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the kin relations of monks and nuns. Monks and nuns who chose to cut off all secular ties, like their motivations of becoming monks and nuns, were mostly not for
religious reasons. Furthermore, keeping a positive and close relationship with relatives can be vital for monks and nuns because most of their monastic lives must rely on the supports of their relatives. The support might not be financial, but when one wants to join the Order, other relatives in the families have to share their lay responsibility to their natal or married families. Thus, monks and nuns who have the permissions from their families to join the Order will have less family burdens afterward than those whose family is against to the decision.
In order to find out real facts about Chinese monastic system in Taiwan and kin relations of monks and nuns, there are three research focuses in my thesis:
1. To find out the kin relations of monks and nuns;
2. To look at the mutual dependency between monks or nuns and their relatives;
3. To compare the ideology and the reality of monastic life and religious institutions. What types of supports should the monastery provide to their monastic members (the ideal perfect monastic system)? Does this ideal system being carried out within the monasteries in Taiwan?
1.3 Reviews on Literatures and Related Studies
There is not much study focuses on the relationship between monks and nuns and their families. One PhD thesis that had a section in discussing kinship
relationship of was a research done by Fang Tsung in the early seventies of Taiwanese society. Most of the studies on Buddhism in Taiwan or other traditions focus more on the theoretical and philosophical perspectives. Many published biographies of monks
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and nuns do not talk about their relationship with families much into details. One can find studies on the relationship between the monastery and their laymen, politics, society, or a social structure as a whole, but only a few of them ever mentions about the importance of monks’ and nuns’ families. The following books and articles are most helpful to my research topics. Although not all of them have direct relationship with the topic that I have been doing, they are great religious historical background books that I can use. There are four types of resources that have been used in this particular study:
1. Anthropological studies on Buddhism;
2. Historical or archival studies on Buddhism;
3. Buddhist texts;
4. Other related materials.
The followings are primary materials that I have used in my thesis:
a. Anthropological studies on Buddhism
In the first type of resource, Sherry B. Ortner was one of the scholars who did her studies among Sherpas from an anthropological perspective in the early years. Her first study on Sherpas was between September 1966 and February 1968.5 In her study, she pointed out that the Sherpas family had a tradition of sending at least one child to the monastery when necessary so that each of his/her other kids could get more inheritance from them. Due to this reason, the family of those monks who had been sent to the monasteries had the responsibility to support their kid’s living expenses at the monastery. In another word, the monastery did not have the full financial responsibility in supporting its members. This finding brings us to a reality
5 Sherry B. Ortner: Sherpas through their rituals, 1978.
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that a monastic community does not rely only on their own income and laymen’s support but also on the families of those monks and nuns. In supporting the monastic community, not only these people gain merits but also resolving the problem of division of inheritance.
In Ortner’s second book on Sherpas, she tried to answer the following questions;
first, why at the very first, did those Sherpas found their monasteries?; second, how did various structural and historical forces come in actions by a particular person at a particular time?; lastly, how were the abstract dynamics of structure and history transformed into human activity with intentions.6 In this book, she tried to analyze the interactions between the internal and external forces of Sherpas society, and how these forces push them to change their cultural schemas and to find a solution.
Another anthropologist who did a detailed research on Baan Phraan Muan village of Northeast Thailand was S. J. Tambiah.7 In this particular study, he noted that it was legitimized of a monk to assist their parents when they were in need of material help or when they were ill. Even though his monkhood and his secluded life
suggested his departure and separation from his family, but it was not wrong to have close relations with their parents. The book pointed out the fact that a monk was allowed to maintain close relations with his parents when needed.
Shiu-kuen Fan Tsung did a research on women who were outside of the
normative family system, particularly Buddhist nuns and professional prostitutes in Taiwan. Her fieldworks had been taken place in a Hakka village between the
summers of 1973 and 1974. Fan Tsung’s PhD thesis was later published in 1986 with her thesis topic, Moms, Nuns and Hookers: Extrafamilial Alternatives for Village Women in Taiwan. She tried to find out the reasons for woman’s choice to stay
6 Sherry B. Ortner: High Religion, 1989.
7 S. J. Tambiah: Buddhism and The Spirit Cults In North-East Thailand, 1970.
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outside of the normal family system. In Fan Tsung’s discussion about nuns in this Hakka village, she did look at nuns’ kinship relations, and that was very close to what I wanted to find out when I did my own deep interviews with the informants.
