Rites of Passage

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to me as the main reason. However, another issue had been present from the very beginning.

Even at the time, when it seemed that I could attend the ritual, there was openly stated condition that I would have to cut my long hair. At first, I reacted with a reference to the Classic of Filial Piety without insisting on my participation.

This is an interesting issue, since a member of the temple administration brought it up on several different occasions, such as when we were talking with ritual masters. The two respective masters are over sixty years old, and with long-time experience in rituals. They were not worried over the long hair, and both came up with the same conclusion, “He can bind his hair to a top-knot and put a cap on. No one would see anything, and it is not a problem.” Even though the long hair in itself was not problem for them, since they understood that it might be a problem for temple and city administration, they came up with a practical solution how to solve this problem. Nevertheless, from perspective of republican ritualism, this solution did not solve the issue, since the core of the problem seems to have been centred on the control over body, and “republican body” being characterized by its shaved facial hair, and short hair. A manual for the ritual masters who take part in the autumn ceremony in the Taipei Confucius temple (Shidianli lisheng liyi guifan 釋奠典禮禮生禮儀規範) prescribes basic rules, movements and actions during the ritual, such as how to handle various ritual implements. On the page six under the heading Common standards (共同準測), it states,

“Because the sacrifice is an event of great state import ... (the participants) ... are not allowed to grow beard and long hair.”

This is another aspect indicating the civic republican nature of the ritual. It is also telling of how Confucianism was appropriated into the republican ideology. In this case, filial piety became one of the pillars of the state ideology, but it has been understood in a sense of social hierarchy and obedience, bodily aspects of protecting one’s body were cast away. This reminds of an incident, described in the historic overview in the Chapter 2, when the Japanese governor-general Kodama, on one hand, praised filial piety of anti-foot binding association, and on the other hand, the Japanese administration was forcing male population to cut their long hair. Both cases seem to be a part of efforts at modernization in a sense of the control over the bodies of citizens.

5.2 Rites of Passage

In this section, I move beyond the autumn Confucius ceremony that is most often associated with the temple in popular consciousness, and describe other the rituals preformed in the temple. The rituals in this section can all be classified as rites of passage. First, I discuss the adulthood ceremony organized by the Taipei City Hall and make a comparison between the structure and ideology of the ceremony under Mayor Ko in 2015 and under Kuomintang mayors in the previous years. Next, as another contrast, I describe an adulthood ceremony organized by Tatung High school, and a ritual for pre-schoolers organized by the Rotary Club.

All these rituals have been newly invented, and none of the rituals was self-referenced as Confucian, although there were occasional references to (national) Chinese culture. None of the inventers seems to have consulted Confucian ritual manuals with an exception of the

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adulthood ceremony organized under Kuomintang mayors. As is already a common usage, the Kuomintang rallied scholars who consulted classical texts, even though the ritual functioned as nationalist republican ceremony. However, all the rituals share a function of marking a spot in the passage of time. The Kuomintang adulthood ceremony was a visibly nationalistic, republican ceremony. The passage was about becoming a citizen, member of nation. The temple played role as a national symbol. Ceremony under Mayor Ko was highly de-ritualized, function of passage into civic adulthood. It did not reference or make use of the temple space.

Ceremony organized by school lead by the young adults’ natural authorities (principal and teachers). It functioned as a civic ritual to adulthood with an interesting difference that the initiates had to pass several trials, which they were passing together with classmates. Rotary ceremony, similarly to others, was a reaction to an absence of rituals in modern lifestyle, and motive for the organizers was to help children and their parents mark an important passage from kindergarten to elementary school.

Taipei City Hall

In 2009, Taipei city government organized first joint adulthood ceremony (Taibeishi lianhe chengnianli 台北市聯合成年禮) in Confucius temple. Judging by its structure and symbolism, this was intended as a civic ceremony. Participants were at the age of legal adulthood, i.e. 18 years, and were selected from schools in Taipei administrative districts, with boys and girls undergoing the rite together, and in 50:50 ratio. Every year, the city government also invited different celebrity role models to make a speech, in a move in which state and celebrities supplanted authority of family, clan or community. In 2015, Mayor Ko did organize the ceremony of transition to adulthood but in a reworked fashion. This year was also the last year when the City hall organized the adulthood ceremony. The temple will only continue to provide space for rituals organized by other institutions. As such, the autumn Confucius ceremony remains a single highly ritualized event organized by city government, other events and activities are more “secular”, and tourist oriented.

The date of the adulthood ceremony in 2015 was Saturday afternoon on November 21th. Participants started arriving at half past twelve to sign in when they all received and got dressed in the same black shirt (also worn by the mayor) with an English inscription “Ya! We are going on / 2015 Taipei”. Before the ceremony began at 14:30, there was a rehearsal of student performances on the platform in front of the main temple hall.

Since a motto of the ceremony was “Show yourself”, when the students registered, they could also sing up to perform and participate in competition, where winners received a monetary award from the mayor.

Ceremony begun with participants lining up in the back of the temple according to the numbers they received during registration. Then, they received a flower, and in succession, passed through a gate with archways made of purple and white balloons on the western side of the main hall. There were around 250 registered students, some of them walked together with their parents, some with their friends, and some walked alone. Having passed the gate, the participants had a photo taken by the staff. Another photo was taken when they stopped

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in front of the main hall. Afterwards they left passing between the chairs on the main courtyard towards the Yi gate. This walking away was to symbolize that the young adults set up on the way towards adulthood. Afterwards, ceremony staff in western suits (boy volunteers) and skirt suit (girl volunteers) to their seats, according to the students’ numbers.

