00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page i RELIGION IN MODERN TAIWAN 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page ii TAIWAN AND THE FUJIAN COAST. Map designed by Bill Nelson. 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page iii RELIGION IN MODERN TAIWAN Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society Edited by Philip Clart & Charles B. Jones University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page iv © 2003 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 0605 04 03 65 4 3 2 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Religion in modern Taiwan : tradition and innovation in a changing society / Edited by Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2564-0 (alk. paper) 1. Taiwan—Religion. I. Clart, Philip. II. Jones, Charles Brewer. BL1975 .R46 2003 200'.95124'9—dc21 2003004073 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Diane Gleba Hall Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page v This volume is dedicated to the memory of Julian F. Pas (1929–2000) 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page vi 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page vii Contents Preface ix Introduction PHILIP CLART & CHARLES B. JONES 1. Religion in Taiwan at the End of the Japanese Colonial Period CHARLES B. JONES 2. Stability and Change in Taiwan’s Religious Culture JULIAN PAS 3. Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World: The Taiwan Case CHRISTIAN JOCHIM 4. Chinese Tradition and Taiwanese Modernity: Morality Books as Social Commentary and Critique PHILIP CLART 5. The Cult of the Royal Lords in Postwar Taiwan PAUL R. KATZ 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page viii Contents 6. The Daoist Priesthood and Secular Society: Two Aspects of Postwar Taiwanese Daoism LEE FONG-MAO 7. Religious Change and Democratization in Postwar Taiwan: Mainstream Buddhist Organizations and the Kuomintang, – ANDRÉ LALIBERTÉ 8. Guanyin Narratives—Wartime and Postwar BARBARA E. REED 9. Christianity and Democratization in Modern Taiwan: The Presbyterian Church and the Struggle for Minnan/Hakka Selfhood in the Republic of China MURRAY A. RUBINSTEIN 10. Accepting the Best, Revealing the Difference— Borrowing and Identity in an Ami Village HUANG SHIUN-WEY 11. Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: Religious Studies and the Question of “Taiwanese Identity” RANDALL NADEAU & CHANG HSUN Glossary Contributors Index vi˙i˙i˙ 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page ix Preface TOWARD THE END of the summer of , the coeditors, then a pair of green-as-groceries graduate students preparing doctoral dissertations on Chinese religions in Taiwan, began sharing our interests in some of the larger historical developments that had been taking place in religions beyond our immediate research interests. We began asking other scholars of our acquaintance if they would be interested in putting together a modest panel for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on the topic of religious change in postwar Taiwan. The response was so over- whelming that we ultimately created two panels, the second for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. From there, it was nat- ural to exploit the momentum gained from those panels and try to collect polished versions of the papers into a book. We did it, and here it is. It is unfortunate that Professor Julian Pas passed away shortly after com- pleting the first revision of his essay and could not, therefore, attend to subsequent revisions or see its publication here. The final editing was done by Philip Clart and Charles Jones, with timely assistance from Paul Katz. Both editors hope that this, Professor Pas’ last scholarly essay, will serve both to memorialize him and to inspire readers to search out other materials by this fine scholar. This volume is dedicated to his memory. We would like to thank Patricia Crosby of the University of Hawai‘i Press for her support of this endeavor. As novices in the book-editing business, we could not have finished this project without her solid advice and pertinent suggestions. We would also like to recognize the contribution of the anony- ˙xi 00FMClart 7/25/03 8:37 AM Page x Preface mous reviewers for the University of Hawai‘i Press and, most of all, the patience of the contributors to this collection, who remained committed to a publication project that took longer than we originally expected. Well, gut Ding will Weile haben, as the German proverb goes, and we hope that the finished product is, indeed, a “good thing” that was worth waiting for. A note on the romanization conventions employed in this volume: As a rule, the Hanyu pinyin system is used for the romanization of Chinese terms and names, unless another spelling is in general use. Such exceptions include some place-names (e.g., Taipei rather than