In Welch’s The Practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900-1950, he provided the readers a clear picture about Buddhist monastic system and Buddhist practice in China.8 In this book, I was able to find out some influences of the Chinese monastic system on Taiwanese monastic system, especially when I focused my study on a monastery which its founder was from China after 1949. Welch mentioned in the book that he found many differences between ideal and reality, past and present, theory and practice, and these differences were also found by me when studying Taiwanese Buddhism in practice, too. The book could be divided into two parts: the monastic system and the individual Buddhist. In the first part, Welch gave detailed descriptions on monastic institutions, a picture from an institutional level; for the second part, different aspects would be taken cared in a personal level.
An anthropological material that had been used in my study was Stephen F.
Teiser’s The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Part of the study focused on the
relationship between mother and son at the time of the death of the mother. Certain ceremonies should be held by the son after the death of his mother in order to save the mother from bad rebirth. As most of other similar works, they drew their
attention mostly on the relationship between mother and son only. This was also the case in Alan Cole’s works. Both focused on the kin relation between mother and son especially after the death of the mother.
I have also used a few books of anthropological studies on Chinese kinship system.
Two of them are very useful in helping me to understand about family in Chinese society. In Baker’s Chinese Family and Kinship, he focused his study on pre-twentieth
8 Holmes Welch: The Practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900-1950, 1967.
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century’s China, and his field research was mainly done in rural China.9 There were two primary discussions about Chinese kinship system in his book: lineage and ancestor worship. Both topics were also important when we talked about pseudo-family structure within the Chinese monastic system.
Another anthropological study on Chinese kinship is Paul Chao’s Chinese Kinship (1983) . Chaos’ work was mainly based on historical documents not field work. He tried to find out the relationship between ancestral worship and filial piety in Chinese family system. In addition to that, he wanted to tackle problems like the lineage, clan, village, organization, the concept of the soul, the social importance of ancestor cults, filial piety, and other aspects about social life in China that had not been discussed much before.
In Li’s “The Mother-Daughter Complex: Gender Identity and Subjectivity of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns”, she discussed different conceptions and expectations of Buddhist nunhood between parents and the younger generations of nuns whose educational level were higher than before.10 At the same time, what were their conflicts with their mothers due to the difference between their educational levels?
Li also talked about the function of the conflict between mothers and daughters in a changing patriarchal society. Lastly, she explored the transmission of gender identity between mothers and daughters within the last fifty years from both psychological and cultural perspectives. Another article of Li, “Buddhist Women and Women’s Buddhism – the Gender Studies in Buddhism in these two decades (2002)”, she provided several Chinese and English research works on the study of Buddhist women. It was in her article that I found several useful second hand resources related to my topic.
9 Hugh D. R. Baker: Chinese Family and Kinship, 1979.
10 Yu Chen Li: “Mother-Daughter Complex: Gender Identity and Subjectivity of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns”, 2002.
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b. Historical or archival studies on Buddhism
In this category, Alan Cole’s two works studied the relationship between mother and son, and paternal relationships by finding out clues from those Buddhist texts of the Mahayana tradition.11 His research method was mainly archival. However, his topic of research could also be grouped into the first type of my resources. He noted that the family values served as an effective connection between the monasteries and the private families, and behind that, it was this mutual dependency between these two institutions.12 I focus my study also on the mutual dependency of these two institutions, but it is different in the subjects of this dependency. My focus is on monks and nuns and their families, but Coles’ emphasis was between mothers and sons but not necessary monks. Such a mutual dependency mentioned in Cole’s work was only one of the results but not the original purpose of the compositions of these texts.
A sub-category was those works about Buddhist histories in Taiwan. Charles B.
Jones’ Buddhism in Taiwan (1999) divided history of Buddhism in Taiwan into three periods: the Ming and Qing Dynasty from 1660-1895, the Japanese colonial period from 1895-1945, and the retrocession to the modern period from 1945 to 1990. He provided valuable biographies on many Buddhist leaders in his later part of
discussion.
