Gendered Charisma in the Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Movement

Gendered Charisma in the Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Movement

C. Julia Huang

ABSTRACT: The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation of Taiwan is a lay Buddhist movement under monastic leadership that has a mission of relieving all living beings from suffering. The founder and leader is the Venerable (or the Dharma Master) Cheng Yen (Zhengyan fashi). Cheng Yen is an ordained nun and, at the same time, commands considerable personal appeal. While Tzu Chi’s current membership of several million does include a significant number of men, the majority of followers, especially the core members, continue to be women. What do Taiwanese women see in Cheng Yen and in Tzu Chi? Drawing from ethnography in southern Taiwan and the Tzu Chi literatures on Cheng Yen, this paper attempts to show a pattern of normalizing female charisma—in the sense that female followers struggle for a breakthrough from the cultural constraints of their female gender roles by means of, and by virtue of, the Tzu Chi mission.

INTRODUCTION

The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation (lit. Compassion Relief) is one of the most prominent new religious movements among the Chinese speaking people around the globe today.1 It was founded in Taiwan 40 years ago as a small grassroots charitable women’s group, and during the last two decades expanded into an international humanitarian nongovernmental organization, with branches around the world and especially where Chinese communities are concentrated, such as North America. It is a lay movement under monastic leadership in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Its core practice is “doing good” as a modern nonprofit—or to use a term more familiar to readers in North

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 12, Issue 2, pages 29–47, ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480 (electronic). © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2008.12.2.29

America especially the United States, a faith-based organization—by delivering disaster relief locally in Taiwan and internationally regardless of religious and ethnic boundaries. Among the distinctive features of Tzu Chi, the most conspicuous and what concerns the present article is the charismatic leadership of its founder and leader, the Venerable Cheng Yen (or, in the group’s English writings, the Dharma Master Cheng Yen, Zhengyan fashi).2 By charismatic, I do not mean that Cheng Yen is self-invented. She is an ordained nun in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. She preaches from the scriptures, and follows the Venerable Abbott Yinshun (1906– 2005), an eminent reformist monk advocating this-worldly Buddhism or “Buddhism for the human realm” (renjian fojiao) in Taiwan in the twentieth century (see Ji Zhe’s article in this special issue).3

Cheng Yen is an unassuming nun. She is phenomenally beautiful according to her followers, who spoke in a variety of contexts, both formal and informal.4 Her selfless devotion to the mission can be strikingly inspiring. Many devotees trace their commitment to the movement through their personal ties to Cheng Yen. Indeed, many of them express these personal ties emotionally, crying uncontrollably when encountering Cheng Yen.5

What concerns the present article is not merely how powerful Cheng Yen is but how her personal power is gendered. Cheng Yen is a nun, which is already distinctive in the history of prominent Chinese Buddhist leadership. Since the founding of the movement, most of her devotees have been female. While it is a fact that both men and women are drawn to Tzu Chi, gender clearly matters in the construction of charisma in Tzu Chi, which suggests that charisma itself may be gendered. What I wish to do in this article is to show how female gender matters in the construction of Cheng Yen’s charisma and why. I shall argue that the why has to do with the way her followers’ ordinary lives are rendered extraordinary by their modeling of Cheng Yen’s unassuming course for pursuing religious-social achievement and empowerment for women in Chinese society.6

Let me begin with a vignette from my field notes:

In 1997, at the beginning of the year-end meeting of volunteers at the Taipei branch of the Tzu Chi Foundation, the young emcee, dressed in her Tzu Chi uniform, asked the crowd of seven hundred, mainly middle-aged women: “Why do you volunteer for Tzu Chi?” A brief silence was followed by the timid responses of several female voices from all parts of the auditorium: “[Because we] love the Supreme Person (ai shangren).” Blushing, the master of ceremonies smiled and, somewhat pedantically, replied: “Oh. Of course, we all love the Supreme Master. But we volunteer for Tzu Chi because we are ourselves shanxin dashi (benevolent persons). We are here because of da’ai (great love, universal love).”7

The seven hundred women in the above vignette are a small part of the roughly five million followers of the Tzu Chi movement in 117 countries (as of the year 2000). Among these countries, about 30 contain a total of 126 Tzu Chi branches, wherein similar year-end meetings are held around the globe: some, like the one in Malacca, Malaysia, are large-scale, while others, like the one in Boston, are smaller. All of these ceremonies have one thing in common: a concentrated focus on one leading nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen, commonly referred to as the Supreme Person (shangren).

