time to go outside. I was so excited that I could finally leave the little blue stool behind and perhaps go see some animal releases. First, though, more rituals! We stopped as a group outside the temple and turned back to the Buddha statue inside the temple to worship it with bowing and chanting and incense offering. As we moved from there to another location on the temple grounds where there was a large table covered with edible offerings for the Buddhas, workers came around and took one of our incense sticks, the saltwater dish, and one of the pieces of bread, leaving us with the book, one incense stick, one piece of mushed-up bread, and the jasmine packet. That was still a lot of stuff to be holding, but at least I was able, albeit with some difficulty, to pull up my pants. My victory, however, was short-lived, because as Hai Tao led the group in chanting over the food, some guy came over and gave me a flag to wave. I did my best to wave it while also holding all the other stuff. Soon enough, my pants started falling down again, and this time, I was helpless to stop their descent.
And that was it. Suddenly, the whole ceremony was over. No mercy releases whatsoever. No birds, no fish, no salamanders. Not even some worms or an amoeba. What the hell? I asked Jen what was going on, but all she really wanted to talk about was how much she wanted me to go and talk to Hai Tao, to meet him in person. She said that she would bring me over to meet him, but that she wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye and would have to run away immediately. I demurred and asked again about mercy release. Finally, she relented. She said that, two weeks ago, they had let out ten gigantic truckfuls of fish into the sea by the northwestern city of Hsinchu.
I said: “That’s a lot.”
She said: “Yes.”
I said: “Where do these fish come from?”
She said: “Breeders breed them for restaurants, but Master Hai Tao buys them to save them from the restaurants.”
I refrained from telling her I thought that Hai Tao was pulling the wool over her eyes, and I simply said, “Oh.”
I found York and asked him if he knew whether there might be any plans brewing for a nearby mercy release, and he pointed me to the bottom of the hill, where a midsized truck loaded up with plastic vats was idling. I immediately clambered down the hill and approached the truck. The vats were filled with fish, which I could hear splashing around inside. I asked a woman who seemed to be in charge of the truck whether the fish were going to be released today, and she said no, that they would be released sometime in the future near Hsinchu.
“Not today?” I queried weakly.
“No, not today.”
The lady gave me a phone number to call that she said would inform me of when the next release might be, but when I got back to my hotel a couple of hours later and called the number, I couldn’t decipher any of the information on the prerecorded message. All in all, despite being able to talk to some people who actually practice mercy release with Hai Tao, it had not been an overly successful visit—I hadn’t seen what I had hoped to see. But perhaps my failure was simply a matter of timing. Had I come a week earlier or perhaps a week later, I could have witnessed exactly the kind of practice that has so angered the Taiwanese government and environmental groups around the world. Crestfallen and exhausted, I drank a few bottles of Taiwan Beer, crawled into bed, and watched the second half of The Hangover, Part II until I fell asleep.
For the larger part of the next two days, the typhoon battered Taipei with torrential rains and extreme winds. I stared out my hotel window, chowing on noodles and sipping beer purchased from the miraculously still open 7–Eleven that was right next to the hotel. I read a lot and watched many movies starring Seth Rogen. When the typhoon finally cleared, I had one more spot to visit. In an area of town near the bustling Longshan Temple, near Snake Alley, the notorious part of Taipei where you can go watch a snake be stripped of its skin and then drink a cup of its blood, is a stretch of Heping East Road known as Bird Street. The area, which I learned about from Wu Hung, is where you can go to buy any kind of bird you want—everything from a sparrow to a parakeet to a couple of lovebirds to a toucan to an honest-to-goodness buzzard—either to keep as a pet or, if you’re so inclined, to release for karmic rewards.
