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ideology of detachment from the family became their reasonable excuses. Becoming a nun gave them more freedom to detach themselves from unwanted ties.71 In old time, becoming a nun might be more acceptable by the villagers than getting a divorce. In overall, half of the nuns got some financial supports from their relatives, and their family’s contribution helped them a lot. Nuns who had to rely on the monastery suffered from material deprivation, and they could not afford medical expenses even if they needed. Fan Tsung suspected that the loners had the most regrets in their monastic lives because they were not happy. In response to Fan Tsung’s argument on that, it did not happen to my informants. Whether loners regretted of being a monk or nun is unsure, but unhappy monks and nuns for sure will have more regrets than happy ones. Another interesting finding of Fan Tsung was that one out of every four nuns in her sample was little-daughter-in-law.72 They were adopted at the time when adoption was popular among Taiwanese society.
3.4 Substitutions of Family and Kin in the Monastery
Theoretically, one has to leave their family in order to join a monastic
community. At the time when someone decides to cultivate their Buddhist path in the monastery, he or she should put his or her attachments to their families aside.
Not every monk and nun leaves their family to be a monk or a nun. Many monks and nuns join the monastic community which is built by his or her own lay family. Within such private-owned monastic community, all family members still live with each other even after being tonsured, and the monastery is like a family business to them.
Chinese monastery, in particular, reconstructs another family system within the monastic community. An obvious evidence of this is pseudo-kinship terms used by
71 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.300.
72 They were either little child bride (ton yan xi 童養媳) or just adopted daughters (yiang nu 養女).
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monks and nuns in the monasteries. Usage of pseudo-kinship terms by monks and nuns in Chinese monasteries will be discussed further in chapter four. Monks and nuns are not allowed to engage in sexual activity, and it is strongly prohibited by Buddhist precepts, so they will have no descendants of their own unless they married before. Thus, some nuns will tonsure their own disciples to be substitute children.73 We talked about women being taught by the society to seek security from their relatives, and nuns also seek for that security within the monastery, too.
The best way to solve the fear of insecurity would be having tonsure disciples. Monks and nuns cannot rely fully on the care from the monastery, but they can rely on their tonsure disciples as their own children. In Fan Tsung’s samples, nuns’ ideal
relationship of mother and child was substituted by master and disciple
relationship.74 It is unsure whether monks seek for that kind of substitution or not, but I am sure that they will be cared when they get old and sick if they have tonsure disciples. In addition, both monks and nuns are happy and proud to have as many tonsure disciples as they can like lay people bearing many children.75 Furthermore, nuns are very protective to their own disciples like mother in protecting their own children, and in return, a good disciple is like a filial child in which she fulfills her filial obligations to her master.76 Like Chinese ideology of filial piety, not only taking care of the live parents is important but also sacrificing dead parents and ancestors.
Because ancestral sacrifice is so important to Chinese people, so having a male descendant to continue such a doing is also important. Unless they have been married with children before, most monks and nuns do not have child sacrificing them after death. In this case, pseudo- or quasi- ancestral line will solve the problem:
73 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.13.
74 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.325.
75 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.326.
76 Fan Tsung, 1986, pp.327.
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Such nun often created their own quasi-ancestral line by treating former nuns from the same temple as ancestors, raising tablets to them as an altar, and worshipping them in much the same way as the family did its real ancestors. In turn, of course, the nuns could hope to be similarly worshipped by those who were to come after them.77
Similar quasi-ancestral line can also be found in popular vegetarian halls in Hong Kong, too.78 The purpose for creating pseudo-kinship is to impose social and family rules upon a less familiar relationship, and monks and nuns within the system have to follow rules according to family values and ethics.79 In addition to that purpose, pseudo-kinship relationship within the monastery serves for two more functions.
First is that it solves the problem of the lack of welfare that a monastery should provide to its members. When a monk or a nun is sick, the sick should be the
responsibility of the whole monastic community but not only their disciples. However, if a monk or nun has disciples, then the responsibility of the monastery would be transferred to the monk’s or the nun’s disciples. Second, some monks and nuns are actively or reluctantly having no contact with their relatives. Therefore, establishing another pseudo-kin relation helps substituting that relationship. Sometimes, when a person is so used to a social system since the time of birth, the person tends to recreate a duplicate system within a newly created institution with or without intentional purposes. For instance, when someone talks about a “temple” of different religion in another country that we have never been to, or have no
knowledge about, what comes up in our mind could be a picture similar to temples in Taiwan because we are familiar to that. One of a very clear example will be pseudo-
77 Baker, 1979, pp.79.
78 Baker, 1979, pp.79.
79 Fan Tsung, 1986, 343.
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ancestral line existed in the monastic sacrifice rituals. People reconstructed another family within the monastic system based on what they are taught about family by social guidelines, and they reconstructed a very similar family system of their own within the monastery because that is the only cultural pattern they know about family.