For the audience in the above vignette, the meeting was one of the relatively few ceremonies they attend each year as volunteers and followers of the movement. The bulk of their activities is made up not of sutra chanting but rather of secular work—for many members, work carried out seven days a week—either inside local Tzu Chi offices where they mop the floor of the auditorium, or check membership dues in the accounting office; or outside Tzu Chi offices, where they collect monthly dues at members’ homes, sort garbage for recycling, and deliver relief to disaster victims in Taiwan and overseas. Although the audience’s answer to the master of ceremonies’ question was emotional, the content of the meeting itself was not esoteric. There was no meditation, no charismatic healing, no speaking in tongues, none of the things researchers might expect based upon the followers’ spontaneous expression of love for the leader. Instead, the key theme of the speeches delivered at the meeting was the secular humanitarian work being accomplished in Taiwan and in over 30 other countries by followers who, like those present at the Taipei meeting, volunteered because of, and for, the leader.

Movements, especially religious movements, which place tremendous emphasis on their leaders and/or founders, are often correctly called charismatic groups. Charisma, meaning “the gift of grace,” is taken from the vocabulary of early Christianity,8 and refers, in the Weberian sociological tradition, to an inborn personal magnetism that arises in the interaction between leader and follower, and may serve as the basis of leadership when it is regarded as a manifestation of power embedded in a broader symbolic framework, such as divinity.9 In an influential critical essay, Stanley Tambiah applies Weber’s sociological theory to the field of comparative religion: “Religious charisma derives from transcendental claims to authoritative leadership, claims that are made by the leader and accepted by the followers.”10 In a traditionally Buddhist context, two principle sources of charisma are achieved— salvation and supernormal powers—as

exemplified, on the one hand, by ascetic saints (arahants or arhats) who achieve nirvana via extended meditation, often in a monastic setting, and, on the other hand, by the bodhisattva, who renounces salvation to return to the world and save others.11 In other words, Buddhism does have its own distinct sources of charisma. However, the nature and structure of the emotional binding and personal ties between the leader and the followers, especially between a female leader and her followers, seems to be missing from Tambiah’s model. To supplement this Buddhist model of charisma, further ethnographies are required. Tzu Chi’s story is a nun’s tale writ large, and provides a window into the question of charisma in a Buddhist context. Tzu Chi is a Buddhist movement founded by a nun (who has remained the leader to this day) and her female followers, including monastic and lay. In considering the source of charisma in the Tzu Chi movement, it is crucial to ask if female gender offers a distinct source of charisma, or, in other words, if the appeal of charisma is gendered. It is a truism

that there are fewer female leaders—religious and general—than male around the world. But feminist anthropology since the 1970s has argued that the invisibility of women in ethnographic accounts could well be a result of male-centered biases.12 To what extent might a consideration of gender, a fundamental individual attribute and cultural construct, make a difference in our understanding of the power of personality? Issues concerning gender and religion have been addressed by a growing body of literature, and two anthropological approaches to women in religion are particularly relevant here.13 One is represented by Janice Boddy’s work on the za¯r possession cult among Sudanese Muslim women, which Boddy sees as a form of subjective resistance. Zayran are za¯r spirits which possess these women, allowing them to “tell [stories] about themselves and others, [providing] a portrait of village culture” in which they articulate family grievances and express aspects of their personalities in ways that are forbidden in the highly patriarchal

Sudanese society.14 Zar possession thus facilitates the articulation of resistance to the experience of gender oppression in daily life. Susan Sered provides a very different approach from that of the resistance school. Based on a study of twelve cross-cultural cases, Sered proposes a model of female-dominated religion or women’s religion.15 Her major argument is that motherhood distinguishes women from men, and hence women’s religions from men’s religions. In the present article I am similarly concerned with the “female agency”16 of religious charisma: how might women’s experience and their perceived value of female gender—both universal and culturally distinctive—shape the rise of female charisma? How does female gender matter in the process of a female-dominated charismatic movement— both in terms of the figure’s “claims to authoritative leadership” and of her followers’ acceptance of such claims? By examining Buddhist charismatic leadership in the Tzu Chi movement, I focus deliberately on the significance of female gender issues in the rhetoric17 and the embodiment18 of the power of personality: first, on the legend of the founding nun’s pursuit of priesthood; second, on the followers’ interpretations of their commitment to her mission.

SETTING

The Tzu Chi movement is part of the more general Buddhist revival which has followed the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987. The abrogation of this law and, more importantly, the 1989 passing of the revised law on the organization of civic groups, have resulted in a rapid expansion of formal, that is, registered Buddhist groups19 and the beginning of “a new phase of increased Buddhist pluralization.”20 The post-martial law Buddhist revival underwrote the rapid growth of large-scale, wellfinanced modern organizations, the proliferation of welfare institutions, as well as the internationalization of the movement, measured in terms of increased overseas Chinese participation and increased links across national borders. Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism is also characterized by a markedly increased significance and influence of nuns vis-à-vis monks. As Karma Lekshe Tsomo writes: Although still underrepresented in male-dominated bastions of ecclesiastical power, Buddhist women in Taiwan exert their influence through material generosity and sheer numbers. A significant number have rejected marriage in favor of ordination as Buddhist nuns. Women entering monastic life outnumber men more than five to one; on the whole they are better educated, more active, and younger than male candidates, entering the order as a first option, rather than after another career.21

Tzu Chi is one of the three largest Buddhist movements active in Taiwan and in the Taiwanese diaspora. The other two groups are Master Xingyun’s Buddha’s Light Mountain (Foguanshan) and Master Shengyan’s Dharma Drum Mountain (Fagushan). All three groups were founded in the 1960s, three decades before their major expansion into popular movements and successful modern organizations in the early 1990s. Unlike the other two groups, however, Tzu Chi was founded and is led by a nun, has a strong focus on lay participation, and emphasizes contributions to social welfare and other humanitarian missions as the path towards becoming a bodhisattva.

Beginning in 1966 as a small community of less than forty women in the backwaters of eastern Taiwan, Tzu Chi survived its initial difficulties, growing slowly during its first decade and then rapidly across Taiwan during the late 1980s—during a period when Taiwan was moving toward a wealthier economy and more democratic polity. Three decades after its founding, Tzu Chi had become the largest formal voluntary association in Taiwan and a growing transnational organization among overseas Chinese. In today’s Taiwan, it runs three state-of-theart, 900-bed hospitals, a television channel, and a secular university with a respected medical school. Over the past decade, Tzu Chi has delivered relief to over thirty countries around the world. Such accomplishments have won its leader Cheng Yen several international honors. Among these are the 1991 Philippine Magsaysay Award (the so-called “Asian Nobel Peace Prize”) and a 1993 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cheng Yen has been acclaimed as one of the new leaders of contemporary Buddhist peace activism.22 In 2002, she received the Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award from the World Buddhist University, based in Thailand.

A NUN’S TALE: THE LEADER’S LESSON

Cheng Yen (birth name Wang Jinyun)23 was born on 14 May 1937, in Qingshui township, Taizhong county, west-central Taiwan, as the third daughter of the family. Soon after her birth she was adopted by her uncle, the younger brother of her biological father,24 and in all interviews and Tzu Chi publications, Cheng Yen refers to her adoptive parents as her only parents.25 Her adoptive family was relatively wealthy and resided in Fengyuan City, the largest city of Taizhong County. As the eldest child of a merchant family, after graduating from primary school she helped with the family business and household chores, until the age of 20 when she discovered her religious vocation.26