Taibei, Kaohsiung rather than Gaoxiong), names of well-known figures (e.g., Chiang Ching-kuo rather than Jiang Jingguo, Shih Ming-te rather than Shi Mingde), and names of Taiwanese scholars who use a nonstandard romanization of their name in their own English publications (e.g., Chiu Hei-yuan rather than Qu Haiyuan, Sung Kwang-yu rather than Song Guangyu). In all such cases, the Hanyu pinyin version of the name is provided parenthetically at the first occurrence only. The editors would like to thank the School of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America for financial assistance with the preparation of the frontispiece map, and the Catholic University of America’s research grant-in-aid program for financial assistance in preparing the index. The index was prepared by Edna Paulson and Associates. x 00Intro/Clart 7/25/03 8:38 AM Page 1 INTRODUCTION Philip Clart & Charles B. Jones THIS COLLECTION starts from the premise that religious traditions are not static objects to be described and cataloged so as to arrive at an eternally valid knowledge of them. The various encyclopedias or dictionaries of reli- gion and religions now available are very useful reference works, but they may also lull their readers into a false sense of possessing authoritative, con- cise, and immutable knowledge about particular religious traditions. In fact, what such reference works provide are abstractions of traditions, summaries of core beliefs and practices that supposedly remain more or less constant over time and across di¥erent geographic areas. Such abstractions have their value—and we ourselves are certainly responsible for our own fair share of them. As ideal types, they can help us structure our perception of empirical reality, leading to an understanding of the religious phenomena with which we are faced. At the same time, we must not confuse these ideal types with the empiri- cal reality. There will always exist a—greater or smaller—gap between a tra- dition’s abstraction and its concretization in life. A lived religious tradition is a social construction that is conditioned by many factors, including, but not limited to, class, political system, climate, economic conditions, textual traditions, and institutional structures. As these factors keep changing, so do religions, even as they themselves become factors in the social construction of other areas of culture. Seen in this way, religions (like all of culture) are not things but dialectical processes, parts of the ongoing endeavor of human beings to draw on various cultural resources in order to make sense of and 1 00Intro/Clart 7/25/03 8:38 AM Page 2 PHILIP CLART & CHARLES B. JONES to inject meaning into the world that surrounds them and to enable them to live and work together. What is true for religion is equally true for academic theories of religious change. Much scholarly analysis has gone into creating theories of modern- ization and its e¥ects on religious life, practice, and belief. However, an ideal type of “modernization” runs the same risk as an ideal type of any given reli- gious tradition: the risk of providing a mirage of unity and singularity for what might really be a host of local conditions and phenomena that could more fruitfully be studied in the plural. The assumption that a single model of modernization, generated by analysis of data coming primarily from the West, could help understand what is going on with the religions of East Asia has been questioned in recent years. Tong Shijun (), for example, examines the applicability of Jürgen Habermas’ theories of modernization to China and calls attention to debates regarding modernization that took place in the early twentieth century among Chinese intellectuals. They equated “modernization” with “Westerni- zation” and utilized the native philosophical categories of ti (substance) and yong (function) to frame their questions: Were cultural and technological importations from the West simply manifestations of a yong that did not a¥ect the Chinese ti, or were yong and ti so interrelated that the one necessarily a¥ected the other? In other words, could one import Western technology without becoming Westernized? Tong himself concludes that a Western theory such as Habermas’ can, indeed, be utilized to understand China’s transformation in the twentieth century—if properly qualified. Another example is Stevan Harrell’s () anthropological look at recreational patterns in modern Taiwan. While noting that urban Taiwanese go out and play in much the same ways as Westerners, Harrell raises the question: Is this really Westernization, or is it simply that urban folk who need to get away from the bustle of city life find their activities necessarily channeled into certain choices? In doing so, he questions whether one can, as the Chinese intellectuals studied by Tong did, equate modernization with Westernization.