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My research examines religious environmentalism in Mainland China and Taiwan today—how religious cosmologies, ethics, dietary practices, and rituals may contribute to an alternative ontology of environmental protection that slows climate change. I am now conducting fieldwork in eastern Taiwan, in Hualien County. Hualien is the headquarters of the Taiwanese Buddhist Tzu Chi Merit Foundation (慈濟功德會), with lay Buddhist volunteers all over the globe engaged in charity work, natural disaster relief, recycling, and environmental education. Tzu Chi is led by Master Cheng Yen, a charismatic Buddhist nun who gives daily sermons on the Great Love Television Station, radio, and online. She expresses deep religious concern about the environment and climate change and admonishes her members to practice vegetarianism, thrift, and recycling. Hualien County also has the highest concentration of Austronesian indigenous people in Taiwan, at 20 percent of the population. While Tzu Chi promotes Buddhist veganism, Taiwan indigenous groups were hunting cultures that still love eating meat. What could Chinese Buddhism and indigenous cultures possibly share in terms of environmental outlooks? I propose that if we focus on their religious ontologies, they both have tremendous contributions to make for modern environmentalism, albeit through different ontologies.
Tzu Chi Buddhist Environmentalism
Tzu Chi deploys some key Buddhist ontological precepts to promote environmentalism for the modern age. Buddhists are forbidden to kill and must show compassion for the suffering of
sentient beings. Tzu Chi also extends sentience to Mother Earth, whom Master Cheng Yen frequently invokes as a suffering entity due to human destructiveness. The Buddhist notion of transmigration is also deployed to discuss how, in the transfer from one life to the next, destructive actions will reap karmic retribution in future lives. Buddhists also say that we must have an intact Earth for us to return to in our future lives.
Tzu Chi has over two hundred nuns in residence at the Spiritual Abode (精舌), their monastic retreat nestled in the foothills of Hualien. The kitchen feeds one thousand residents and visitors daily. Many of their vegetables come from their own organic farms nearby, cultivated by nuns and volunteers. I asked two nuns plowing the field what they do about worms and birds that eat their vegetables. They said that one year, they planted a whole field of corn, but could not keep the birds from gobbling up everything. They added with surprising cheerfulness, “We just figured that this would be our ‘offering’ [供養] for them,” using a phrase that usually refers to making sacrifices to gods and ancestors. As to the worms, the nuns said, “Well, they were here first; they are the indigenous people [原住民] of this field!”
Most Tzu Chi members are lay volunteers who donate labor, time, and money for charity for the poor, sick, and elderly, for natural disaster relief, for spiritual education, and for environmental efforts. Despite minimizing traditional Buddhist scripture-chanting and rituals, I found Tzu Chi members were deeply religious, and their daily activities were highly ritualized. One day, in the great dining hall, I had a vegetarian lunch with hundreds of volunteers who had traveled from across Taiwan to Hualien. I experienced firsthand the strict religious asceticism and discipline behind their dietary practice. People wore their COVID masks and only took them off when eating. They spoke very little during the entire meal, so as not to spread COVID. They focused on their food, for eating was a ritualized act. They briefly put their hands together in prayer to thank the Buddhas for their meal, facing a photo of Master Cheng Yen (the “Elevated One” 上人). The meal was vegan, which has new significance in the age of the Anthropocene: industrial livestock-raising is not only cruel toward animals but uses up large tracts of land and water, with heavy methane releases from animal belching. Reducing livestock would release the land and water for reforestation with carbon-absorbing trees. One meal included multigrain food bars that Tzu Chi produces in their own factories to hand out for disaster relief around the world. Evidently, these were approaching their expiration dates, so they had to be consumed. Tzu Chi members always bring their own reusable bowls, chopsticks, spoons, and water bottles, to save on garbage. I was politely admonished by others around the table not to slouch: one must sit up straight, cradle the bowl in one hand, while the other wields the chopsticks, which is the Tzu Chi way. After lunch, everyone went outdoors to wash their own bowls and utensils. Wishing to reduce carbohydrates, I looked for a garbage pail to throw out my leftover rice. People frowned, as everyone else had assiduously finished every single rice grain, to avoid waste. Thus, I learned how Tzu Chi members cultivate a daily life of ritualized thriftiness, self-discipline, and ascetic diet to express compassion for animal life and benefit the environment.