A similar work from the above was written in Chinese by Canteng Jiang on the Buddhist history of Taiwan from 1662 to 2008.13 He divided his book into three periods: from Ming Zheng period to the end of Qing Dynasty (1662-1894), the Buddhist history of Taiwan during Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), and from
11 Alan Cole: Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, 1998 and Text as Father : Paternal Seduction in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature, 2005.
12 Family value, in here, was the obligation to hold Buddhist ceremonies by the son after the death of his mothers in order to save the mother from bad rebirth. This was an act to show his filial piety.
13 Canteng Jiang: Taiwan Fojiao Shi (臺灣佛教史-The History of Buddhism in Taiwan), 2009.
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retrocession to modern period (1945-2008). Jiang’s book had great materials collections where one could get much historical information from his work. Both Jiang’s and Jone’s books provided good historical background of Taiwanese Buddhism, and these historical facts were important because Taiwanese monastic system had been influenced greatly by both monks that were from mainland China after 1949, and Japanese Buddhist monastic systems. Therefore, both works were helpful in providing background information on the historical developments of Buddhism in Taiwan.
Gregory Schopen was a Pali scholar, and he did many Pali textual studies. I looked through most of his works in trying to find out the real monastic life in the Buddha’s time, and the possible traces of Buddhist teaching about the proper relationship between monks and nuns with either their relatives or laymen. One of his articles, “Filial Piety and the Monk in the Practice of Indian Buddhism: A Question of Sinicization (1984)”, dealt with the question whether the ideology or virtue of filial piety had long existed since the early Buddhism, or it was brought up to Buddhism by the influence of Chinese family ethics after the it spread to China. Schopen used Pali evidences to prove that monks and nuns dedicated the merits to both live and deceased parents as an act of filial piety. His other works also dealt with Buddhism in practice in the early Buddhist history, so these works gave us pictures about what were theories and what were the realities in early monastic lives.
c. Buddhist texts
The third type of resources used in this thesis is Buddhist texts and any type of Buddhist literatures. These include Buddhist sutras, the vinaya (Ex. Dharmaguptaka vinaya), or Buddhist canons mainly of the Mahayana tradition. The purpose of using these materials is to find out what is the proper relation (according to Buddha’s
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teachings) a monk or a nun should maintain with their lay family members. For example, in the Dharmaguptaka vinaya, the bhikshuni precepts indicated that it was improper to accept donations (Ex. cloth) from an unrelated householder.14 For what reason accepting donations from a related householder is not against the vinaya is what should be looked into. From the information of this type of resources, I found what was ideal in the Buddhist monastic system in order to compare them from what was real in Taiwanese monastic system. Moreover, a few books were studies on Buddhist monastic disciplines such as Shih Neng Rong’s An Investigation on the Vinaya's Monastic Discipline, Chinese Monastic Regulations, and their Significance in the Present Sangha Order (2003), these works helped us to understand what was ideal monastic system, and matters on daily monastic lives.
d. Other related materials
The last category includes all secondary materials such as related theses, papers, articles, biographies of monks and nuns, online resources, and C.F.S.’ publications. In Hillary Crane (2007), “Becoming a nun, becoming a man: Taiwanese Buddhist nuns’
gender transformation”, her conversations with nuns at Zhi Guang Monastery
showed the close relations between nuns and their families (the families established by marriage).15 Some of these nuns had a hard time leaving their family burden behind. Although her article was on gender issue, it provided great first hand information that were close related to the topic of this thesis.
M.A. or Ph.D. thesis
Many thesis papers that I had used were about the interactions between
14 Karma Lekshe Tsomo: Sisters in Solitdue: Two Traditions of Buddhist Monastic Ethics for Women:
pp.37, 1996.
15 Hillary Crane’s article was published by Religion periodical: pp.117-132 (2007).
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Buddhist ethics and the ethics of traditional Chinese society. These focus on the relations between mother and son (similar to Alan Cole’s study) or between parents and children (the issue of filial piety). Therefore, these theses became great
resources in dealing with issues on the conflicts between social norms or ethics and the choice of entering the monastery.
Biographies
Lastly, biographies of monks and nuns provide some background information of why they chose to become monks or nuns as their life career. They sometimes, mostly not in details, talked about their families, or mentioned their relationships with their families after becoming monks and nuns.
1.4 Research Methodologies