A Tale of Two Temples

Friends,

Recently I was waiting for a prescription inside a hospital (nothing bad, don’t worry) when I suddenly heard some loud noises coming from outside. No one around me panicked, so I did not either, but I couldn’t tell what the sounds were until I finally got outside and saw this procession . It wrapped around several city blocks, with musical instruments, dancers, and their own traffic guides. Dancers dressed as spirits stopped at small shrines placed outside businesses to ward off evil. Cars tried to inch impatiently around when the parade slowed. Some pedestrians stopped to take pictures or point out things to their children, but most walked past as if nothing special was happening.

Lately I’ve been learning more about Buddhism and Taoism here in Taiwan. I started being interested primarily because of the Taoist temple right beside our house and the relationship between being vegetarian in Taipei and Buddhism. Buddhism is the reason, for example, that there are a ton of vegan restaurants in Taipei, that I can’t buy beer at my favorite vegetarian hotpot restaurant, and that Din Tai Fung marks greens sautéed with garlic but no meat as not being vegetarian. I’ve also felt more and more embarrassed that I couldn’t easily tell the difference between a Buddhist or Taoist temple (check the statues), a Buddhist monk or a Taoist priest (key information: hat? robe color? necklace?), and the significance/scheduling of all the offerings placed on the sidewalk.

So I’ve been trying to learn more! A funny thing is how hard it is to get “correct” information. I can ask one person a question and get a definitive answer then ask another person the same question and get a completely different answer. I put “correct” in quotes above because of course an answer about religion can vary wildly based on region and context. But I also have to remember that if I ask a random person in the United States a question about Christianity or religion’s role in society that I’d get incorrect and inconsistent information as well.

You can look up primers on Taoism and Buddhism as a whole elsewhere, but a primer for some basic info in Taiwan (please email me corrections!): self-identified Taoism practitioners and temples outnumber Buddhist here, but they coexist peacefully, and in fact many temples will include worship objects from both religions and many families will mix the practices together. In most Buddhist countries, only monks follow Buddhist vegetarian rules (no meat, no dairy, no eggs like vegan, but also no onions, garlic, leeks, or alcohol), but in Taiwan many Buddhist practitioners also follow it, leading to vegetarian/vegan having a wide range of precise meanings. The most prominent Taoist deities in Taiwan are Mazu and Guan Gong , as well as the omnipresent Tudigong (who is watching you if you litter or forget to pick up dog poop ), but the average temple is dedicated to more local gods (as my teacher said, Taiwanese prefer the idea of a god who is in the neighborhood instead of one way up in the sky: 舉頭三尺有神明, “If you raise your head three feet, there’s a god”).

One thing that’s fascinated me is how religion’s role in society seems so different in Taiwan versus the United States. Religion is much more public here. It’s very common to walk down the street and see a small temple inside an apartment’s window, or to see a table of offerings to the spirits or ancestors outside of a business. Temple interiors are open, unlike most churches, so you directly see people worshipping. The temple by our house has benches beside the altar, where people gather and chat or houseless people take refuge, often right beside someone praying or burning funeral money. And yet, besides being public, religion seems to influence society writ large much less. While there are some shady connections between temples, organized crime, corruption, and politicians (for more on this, read here and here ), whether a politician is Buddhist or Taoist does not seem to affect their support or agenda (several politicians are also Christians, though followers outside those three religions are pretty rare and would probably face additional scrutiny). There’s also little connection between religious beliefs and new laws, though of course there are laws that impact religious organizations where they overlap. This is opposed to the US, where religion comes up in presidential campaigns, Supreme Court nominations, legislative debates, and more. Like the US, Taiwan’s constitution provides equal protection regardless of religion and freedom of religious belief.

The only real conflict I’ve ever personally seen/heard of between Buddhism and Taoism in modern Taiwan was portrayed in the wonderful film Little Big Women / 孤味, where the wife of a dead man tries to interrupt his Buddhist mistress’s prayers with Taoist chanting.

Many dictators control religious elements of society, but while Chiang Kai-Shek was a reportedly devout converted Catholic, he seems to have done little to exert influence over religious spheres, except as part of broad marginalization and discrimination against native Taiwanese culture as well as destruction of Japanese-built temples when erasing their presence on the island.

A gigantic cemetery near our house has a Taoist shrine beside the road near Buddhist guardian lion statues (石獅), then iconography on the graves that include Buddhist swastikas, Christian crosses, and the Islamic star and crescent, or they’re set beside small Taoist altars.