I also volunteered at Tzu Chi recycling centers in Taipei and Hualien. Master Cheng Yen calls recycling work “self-cultivation,” thus making an ordinary labor that is paid when it is done at government recycling centers into a religious practice at Tzu Chi centers, where people cheerfully work for no pay. Thus, the Elevated One ritualizes and sanctifies acts of everyday life. Recycling centers also provide spaces for the care of the elderly (including blood pressure measurements), free vegetarian meals, a store selling secondhand household items, and classes on anything from traditional Chinese music to home gardening. As one immerses oneself in sorting the recycling items into nine categories or bins, one realizes that this work has a meditative quality that blocks out the “random flashes of chaotic thoughts” (雜念). It commands one’s whole focusing power to decide quickly which bin each item from the mountainous pile must be thrown into: Number 1 PET plastic bottles, soft plastics, hard plastics, Number 1 aluminum cans, other metal cans, paper food and drink containers with wax lining, paper and cardboard, plastic bags, and glass jars. Sometimes, big cockroaches and spiders crawl out unexpectedly to make life exciting, and stale food sticks to the paper bento box containers.
The dirty work all became worthwhile when I visited the Great Love Science and Technology Company in Taipei, a nonprofit company that sponsors scientific inventions of new products made out of Tzu Chi recycled plastics. Many items were invented out of necessity from Tzu Chi disaster relief expeditions, including hunger relief to Africa; earthquakes in China, Mexico, Taiwan, Nepal, and Turkey; war relief for Ukrainians who fled to Poland; flood and mudslides in Taiwan and Libya; and wildfires in California, Greece, and Maui. The primary life-saving recycling products have been the warm grey blankets and vests made from plastic bottle fibers. Tzu Chi also uses recycled plastic to make tough outdoor benches and hard bricks with holes that are used to line the ground of Tzu Chi building pathways and parking lots, “so that the Earth can breathe.”
Indigenous Taiwan
There are sixteen indigenous groups recognized by the Taiwan government, and in Hualien, I focused on the Truku (Taroko), who are related linguistically and genetically to the Atayal and Seediq from their migration history. These groups are descendants of mountain forest hunting and horticultural cultures, until they were forced to move down to the plains by the colonizing Japanese forces in the 1930s. Although they are employed in urban environments, some men still go into the mountains to hunt wild mammals for festival sacrificial meat and wedding gifts. About 90 percent of indigenous people have accepted Christianity, so there is now a certain detachment from their ancient cosmologies and relations with the natural environment.
The Taiwan government now champions multiculturalism and the teaching of indigenous languages and cultures in the schools. However, indigenous communities have one major bone of contention with the government: their ability to hunt in their ancestral lands. The government wants to protect wildlife populations in the mountains. The indigenous reply that they have centuries of keen observation of animal behavior and reproduction; their traditions forbid hunting in spring and summer, when animals are rearing their young, so they understand best how to keep animal herds prospering. As one indignant Atayal member said to me: “The forest is our refrigerator! Why would we wish to deplete and squander it?” He meant that indigenous people are more invested in protecting the forest than Han Chinese who, not relying on it for food, do not understand its rhythms and interspecies patterns. Like the Northwest Coast potlatches that were also forbidden by North American colonizers, hunting for Taiwan indigenous people is a whole way of ritualized social life that keeps their culture alive. In their struggle for hunting rights, indigenous people also come into conflict with secular and Buddhist animal rights groups.
While hunting and animal sacrifice do not seem environmental to animal rights groups, the practices are guided and restrained by traditional indigenous ontological regulations of gaya, which means “laws of the ancestors.” Gaya reveals great promise for the protection of the environment. It transmits and protects traditional culture by regulating proper social relationships between generations and kin, marital and sexual relations, planting and hunting, illness and healing, and prescribes how to honor the ancestral spirits. Indeed, according to Truku writer and scholar Kaji Cihung, whom I interviewed, gaya regulations evolved from their ancestors’ close observation of natural patterns that provide order and harmony between living things. In this way, gaya works against the grain of modern industrial and consumer temporality by asking indigenous people to abide by seasonal schedules for hunting, laying traps, harvesting edibles from the forest, and community rituals. Admittedly, I need more fieldwork to flesh out the operations of gaya, and I plan to return to Hualien to stay in an indigenous village.
In conclusion, both Tzu Chi and Truku indigenous religious ontologies have something to teach us about environmental cosmology. Chinese Buddhism posits an interconnection and compassion among all sentient beings due to interspecies and interbeing transmigration across lifetimes. The indigenous notion of gaya enjoins us to be closer to natural patterns, instead of imposing our human will upon natural processes.
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my thanks to the Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library of Taiwan, for their generous research grant that made this research possible. I also wish to thank the following for their valuable and generous assistance: the Tzu Chi Merit Foundation (Jiang Shuyi, Wu Rui-hsiang, and Prof. Hsu Mu-tsu), and faculty members (Profs. Kerim Friedman, Lee Yi-tze, and Joyce Yeh) at Donghwa University’s Institute for Indigenous Studies. I also wish to thank Prof. Chang Hsun, director of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and Prof. Lu Meihuan of the Department of Anthropology at National Tsinghua University.
Angie Heo is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion