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5.4 Further Research
Still, there are many questions that this research cannot answer, and these questions are also close related to my topic. Lay relatives of monks and nuns are mostly the biggest supporters of them, and receiving supports from lay relatives by monks and nuns is not against to Buddhist vinaya or individual monastic rules. In early Buddhism, whether a new monastic member had personal saving or not was never a problem when joining the monastic community. Monks and nuns were fully relied on lay supporters to sustain basic living. Moreover, monks and nuns also relied on the monastic community for extra cares and expenses. When a monastic member was sick, the monastic community would find a way to pay medical expenses for the sick member.177 In Ideal Chinese monastic system, the monastery also has the responsibility to take care of a sick member, but the reality that we have seen today is that most of sick monastic members are forced to leave their monasteries. Most of these sick monks and nuns can only rely on their lay relatives unless they can find another lay person to support them. Medical expense is the most important financial assistance that a lay relative would provide to another monastic relative. Taiwanese Buddhists always have a saying that if one wants to join the monastic community, that person must bring some money with them. The personal saving will be either donated to the monastery for a better monastic position or paid for personal expenses after entering the monastery. Why is there such a difference between an ideal monastic system and real monastic system is worth for further research.
Indeed, it is not hard to hear a story about a monk or nun leaving the monastery because of his or her illness among Buddhist communities in Taiwan. Some of them are forced to leave directly but some of them are forced to leave by pressure from the monastic community indirectly. How each monastery deals with a sick monastic
177 Shih Neng Rong, 2003, pp.187-188.
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member in Taiwan needed to be looked deeply into. In addition, what kind of medical system a monastery has in another Buddhist tradition such as Theravada in Thailand and Sri Lanka or Tibetan tradition in India and Tibet can be compared with the medical system among Taiwanese monasteries.
In this research, we look into kin relations of monks and nuns and lay relatives’
supports to monks and nuns only from the perspectives of these monks and nuns.
What their parents and other family members thought about Buddhist renunciation, the reason for their willingness to support, how they think about Taiwanese Buddhist monasteries, and how they feel about their relatives’ monastic lives after entering the monasteries are interesting thesis subjects. Furthermore, how both monk or nun and their relatives feel about Buddhism or Buddhist monasteries if the monk or nun is forced to leave the monastery when gets old and sick? How these monks and nuns deal with these difficulties? These are all potential questions that a new research can start with.
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Chapter Six: Summary and Conclusion
A monk or nun does not only rely on the supports of lay Buddhists but also supports from their relatives. Actually, some of these monks and nuns would never be able to join the monastic communities without lay relatives’ helps. The reasons why these lay relatives are willing to provide supports can be different. How people perceive the act of Buddhist renunciation play an important role in affecting the relationship between monks or nuns with their families. Buddhist renunciation is an extrafamilial alternative, and it is believed that only people who face life difficulties or someone who has been abandoned by the family system would want to become monks and nuns. Not only this is in the majority’s concept about Buddhist
renunciation, but that concept can be traced back to religious laws during the Ching Dynasty (1636-1912). The government of Ching Dynasty never believed that a young girl would really want to keep celibacy vow, so it set rules to restricted women under the age of forty and healthy women to join the monastic order.178 Rules set by the Ching government might be one of the reasons why there was the establishment of women living in the monasteries without proper ordination. Both personal and social perspectives about Buddhist renunciation will affect the relationship between monks or nuns and their relatives. Chinese Buddhism has suffered from the attacks by Confucianism on bringing negative social values into Chinese society. Monks and nuns are unfilial because many of them provide no heir for their family, and they also leave their parents behind unattended. Social values have been changed throughout times, but we still hear similar criticisms until today.
Kin relations of monks and nuns can also be affected by the reasons they want to join the monastic communities. Both Welch’s and Fan Tsung’s researches indicated
178 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.167-168.
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that most of monks and nuns became monks and nuns not for the religious reason, and these people tried to run away from the secular world for different personal reasons.179 In Sherpa’s society, a family would send a son, usually not the eldest one, to the monastery in order to solve family financial problems.180 Therefore, they also had the responsibility to support the basic living costs of their sons in the
monasteries. Despite that, the amount of that support was much more affordable than having to give them enough inheritance. In addition to that, these families would be happy to have their sons generating merits for them at the same time. In the cases of my informants, most of them did have Buddhist belief before joining the monastic community. However, religious reason was not the key reason why all of them wanted to leave their families and entered the monastery although most of them would not admit that. From their life stories, it is not hard to tell that many of them had ever encounter difficulties which made them wanted to run away from these sufferings. Despite their motivations of Buddhist renunciation, if a monk or nun has the permission from their families to become monk or nun, then he or she tends to have better relationship with their families afterward. Having a positive
relationship with lay relatives is important to these monks and nuns because that sometimes provides security for them if they somehow feel insecure about their monastic lives.
Monastic community can also be another substitution for secular family.
Pseudo-kinship terms used between monks and nuns are the best indication.
Sometimes, these pseudo-kinship terms can have double meanings in those family hereditary temples. Relationship between two monastic members can be established through dharma lineage, blood relation or both. Thus, kin relations of monks and
179 Welch, 1967; Fan Tsung, 1986.
180 Ortner, 1978.
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nuns in family hereditary temple can be far more complicated than large public monasteries and hereditary temples based on dharma lineage.
Taiwanese Buddhist monastic system has been changed through time. Before Japanese colonization, most of Buddhist temples were not orthodox Buddhist monasteries. Due to the religious policies set by Japanese colonial government in Taiwan, many popular temples tried to transform themselves into Buddhist
monasteries and affiliated with Japanese Buddhist monasteries in order to save their temple properties. Many of these temples adopted Japanese Buddhist traditions of having wives and eating meats. The influence of such a tradition and the
transformation background of these Buddhist temples are two important facts of why there are many family hereditary Buddhist temples in Taiwan. After 1949, monks fled from China tried to establish orthodox Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan, but there are two major differences between monastic system in China and Taiwan. First, Buddhist monasteries in China only have either monk in residence or it is a pure nunnery; second, one can almost find no large public monasteries in Taiwan like ones in China. There are social and political reasons for these two differences. Taiwanese Buddhist monastic has three developing stages in a rough division: before Japanese colonization, during Japanese colonization and after 1949.
Today, more and more people have the chance to get higher education. Because of higher education and change of social values, people start to look at a life that they really want. Highly educated monks and nuns also attracted more young and educated people to follow them, so they gave the society another image about Buddhist renunciation now. With a new positive image, parents and relatives are more acceptable to the choice of Buddhist renunciation, and that changes the kin relations of monks and nuns.
A monastery with good monastic system will have better welfares and cares for
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their monastic members. In ideal Buddhist monastic system, the monastery should provide all necessary supports for their members especially when they get sick or old.
However, most of the monasteries in Taiwan do not provide medical cares, so sick monks and nuns are sometimes forced to leave the monastery, so they have to search for other’s helps. Their families are the ones who they have to turn to, but not all of them are willing to give helps. They believe that the monastery will take over the responsibility to look over a monk or nun after they enter the monastery.
Without the helps from lay people and families, these monks and nuns will have to find ways to support themselves such as begging for donations on street or doing private Buddhist rituals. Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan get a large amount of donation every year, but the amount out of this donation which has been put into welfares for their monastic members is unknown. Thus, kin supports for these monks and nuns are still indispensable.
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Diagram 1: C.F.S. management structure at the monastic level The founder or
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Diagram 2: C.F.S. management structure at the organizational level
Upadhyaya
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