Students were sitting on folding chairs in the courtyard, while parents sit or stood behind them at the Yi gate. At 3 o’clock, the performances started. They lasted about half an hour, and included violin, singing, and dancing performances. At the end, the students in audience were to cast votes. As I noticed during this part, most of the students were not paying much attention to the stage. Instead, they looked into textbooks and exercise books on their knees.

I met a mother, whom I knew because she was a volunteer dancer at the temple, and she waved and me and said, “Over there, that is my son. I had to persuade him to come; he thought it was waste of time.” She explained that students now prepare for the university entrance exams, and that is why her son would rather stay at home and study. While mum appreciated his diligence, she thought that this was a rare occasion, and he ought to go get fresh air, as too much diligence is not good. Although the mum has been at the temple every weekend, for her son, this was the very first time he visited the Taipei Confucius temple.

At four o’clock, the mayor took the stage and had a speech lasting over a half an hour.

At this point, students put the textbooks away. When the speech started, I had to leave, and when I returned twenty or thirty minutes later, I was crossing the plaza in front of the Minglun Hall, when I saw another familiar face and asked, “Has the ceremony finished?” “No, the mayor is still talking. The speech takes way too much time!” The mayor’s speech was followed by a short (circa 10 minutes) capping ceremony. The mayor put baseball caps with the same logo as t-shirts on the heads of several students acting as representatives of the whole body of participants, and the degree of ritualizing was very limited. This was followed by half-an-hour long ritual of taking pictures with mayor. Afterwards, the mayor awarded prizes in the form of large a symbolic cheque, which he gave to the groups and individual students who participated in the competition.

At the end of the ceremony, the mayor went down from the stage and, together with the students, called out the slogan of the ceremony and everybody threw their caps into the air. After that, the participants were invited to write down hopes and plans addressed to their future themselves, and put them into a mailbox in the main courtyard. At the very end, the participants and their parents etc. took turns in taking photos with the mayor.

I did not have opportunity to observe directly the ceremonies in previous years, but from the written records and recordings, it is evident that the 2015 ceremony was significantly different from the previous republican ceremony under a Kuomintang mayor. Yet, both version of an adulthood ceremony were first political events, differing only in focus and execution. Modern state’s efforts to take over the spheres of life previously governed by families, communities, and religious groups include rituals too. This can be seen on state requirements for marriage registration, or Taiwan government’s guidelines and handbooks⁴⁰⁸ for republican-style marriages, funerals, childhood rituals, or ancestor rituals, together with

408 These are available online and for download on government websites.

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the Kuomintang policy prescribing government organizations to commemorate Confucius birthday, and other newly invented national holidays such as the Constitution Day.

The Kuomintang adulthood ceremony was characterized with a high degree of ritualizing, and was heavily infused with republican nationalist symbolism. The ritual was based on prescriptions for adulthood ceremonies contained in The Models for Citizens’ Rites and Ceremonies (Guomin liyi fanlie 國民禮儀範例). An entry into adulthood equalled here an entry into nationhood. In contrast, there was very low degree of ritualizing the 2015 adulthood ceremony, which seemed purposely anti-ritualistic. The gravity point was the person of Mayor Ko rather than overarching symbolic system, and the ceremony followed from globalized values with focus on entry into capitalist job market.

In the KMT version, before the ceremony itself, the participating youth, whom could be around 100, had to undergo one-day workshop on tea ceremony under instruction by Lin Gufang 林谷芳, the founder of the Taipei Academy (Taibei shuyuan 臺北書院) and head of the Graduate Arts Institute of Arts Studies at the Fo Guang University. Instead of the t-shirts with modern design worn by everyone in 2015, the Kuomintang ceremony had students wear Tang-style jackets, blue for boys and pink with flowery decorations for girls. Moreover, boys and girls were standing in two separate groups. Overall, the ceremony was highly ritualistic, and utilized a tree-offerings ceremony with assistance of masters of ritual in white Tang jackets, while the mayor and VIPs were dressed in the long-garbs (qipao 旗袍) worn by officiants during the autumn ceremony. The KMT adulthood ceremony included offering of tea to one’s parents. At the end, all participants had to perform three bows, first to Heaven and Earth, second to the forebears of the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu 中華民族). The third one was to Confucius and the Former Worthies and Sages, who were thus incorporated into national cosmology. During the bow, the mayor presented incense and alcohol. The young participants ritually drank a sip of alcohol at the end of the ceremony. This was followed by three-offerings and another three bows to Chinese ancestors and Confucius with other Sages and Worthies. A large spirit tablet of the shared Chinese ancestors (zhonghua minzu liezuliezong shenwei 中華民列祖列宗神位) was installed on the platform in front of the main hall. The writing of a letter to one’s future self was present in both versions of the ceremony.

The Kuomintang emphasized high degree of ritualizing to not only demarcate the event in time and place to enhance its uniqueness, but to express the KMT monopoly on access to symbolic power located in the roots of the Chinese nation in the ancient past. The tablets of Chinese ancestors functioned as a materialization the shared past of all those belonging to the Chinese nation, and served to make the invented construction of nation seem real and pre-existent. This shared national ancestry has been imposed upon the populace within the state boundaries under the control of ROC.

In 2015, the ceremony had a form of a mainstream youth festivity with a duo of comical cross-dressing moderators as if from a youth TV show. In the case of the Kuomintang, there is a clear cultural logic for choosing the Confucius temple, the symbol of Chinese culture, as a place for a ceremony that might otherwise take place in an ancestral hall or in front of home altar, because national pantheon takes a precedence over one’s ancestors. In the case of