When I asked my Mandarin teacher why she thought this was, that religion in America and many other countries seems to influence politics and society much more than in Taiwan, despite Taiwan’s religion being very public, she said something very poetic, which is that it seemed to her that religion here is more focused on something inside people that comes out, whereas religion elsewhere seems more focused on something outside that is put into people. I don’t know enough to know whether I agree with it, but what a way to describe it.

One last thing. If you wander around Taiwan long enough, you’ll notice a common graffiti message: “8+9.” The words eight plus nine in Chinese, 八加九 is pronounced (especially by Taiwanese) similar to 八家將 , the eight generals who are in charge of catching evil spirits/ghosts and returning them to hell, as well as protecting the gods. At the procession I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, these were who the dancers were dressed up as. These type of performers have a reputation as being people who maybe didn’t finish school, or are involved in crime, and so “8+9” has a connotation of young people being up to no good. But nowadays, it’s gaining a slightly more positive connotation, of being a more carefree lifestyle less connected to the corporate grind. Maybe there’ll be t-shirts and Instagram accounts soon, promoting the 8+9 lifestyle.

Or maybe not.

Further reading:

• A group of friends and I play board games together once a week online. More accurately, they play boardgames together once a week, and I pop in to say hi and chat for a while when I can: they’re in the US so it’s in the morning my time. Lately, though, I’ve totally derailed the board gaming focus of the group to push for us to play Geoguessr constantly. For the unfamiliar, Geoguessr drops you in a random location on Google Street View, and based on the clues you can see, you have to guess where you are. It’s really addictively fun, especially because you can easily get better at it — for example, I feel like I can readily identify Romanian versus other Romance languages now — and yet regularly be completely stumped (I definitely recommend banning yourself from using Google to help you guess). It also has more specific subsets, like only locations in one country, one state, or one type of environment. One of our favorites is called “Dads of the World,” where each location has a very clear Dad in the picture. We also tend to name a lot of the people we see. It’s great.
• Did you hear the tale of Doug? You need to hear the tale of Doug .
• Last month I had the pleasure of seeing Michelle Kuo of A Broad and Ample Road discuss her book, Reading with Patrick . First, you should read her and her husband’s newsletter’s two-part interview with a Korean-Ukranian student living in Taiwan ( pt. 1 , pt. 2 ) Second, I also highly recommend you check out her book. It’s about her experience going to an alternative school in Arkansas through Teach For America right after finishing undergrad at Harvard, then navigating wanting to make a difference but being unsure of the best way to do that.
• March 16 was the one year anniversary of the Atlanta shootings. There were several important pieces published to mark the occasion. Here’s Nicole Chung’s interview with Connie Wun , the executive director of AAPI Women Lead. I think the conversation does a good job of putting the event into larger patterns (incarceration, dehumanization, lack of victim assistance) that might not be obvious.
• I loved this short memoir essay by Mary Laura Philpott who discovered late in life that her dad had worked in a bunker intended to house Important People in the event of nuclear war, and that if the worst happened he would be expected to leave his family behind, and how that might have affected their relationship.
• A Terrible Twitter Thread went around last month by a very out-of-touch professor that clearly hadn’t had to deal with adjuncting and had probably gotten tenure well before the current hiring insanity describing all the wonderful things about working in academia (it emphasized, among other things, how much time off you have). I won’t link the Terrible Thread, but I will link my favorite satirical response .
• The Ides of March have come and gone .
• One of the first “funny Taiwan stories” we heard from people helping us decide whether to move here was about them accidentally booking a “love motel,” a common kind of hotel here in Taiwan. Couples here often continue to live with family members, so having an escape is important. The love motels are complete with giant TVs, karaoke machines, catalogs of costumes, garage doors for privacy, and more. Sowmiya Ashok, an Indian journalist, has a fun exploration of them here .

There’s a lot of maybe in my life right now. Two part-time jobs mid process that are big maybes. Maybe Taiwan is on the verge of a Covid outbreak. Maybe we will move to another apartment. Maybe I’m going to be able to get back into publishing some articles soon.

Uncertainty is always at least somewhat stressful, and I think some of us tend toward choices that bring extra uncertainty into our lives. But I think I’ve gotten a lot better at not always looking at uncertainty as “things could go wrong and not knowing makes me anxious,” but instead to change my perspective to “things could be awesome and I’m excited to see what happens.” It’s not always appropriate or helpful, but it is often energizing and comforting.

I hope you find a similar small mindset change that leads to more energy and comfort, as well.

-g

(Special thanks to Kori/摳哩 and Kelsey/陳老師 for conversations and fact checking!)