An important element in the hagiography that would come to surround Cheng Yen was Wang Jinyun’s reputation for filial piety.27 The first miracle in her life was closely linked to—or a result of—her exemplary conduct in that regard. Tzu Chi literature describes how Wang Jinyun, at the age of fifteen, prayed to Guanyin—the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the most popular goddess in Chinese societies, and the only deity she knew of in childhood—that her mother would overcome a serious stomach illness.28 Jinyun vowed to Guanyin that she would give up twelve years of her life and become a vegetarian in exchange for her mother’s return to health.29 In a dream that recurred to Wang Jinyun over three consecutive nights, Guanyin appeared to provide medicine to her mother. Slowly, yet miraculously, her mother’s illness dissipated, and she was cured without resort to surgery, still life-threatening at that time. Wang Jinyun kept her word and became a vegetarian. Tzu Chi literature stresses that her change of diet was not yet a practice of religious devotion but solely an act of filial piety.30 In 1960, five years after the Guanyin miracle, Wang Jinyun’s father had a stroke and suddenly passed away. Although his death was the result of medical malpractice, Jinyun blamed herself because she had moved his body while he was unconscious. This trauma left her nearly unconscious for several days, and Buddhism came to provide a path to personal rebirth from her family tragedy. Still bereaved and depressed, she thought about leaving home (chujia) to become a nun, but was held back by her family responsibilities. One day she asked a nun at a local temple what kind of woman lives in the greatest bliss (xingfu). “The woman who can lift the grocery basket,” the nun replied. “But I carry grocery baskets every day. Why don’t I feel bliss?” Jinyun pondered the question while she resumed her routine of family business and chores, until she suddenly understood:

Did the nun mean that the woman who can lift the grocery basket is the one who has control over the money in her purse? . . . A woman shouldn’t just have the right to control her purse, to live for one jiating (family, household); she should be, like a man, capable of responsibility to society! If some day I can chujia (leave home) to promote this compassion for all humans . . . I’d like to extend everyone’s aijia (love for family) to love for society, for all living things . . . [I]sn’t this bliss?31

In this way, Jinyun saw Buddhism as the path toward a universal vocation—a vocation that allows women to contribute to society, and that “cannot be achieved inside the jia (family, home, or household).”32 She transformed her mourning for her father into the pursuit of a universal ideal that could transcend finite love and a woman’s traditional roles.

This transformation from filial piety to universal love had to face another challenge, however: her mother’s heartfelt objections to Jinyun’s plans. Jinyun left home, wandered among a few temples hoping to enter the Buddhist priesthood, and began her subsequent yearlong tearful struggle between her family ties and her religious pursuits. Her mother sought her out to urge her to return home, and threatened to continue to pursue Jinyun if she refused. Determined, Jingyun vowed to stay or die. Her heartbroken mother cried all the way home.

The severing of her family ties marked the critical transition from lay identity into the priesthood. In 1962, Jinyun found her destiny in a small temple of Dizang, the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva who was determined to refrain from attaining nirvana until all souls had been saved from the suffering of hell. In 1963, she became the fifth disciple of the Venerable Yinshun (1906–2005), one of the most important figures in contemporary Mahayana Buddhism, who named her Cheng Yen. He was a leading advocate of the reformist humanitarian tradition in Chinese Buddhism. In 1966, Cheng Yen, her five female disciples, and thirty housewives founded Compassion Relief.

ANALYSIS OF THE LEADER’S LESSON

Cheng Yen’s hagiography tells of her transformation from a filial daughter into a nun, and eventually a charismatic leader. The relationship between her ties to her mother and her religious pursuits did not end there, but was instead transformed. By the time Cheng Yen reached a position of leadership, her mother had become a primary supporter of her religious mission. It was her mother who purchased the first piece of land for Cheng Yen to build the Still Thoughts Abode, now the Tzu Chi monastery and headquarters. According to one of her monastic disciples, when Cheng Yen’s mother saw her daughter living in a straw hut, she felt great sadness and sighed: “When a daughter marries out, she receives a dowry from her family. When a daughter leaves home to become a nun, she should receive a gift from her family as well.”

Beata Grant rightly points out that Buddhist piety is different from Confucian filial piety, and that women seek Buddhism not as a supplement but as an alternative to marriage.33 The salient family ties, particularly the maternal links in Cheng Yen’s case, suggest that while families may strongly object to a daughter’s pursuit of priesthood,34 Buddhist women’s relations with their family in Chinese culture may be flexible enough to avoid irreconcilable conflict. As Cheng Yen’s mother’s eventual support suggests, there may be a resemblance between chujia (leaving family to become a priest) and chujia (marrying—the jia character used for “female marriage” is different from that meaning to leave the family to join the priesthood) from the family’s point of view, since both acts are “leaving the family,” whatever the destination.

