| Summary: | 碩士 === 高雄師範大學 === 教育學系 === 98 === Many famous Buddhist temples in Taiwan are located on the Lion’s Head Mountain. It is the most visited Buddhist site in the Taoyuan and Miaoli area. It was chosen as one of the twelve most beautiful scenic mountains of Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. In addition to its beauty, it was also a place where literary talents and intellectuals converged. Thus, it is an important area to study in relation to the development and spread of Buddhism in Taiwan and Japan.
Among the temples in the mountains around Lion’s Head, the Yuan-Kwan Temple, built in 1895 on the vista, is the oldest. It has withstood all stages of Taiwanese Buddhist development and witnessed the changes of Taiwanese society.
Many of the practices and artifacts left by the pioneers of Taiwan can no longer be found in today’s rapid changing world. Yet, Yuan-Kwang Temple is one of the very few temples in Taiwan that still preserves a century old agrarian based traditional Chinese temple system where most of the nuns farm and grow their own food. One of special characteristics of the Yuan-Kwang Temple is its great number of Hakka nuns. As early as the Japanese colonial time, many Hakka women from Pington County, which includes small towns and villages like Lin Lao, Ju Tein, Nei Pou and Wan Lian, chose to become nuns at the Yuan-Kwang Temple. These Hakka women left their home towns and traveled several hundred miles to become nuns. They lived through extreme hardship in the Yuan Kwang Convent. Their hardship was described in a traditional Taiwanese expression: “Eating only ginger and drinking only vinegar”. They opened the mountains and cultivated and tilled the infertile land in this mountain region just to fulfill their religious pursuit. What strength and power that could sustain them in their beliefs until the end of their lives? Through oral interviews with elderly Hakka nuns, the author attempts to reconstruct their views on life and Buddhist practice, in hopes of piecing together their roles and significance in the golden age of Taiwanese Buddhism.
The Goals of this research:
1. Investigating the reasons for Hakka women’s choice to join this convent far away from their homes.
2. Interpreting Hakka nuns through the social relationships of Hakka culture.
3. From women’s relational images and self-concept to interpret Hakka nuns own meanings and discourses on “becoming a nun”.
Major findings:
Historically, Hakka women occupied a very important position in Hakka culture. If the characteristics of Hakka women are omitted, it is impossible to construct a complete Hakka ethnic culture and community. Women are the torch carriers, pushers and preservers of ethnic and racial culture. Even though Hakka women have played crucial roles in the continuation of Hakka culture, they are seldom given equal importance in Hakka studies. In the traditional studies, Hakka women could not escape the fate of traditional labor and toil of life, and public opinion was the key means of securing these traditional gender roles.
Joining the convent was the choice of Hakka nuns from 六堆 to escape their female social fate in Hakka culture. They used their own life stories to carve their own marks in history.
Hakka nuns created a self sustaining informational and social support network within the social relationships in Hakka culture.
During the Meiji era of Japanese colonial rule, there were only few traditional pure Buddhist temples in the 六堆 area. Most of the temples were Daoist temples, such as Temple of the Earth, Temple of the Three Mountain Kings, Temple of Kwang-Yin and the temple of Ma-chu. In Tainan, there was a Prior Heaven School’s Temple called 擇賢堂which was considered to practice a traditional style of Buddhism. Even though it was in its early stage of development, it had a close relationship with 六堆, but its contact with ethnic groups was limited to people and students from 六堆 area until Der-tong Master came to Lion’s Head Mountain and became a nun, a network of information diffusion was developed for local women. Thereafter, we start to witness grandmother and daughter, mother and daughter, relatives and friends come together to be nuns in the area. Later, employment places also gradually formed an information network, and colleagues became the disseminators of information. Under the tight control of Japanese colonial government and the hardship in everyday life, a lot of information could only be circulated privately. The range and level of information diffusion was limited to relatives, friends, and neighbors. The lives on the Mountain in the convent were hard but they had a support network of people from the same hometown, relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues who sustained the nuns and kept them persistent in pursuit of their faith. One of the interviewees said : “The work on the Mountain was hard, but we worked together so it became fun and the time passed by fast.”
Although they were nuns, their lives were connected with their families. For example, when a younger brother’s wife was about to deliver a baby, they went home to help; they also helped during the planting and harvest seasons. The only wish they had was to go to the paradise. This was the bright light of their hearts that guided them and supported them to work hard. They considered that doing labor or hard work in the temple is to serve Buddha, and it has deeper meaning than laboring for their family.
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