How Buddhist nuns encounter “modernity” is the central theme in this investigation. Specifically, why—under the conditions of modernity or modernization/Westernization in postwar Taiwan (1945–1999, KMT's government)—have Buddhist nuns taken on visibility and voice in contemporary Taiwan? Buddhist nuns as a historical category contains three characters—“modernity,” “religion” and “women.” To study Buddhist nuns in postwar Taiwan is, therefore, to encounter what I tentatively name the process of “triple othering”—the othering from Buddhism itself, from Confucianism, and from Western culture—and to delineate instead its location and visibility in the Chinese Mahayana tradition. The contradiction between “othering” and “visibility” is what this dissertation attempts to decipher. The implicit goal of the study is to try to bring contemporary Buddhist history into conversation with postcolonial theories in order to shed light on the place of Buddhist nuns in modern Taiwan.
The approach and method used in this project could be elaborated as “plural perspective of cultural study.” This is “a pragmatic contextualist approach to theory” I used in research. This approach is multi-disciplinary. As a result, it displays “hybridity” as well. Based upon different threads of material, including personal interviews and newspapers clippings, the inquiry here employs the historical, sociological and anthropological approach to a religious and cultural phenomenon in postwar Taiwan. My argument is that Buddhist nuns, in different times and places, are simultaneously subject and object in their specific settings. What constitutes the result of my dissertation is the hypothesis that no historical phenomenon should be viewed as a one-dimensional consequence, but rather as a dynamic-dialectic interdependent phenomenon. The dynamic-dialectic interdependent relations involve not only subjectivity or thoughts but also societies and international impacts, where Western European and North American impacts have a determinative importance to the rest of the world, in particular, in Taiwan.
The framework for theorizing this project is to link Chandra Talpade Mohanty's critical theories on the “subject-oriented” theme with Talal Asad's concept of “history making.” However, there is no making history without the author—the author of one's own life, or the author of the works. I thus highlight non-Western authors and/or women authors whose subjects—the person—need to be engaged in the knowledge productions. In the dissertation, I intend to provide an analysis of the Buddhist nuns by tracing three movements: first, the transformation of political and economic conditions in postwar Taiwan; second, the humanistic Buddhism in Taiwan; and third, the construction and emergence of a new women's subjectivity in modern Taiwanese society. It is these three movements converging that allows us “to see” Buddhist nuns in postwar Taiwan.