In a nutshell, Cheng Yen’s story suggests that the core of the question of gender, charisma, and relationality lies in the tension between the female gender role in the Confucian familial ethic and the larger social world. Cheng Yen’s initial attraction to the bodhisattva Guanyin was driven by filial devotion to her mother, and the force that compelled Cheng Yen out of a traditional role was filial piety for her father. Most importantly, what has remained crucial for Cheng Yen’s followers, especially women today, is the transformed relationship between Cheng Yen and her mother, since they recognize and inhabit a similar relationship to her or to their own families. What began as a relationship between a worried filial daughter and a sick mother evolved to a relationship between a runaway daughter and a broken-hearted mother, and ultimately to one between a saintly daughter-leader and a supportive mother-disciple.35 What remains captivating for the female followers seems to be the dual poles of love and authority, both of which have endured even as the mother-daughter relation has been transformed with the spectacular expansion of Tzu Chi. For example, one day during my fieldwork at the Tzu Chi headquarters, I observed veteran female devotees sighing at the sight of Cheng Yen’s mother, now referred to as shima (master’s mother), who had come to visit her daughter but was forced to wait for quite some time because of her daughter’s busy schedule. When I asked them why they were sighing they replied irritably, annoyed by my apparent lack of insight: “A mother can’t even visit her own daughter when she wants to? Isn’t it obvious what the problem is?”

HER FOLLOWERS’ TALES

I would like to explore other aspects of Cheng Yen’s charisma through three stories of her followers, based on my fieldwork in Taiwan.

Jingheng

Jingheng is a founding core member and one of the first ten commissioners (weiyuan)—there were 10,000 as of 2000.36 She married into a merchant family. On the day she and another veteran devotee took me to a Japanese restaurant during my fieldwork in Hualian in 1998, she wore a pink dress suit and sported a tidy perm, a typical hairstyle for middle-aged women in Taiwan.37 She is short and slight, deliberate and soft-spoken, and usually remains quiet, if reflective, during gatherings of other veteran devotees, which is behavior that stands out among her more expressive colleagues.

During lunch, she said, “I have never taken the microphone,” that is, she has never delivered a speech or testimonial. I asked her why, since such a silence contrasts with my impression of active core members, who are usually vocal and even evangelical in their zeal. She answered, “Because I cry whenever I think about shifu [the master, i.e., the Venerable Cheng Yen], let alone talk about her.” I asked Jingheng if she could explain the crying. She paused for a minute, looking straight into my face, expressionless, and spoke slowly, measuring every word:

It’s her beixin [[[compassion]]; lit. “sorrowful compassionate heart”]. Whenever I think of the shifu’s beixin, I can’t help crying. When shifu announced [in 1979] that she was determined to build a hospital [in Hualian], most [followers] felt overwhelmed by the difficulty [of raising such a huge sum of money]. But it was the happiest moment in my life. People say the happiest day in a woman’s life is the day of her son’s wedding. On that day, I didn’t feel a thing. Then people said the happiest moment would come when my daughter-in-law gave birth to my first grandson. So I waited. Yet when it happened, I didn’t feel much at all. But I was never happier than the day shifu told us that we would build a hospital together.38

In other words, what’s extraordinary for Jingheng was what Cheng Yen invited her to do, a sense of achievement she gained from participating in the leader’s mission rather than from the traditional and “ordinary” life passages. The paradox is, the extraordinary event which continued to make her cry was something she carried out by herself by working for the cause, not a miracle the leader performed. She nevertheless attributed this breakthrough in her life to the personal tie between her and the leader, in her words, the “sorrowful compassionate heart.”

Mama Jiang

Mrs. Jiang, or, as she is usually referred to, Mama Jiang (Mother Jiang), is a middle-class woman and the wife of a small shopkeeper in the mountains of southwestern Taiwan.39 She is one of the local female Tzu Chi pioneers in Jiayi County, the other pioneers being a married couple in Jiayi City, and the husband’s mother who was a veteran follower since the early years of Tzu Chi. She first visited Tzu Chi headquarters in 1987 in Hualian as part of a tour organized by the women’s morning exercise group in her hometown, Plum Mountain (Meishan). She immediately began proselytizing, and by 1998 had converted over 400 households. On one of her visits to Tzu Chi headquarters in 1988, she was self-effacing and hid among a crowd of devotees who had come to meet the group’s leader. She described what happened next: “The Venerable Cheng Yen raised her head and eyebrows, speaking across the row of people in front of me: ‘You! Yes, I mean you. When are you going to step forward?’” Mama Jiang realized that the Venerable Cheng Yen was speaking to her. She immediately signed up to become a commissioner trainee. One year later, in 1989, she became the first commissioner of Jiayi County.