Stinky, chirpy, and slathered in Avian flu, Bird Street is not a place I would recommend visiting, even though that thing about how it is slathered in Avian flu was a lie, probably. The birds (along with an occasional group of guinea pigs or giant snails) are kept in terrible conditions, packed into small ugly cages stacked on top of each other from floor to ceiling. The noise and smell were truly overpowering, and the air felt thick with poop and feathers. One small cage held eight ducklings; another housed a full-grown rooster. But the really sad part was the stacks of long, shallow wooden crates that were packed with sparrows. You purchase these if you want to have a big mercy-release event; the stores even have signs up that announce FANG SHENG NIAO (“mercy-release birds”). I don’t know exactly how many sparrows were crammed into each crate, but it was a lot—way more than ever should have been packed into a space that tight. I approached one crate and said hello to the tiny birds. Though I didn’t mention it to them, I secretly hoped that they would get to experience at least a brief moment of freedom in the future—sometime between when they are released from their tiny prison and when they are recaptured and put right back into another tiny prison. I’m not sure how anyone could visit this place and conclude that these large-scale so-called mercy releases are even the slightest bit merciful.
The typhoon, as it turned out, was not the only thing that ended up delaying the release of the rehabilitated macaque. Right around the same time as the typhoon, Chan and her coworkers found a new wound on the monkey’s face and had to put off its release for a couple of weeks until the sore healed. And then, while the macaque was rehabbing, a masked palm civet took its place in the queue to be released, so the poor macaque had to wait its turn. (Chan’s group has only one release-training enclosure, and it is too small to accommodate more than one animal at a time to prepare the animal for reentering the wilderness.) Eventually, however, in late October, the macaque was released.
Chan sent me a video that her office made of the monkey’s long road back to health and eventual release. Only someone with a rotten eggplant in his or her chest instead of a heart could watch the ten-minute film without feeling at least a tiny bit better about the human race. The video starts with the discovery of the monkey, caught and injured in an illegal hunting trap in the middle of the forest, in November 2012. The monkey is unconscious, with a broken skull and injuries all over its body. From there we see the animal rehabilitators working with the macaque to get him back into shape—they feed him with an eyedropper-like thing and try to teach him how to stand on two legs. Before long, the fuzzy gray guy is chomping on solid food and walking around a cage, although the scene where he first tries to walk out of the cage and falls down was enough for me to reach for a box of tissues. By the end of the video, the macaque is happily running around his rehabilitation enclosure and eating normal monkey food and even playing with what I think is a potential mate. Finally, we see the monkey out in the wild, scampering up a giant tree, soon to disappear back into the forest to live out the rest of his life in a natural habitat. Now this was truly a mercy release I could get behind.
One common way that nonbelievers rationalize or even justify imposing burdens on religious practice is by telling themselves or others that the practice in question is not really necessary or not even something that true Christians or Buddhists or whatever actually have to perform. Perhaps you’ve found yourself thinking something like this as you’ve been reading this book. Do Hindus really have to make twenty-five-foot idols to Ganesh? I know lots of Hindus who don’t build giant elephantine idols, so maybe this isn’t really a central practice of Hinduism after all. Can’t Taoists burn one piece of paper instead of a thousand pieces? Can’t the Jews in Israel light a candle on Lag B’Omer instead of a bonfire? My Jewish friends in the United States don’t burn bonfires—surely, bonfires aren’t something that you have to do to be Jewish, right?
Perhaps in none of the practices described in this book is it more tempting to press for abolition than with mass mercy release. After all, this is a practice that only a small percentage of Buddhists partake in; that dissenting Buddhists say relies on a misreading of the relevant sutras; that some scholars of Buddhism say is a deviation from true Buddhist teaching; and that does, by actually harming animals rather than helping them, seem to run counter to the Buddhist ideals most of us are familiar with. So perhaps the government can simply say that regulating this kind of mercy release, even banning it altogether, is completely fine because the ban does not infringe on real Buddhist practice.
While I was investigating mercy release and learning about its dangers, and particularly when I was in Taiwan looking at the stacks of crates stuffed with unfortunate little birds, I found myself thinking along these lines more than once. The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the argument. Ultimately, I’ve decided that it’s just plain wrong. The government should not justify regulating a religious practice by claiming that the practice is inauthentic, unnecessary to believers, or otherwise not a true reflection of how real members of a tradition practice their faith.
