Chinese Buddhism has the world’s oldest and continuous bhikshuni sangha tradition. In contemporary society, Taiwan is home to both greatest number of female monastics (about 15,000), largest proportion of nuns and monks (3:1), and the most diverse bhikshuni communities in the world, a situation unprecedented in world Buddhist history. The outstanding accomplishment of Taiwan bhikshunis in fields such as charity, education, art, culture, as well as Buddhist social movements attracts scholars to do researches on Taiwan Buddhist nuns since the past two decades. About the issues of women in Chan Buddhism, though not totally neglected, studies are limited to pre-modern literary and historical analysis and lack of empirical finding. What is the real practice of Buddhist women, their subjective perception of Chan, and their substantive pedagogy demands us to do further inquiry. This article explores a historically significant but under-studied phenomenon of women religious practice in contemporary Chinese Buddhism. My research focuses on the bhikshuni sangha of Dharma Drum Mountain (DDM)—women who live in a Chan Buddhist monastery in contemporary Taiwan-and its making of modern female Chan teachers. This research draws from my ethnography of the DDM bhikshuni sangha, personal interviews, DDM’s historical archives, and literatures review. Through the exploration of this work, I will show that along with the open space on women in Taiwan Buddhism, DDM founder, Shengyen’s international Chan vision and modernism, as well as the Mahayana doctrine of egalitarianism and Chan sudden enlightenment, it creates a institutional and systematic Chan cultivation, pedagogy and propagation for women, a chance unprecedented for Chan women in the past.