Commissionership means not only proselytization but also carrying out local charity relief. As a woman of means and a novice commissioner, she felt helpless when she first went to visit a poor family in the southern mountain region. As she described it:

I went to the train station [at the end of the day] in a state of frustration. It was in the evening. A tragic accident had occurred just before I arrived. A young student girl had fallen off the platform and was killed by a train. Her body had been removed from the scene, and her family was there burning “golden money” (or “spirit paper”) to her [[[soul]]]. Ashes from the burning paper filled the air and covered my face. I tried to wipe the ashes away, but another gust of wind only blew more into my face. I said to myself: “What a useless person I am! I have failed shifu.’”40

The symbolism of the paper money and her feelings of helplessness spurred her to seek more advice. She returned to Tzu Chi headquarters and asked the Venerable Cheng Yen what to do. Cheng Yen referred her to the pioneer couple in Jiayi City who had been carrying out charitable relief for years. She learned from them how to fulfill the Tzu Chi mission, by carrying out on-site investigation of relief applicants and delivery of both goods and consolation to charity recipients, and in a few years became the most respected veteran in the region.

Mama Jiang’s youngest son was killed in a car accident a few years before my fieldwork began in 1997. Despite the fact the accident was the fault of the speeding driver, Mama Jiang asked for no compensation for her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Moved by her forgiveness, the guilt-ridden driver has since offered three small gifts to Mama Jiang, worth a total of about one thousand U.S. dollars. Mama Jiang accepted the money and donated it all to Tzu Chi in the name of the driver. As she explained to me calmly, her expression showing little emotion:

I couldn’t have let go had I never become a Tzu Chi follower. My son’s life is priceless. No amount of compensation could bring my son back. I’d rather the driver learn his lesson from this accident, drive carefully in the future, and become a useful person to society . . . My young son was himself half a Tzu Chi person: he drove me around to collect membership dues and investigate [[[charity]]] cases. My sole wish is that he return to be a Tzu Chi person in his next life as soon as possible.41

Ajing

Ajing was in her early thirties when I first met her in 1997 in southwestern Taiwan.42 She had a round face, bright brown eyes, pale skin, was soft-spoken yet nevertheless a powerful speaker At the time she was the coordinator of the Dalin liaison office and one of the three female pioneers who had famously recruited over 400 households each—in a town with a total population of only 30,000. Born and raised in a neighboring village, she worked as a hairdresser after graduating from high school. She married into the Zeng family, the members of whom practiced popular religion and barely made a living by collecting recyclable garbage, such as metal and paper. Ajing continued working as a hairdresser until she could open her own shop. Meanwhile, she helped her husband’s family business slowly develop from garbage recycling to manufacturing synthetic materials.

According to local followers, she was introduced to Tzu Chi at the group’s first local event, which was held outside a popular temple in downtown Dalin in 1989. But Ajing traces her initial introduction to the organization back even further. She says it was in a dream that she first met the Venerable Cheng Yen and Tzu Chi. In her dream, a beautiful nun was delivering a sermon under a big tree in a square. There were only a handful of people in attendance, sitting on stools in front of the tree. This piqued her curiosity and she joined the audience. She was so drawn to the sermon that she paid no attention to her surroundings. At one point, she looked behind her and was surprised to see that the crowd had suddenly grown considerably. She said, “Wow! There are a lot of people behind me! We are all listening to the nun. I was so excited that I turned my head back wanting to tell the nun: ‘Shifu! Look! So many people.’ But the nun had disappeared, leaving me on my own at the head of a huge crowd.”