I reached this conclusion for several reasons. First of all, who is to say that one way of practicing any particular religious faith is true and that other ways are not? Religious believers disagree about what their faith requires all the time—consider, just as examples, the difference between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism; whether the Episcopalian Church should allow gay ministers; and whether, as some Buddhists believe but others do not, laypeople as well as monks can reach enlightenment. The division of religious faiths into schools, the creation of sects, and the presence of schisms within faith traditions are indelible features of religious communities. A lot of Buddhists may think that Hai Tao has misread the sutras, but I’m betting that Hai Tao and his followers, including my very smart new friend York, whom I met at the temple, have a different view. Is there any objective method for determining who is right and who is wrong?
Second, even if it were theoretically possible to say that some interpretations of a religious tradition are wrong, an outsider to the tradition should not be the one deciding the matter. An outsider, such as a scholar, may be able to make a sophisticated argument as to what a contested portion of a sacred document means, based perhaps on linguistic or historical analysis. The conclusion, however, should hardly be binding on those who count themselves as part of the tradition, even if the conclusion might be of great interest to some of those people. How many Jews, regardless of what particular stripe of Judaism they might belong to, would agree to allow a Catholic, a Zoroastrian, or a secular scholar decide what counts as true Judaism? Ask yourself how you would react if a nonbeliever told you what your tradition means or doesn’t mean. I certainly wouldn’t want a Christian to tell me what I should believe as an atheist. I think it’s fine if Buddhists debate the meaning of mercy release and how it should or should not be practiced, but it makes me deeply queasy when scholars or other observers who are not Buddhists start telling Buddhists what Buddhists really do or do not believe.
Third, and perhaps most importantly for purposes of this book, the government—which can employ the coercive power of law to radically change or even destroy a religious tradition—is the worst possible institution to decide on the true meaning of a given religion. Allowing a group of legislators, or agency bureaucrats, or judges to decide what counts as a real expression of a religious tradition and what does not is an extremely dangerous road to travel. At least in the United States, it runs deeply counter to our tradition of separating church and state—a tradition intended not only to protect the state from religion but also to protect religion from the state. If the state can decide what counts as real religion and what doesn’t, then what’s to stop it from defining some practice or belief as not being religious and then stomping it out?
For what it’s worth, the Supreme Court has recognized this point on several occasions. For instance, it has ruled that although courts may decide whether a religious freedom claimant is being sincere, they may not opine about the truth of the claimant’s beliefs. Moreover, in a case involving a Jehovah’s Witness who claimed that the state had violated his religious freedom by requiring him to work in the armaments section of its factory, the Court held for the plaintiff even though other Jehovah’s Witnesses had accepted work in that part of the factory. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote:
Intrafaith differences of that kind are not uncommon among followers of a particular creed, and the judicial process is singularly ill-equipped to resolve such differences in relation to the Religion Clauses. . . . Particularly in this sensitive area, it is not within the judicial function and judicial competence to inquire whether the petitioner or his fellow worker more correctly perceived the commands of their common faith. Courts are not arbiters of scriptural interpretation.
Indeed, in the two-hundred-plus years of its existence, the Supreme Court has never even attempted to articulate a definition of the word religion in the First Amendment. The other branches would do well to follow the Court’s lead.
Finally, determining that some practice does not really represent the beliefs of a religious faith is not necessary to justify regulation to protect the environment. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the government may impose regulations even if those regulations happen to burden a religious practice. The government should try to be respectful toward the religion and minimize the harms to the religion to the extent possible, but it most certainly can (and should) take actions to protect the environment from danger. In the case of the type of mercy release practiced by Hai Tao and others like him, the rationale for regulation should be to protect the animals and ecosystems and should have nothing to do with whether this practice is really Buddhist or not. The question is whether the harm to the environment caused by the practice is sufficiently great to justify regulation, given the costs that it will impose on those who believe that mass mercy release is an important part of their religious practice. Reasonable people may differ on the answer to this question, but in my view, given the enormous numbers of animals harmed by the practice and the serious problems caused within ecosystems by the release of nonnative species, the balance should fall in favor of regulation. The Taiwanese government, in other words, is on the right track.