Browsing by Author "Kim, Hwansoo"

In this modern era, our lives are largely influenced by digital technology and the Internet. The interactive feature of the new technology has transformed our conventional understanding of objects. Technology that provides easiness to our life is not unmoved but actively and interactively reshapes and forms human culture and society. This thesis is based on the hypothesis that religious communities and people's religious lives are also under the influence of and transformed by this revolution in technology.

The purpose of this thesis is the examination of the formation and operation of a Chinese online Buddhist forum called Dizang forum and analysis of how it works as a virtual Buddhist community and deconstruct the model of the traditional Buddhist community. By doing close research on how the members of the forum inherit and innovate traditional Dizang belief and practices with modern values and online technology, the aim of this thesis is to explore how technology, and specifically the Internet, transforms religion. The methodology used in this study involved gathering and analyzing data, web page analyzing, religious study, historical study, and media study.

The conclusion of the thesis is that online Buddhist forums, taking the Dizang forum as an example, have already revolutionized the traditional lay people community and thus transformed people's interaction with religion.

Since its founding in 1993, Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association (LCA) advocates for laws supporting the “equality of life” as an alternative to “human equality.” According to European Enlightenment liberalism, “human equality” stems from the distinctly human capacity for rationality endowed by a creator, a reflection of a three-part ontology that separates humans from their creator and from the rest of creation. As this dissertation demonstrates, liberal humanism reproduces this three-part ontology as the distinctly separate domains of the religious, the (human) secular, and the natural. In contrast, Shih Chao-hwei, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun who co-founded LCA, asserts the equality of life stems from the capacity of all sentient beings to suffer. She rejects the entire Christian liberal cosmology, denying the existence of any eternal creator and only recognizing a distinction between sentient and insentient beings.

Based on a total of two years of multi-species ethnographic field work conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study examines how LCA and its allies promote the equality of life as an alternative to human equality in Taiwan. The study responds to (1) recent post-colonial scholarship that demonstrates how colonial powers used the institutions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state to subjugate non-Christian teachings and (2) recent scholarship in political ecology that demonstrates how concepts of nature and naturalism denied alternative ontologies of life. In response to these critiques, I put Han teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as the traditional knowledge of the indigenous minorities who have largely converted to Christianity.

As an ethnographic example of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, I examine how the Tayal people are responding to a conservation law drafted by LCA as part of the colonial policies of the liberal state. The Tayal contend that unlike the Buddhist method of protecting life which prohibits killing, the method of protecting life in their own traditional law called Gaga is expressed through hunting. They resist both liberal policies that denied indigenous people’s full human equality and restrictive hunting policies based on LCA’s Buddhism-inspired equality of life. Yet, the Tayal also ally themselves with Christian churches and the global indigenous rights movement so that their arguments to restore Gaga are expressed in terms of the liberal institutions of human rights. The central argument of the dissertation is that, to resolve political disputes over the equality of life, Buddhists and indigenous peoples are both forced to appeal to and reinforce institutions based on human equality, institutions by which both were suppressed. Rather than accepting liberal narratives that frame questions of ecology in terms of competing human rights, this dissertation invites scholars to recognize liberalism as a product of Christian theology and to consider alternative notions of the ontology of life not simply as religions or forms of traditional ecological knowledge, but as contested but viable legal alternatives to liberalism.

From 1868-1912, Japan underwent a rapid transformation into a modern nation state. This period of time became known as the Meiji Restoration, and practically all aspects of social and political life were affected including Japan's indigenous religious tradition Shintô. As a consequence of reform, Shintô was distilled into two broad categories--state and sect Shintô--with the former being associated with the Japanese State policy and projects. In particular, State Shintô would be utilized in assimilation attempts on the Korean peninsula.

In 1910, Korea was formally annexed and made a colony of Japan until Japanese defeat in 1945. During the roughly thirty-five year-long colonial era, Japanese officials sought to use state sponsored Shintô Shrines as a means to transform Koreans into loyal colonial subjects. The premier Shintô Shrine in Korea was the Chôsen Shrine erected in 1925 and housed the spirits of the tutelary Shintô Deity Amaterasu-Ômikami and, Emperor Meiji. This decision was not without contestation however, as a certain priests and the Japanese intellectual Ogasawara Shôzô (1892--1970) instead argued for the enshrinement of Korea's own progenitor god Tan'gun thinking that a native deity might make Shintô more appealing.

To examine this issue, this thesis will investigate several aspects: First, this thesis shows the development of a state sponsored Shintô and how this shaped colonial assimilation policies on the peninsula. Secondly, it examines Ogasawara's thought behind his reason to enshrine Tan'gun in Chôsen Shrine. Thirdly, this thesis explores Korean understandings of Tan'gun mythology and how this was utilized to create a Korean sense of uniqueness.

By examining these topics, this thesis aims to express a Korean voice in regards to the enshrinement issue. This thesis demonstrates that Korean agents during the Japanese occupation were able to construct their own understanding of Tan'gun through academic and religious avenues. This native agency in the matter would mean that even if Tan'gun had been enshrined, the implementation of State Shintô in assimilation efforts would still have been largely unsuccessful.

This thesis applies David Harvey's theory of time and space compression into the modern Chinese society, especially in the terms of religious development. The theory will also give the reason for the occurrence of popular short-term monastic life programs which are launched be Chinese Buddhism. I will introduce the basic information of short-term monastic life in the first chapter, which include its history, how temple stay program works in China, and its social influence. In the second chapter, I will summarize different theories of time and space compression in modernization, and analyze how these theories can be applied into Chinese society. Based on these theories, the inner contradiction of compression of time and space will be revealed. Then in the third chapter, the case study will be used to explain how short-term monastic life serves a social and psycho-social function, and how short-term monastic life solves the problems under time and space compression in contemporary Chinese society. Meanwhile, in the following chapter, I will try to discuss although temple stay program can work effectively as a social and psychological function, it also shows many characters of time and space compression under the process of globalization. Also, I will argue that the conflict of short-term monastic life about the time and space compression is indeed an epitome of the conflict of globalization. In the last chapter, I will also discuss the necessity of improving Buddhist activities and how Buddhist activities should face and solve the current problems caused by modernization.