The dream left an impression on her, but she kept it to herself and did not pursue its meanings further. One day at the hair salon, she saw a copy of Tzu Chi Monthly. She opened it and saw the portrait of the Venerable Cheng Yen. She drew in her breath sharply, exclaiming: “It’s her! This is the nun in my dream.” Ajing immediately began proselytizing under Mama Jiang’s leadership. Her personal ties to the Venerable Cheng Yen had just begun. Around the time she joined, the Venerable Cheng Yen made an unexpected visit to Dalin during one of her monthly tours around the island. Local followers had no idea of the purpose for her sudden visit to their small town. Only a year later would they know that she was looking for a site on which to build the second Tzu Chi hospital, which would eventually be constructed in Dalin. Tzu Chi’s hospitals embody the spiritual mission of the group and are considered both symbolically and socially important. Many locals claimed credit for the project’s development. According to newspaper clippings and Tzu Chi literature, Cheng Yen had been looking around for an entirely different location prior to her visit to Dalin to build the group’s second hospital in Taiwan. But she settled on Dalin because land was available, because she was supported by local politicians, and because she had the backing of Taiwan’s Ministry of Health. But Ajing took credit for bringing the Venerable Cheng Yen to Dalin to survey the potential site, thus increasing her own personal influence within the organization.

This account of how Cheng Yen first arrived to Dalin was repeated over and over again by Ajing and became part of the local lore. According to this narrative, Ajing’s spontaneous donation of a small parcel of land which her husband’s family inherited was the factor that led Cheng Yen to visit Dalin. Ajing says she volunteered to donate a parcel from what were then scant assets in hope that her master might eventually come to her frequently ignored town. When she first met Cheng Yen at the central Taiwan branch office, Ajing asked her commissioner, Mama Jiang, to tell Cheng Yen of her wish to donate land to build a Tzu Chi branch office in Dalin. But another version of the story says that when Cheng Yen first arrived in Dalin, she asked local followers if they knew where she could find a significant parcel of land to carry out the group’s ambitions. This version of events suggests that Ajing’s role was less critical than she suggests in luring the nun to Dalin. What is clear, however, is that Ajing—a former hairdresser with little education and from a poor background—became a powerful local branch leader and attributes her rise to power to Cheng Yen’s first official visit to Dalin. Each weekend after the groundbreaking in the mid-90’s, Ajing told her story to an average of 1,000 visitors and devotees who showed up at the construction site to see how their donations were being spent.

Analysis of the Followers’ Accounts

Running through the three followers’ tales is a tension between the culturally prescribed female gender role within the family and power outside of family life. Jingheng found achievement in her leader’s mission rather than through the culturally prescribed life passages for women, building on the authority of what Margery Wolf calls the “uterine family” which centers on the mother and her children, as opposed to the patrilineal family which centers on the father and sons.43 Mama Jiang eventually stepped forward from her position of self-effacement within the mission and transformed her maternal grief for her deceased son into a universal love, which includes her son’s possible reincarnation. Ajing clearly stepped out of her limited role of daughter-in-law, aspiring to greater local leadership and authority by claiming a spiritual link to the charismatic leader at the expense of her husband’s family assets.

Each of the three narratives reveals a different facet of the extraordinary in the making of charisma: Jinghen tells of her uncontrollable emotion in the face of the leader, Mama Jiang tells of her (self-)imposed commitments and pressures to achieve the leader’s mission, and Ajing speaks of her spiritual and transcendent personal link to the leader. Common to the three stories is an electrifying initial contact with the leader, which serves as the catalyst to propel the follower out of a traditional female gender role and toward a position of power in the larger society. Each of the three followers narrates something extraordinary about the leader, or more accurately, about the relationship between herself and the leader. Yet, in the final analysis, all of the followers’ tales measure the extraordinary happening against the backdrop of the ordinary roles to which they had been assigned or, had assigned themselves. The female devotees of Cheng Yen interpret their relationship with her as extraordinary: the thought of the master provokes uncontrollable tears; the master points out the path to reincarnation; the master communicates through dreams and other forms of extra-sensory communication. The followers also view their relationship with the nun as transformative: the sublime experience of their Tzu Chi identity contrasts dramatically with the Taiwanese cultural prescriptions for women’s life passages. What lies at the center of their expectation of the extraordinary is the devotees’ interpretive and narrative agency. In other words, the female devotees’ post-Tzu Chi self-awareness speaks to a culturally specific model of female agency as understood in the ordinary world of Chinese women in Taiwan.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I would now like to return to my preliminary question: How do women’s experiences and the perceived value of female gender—in both universal and culturally distinctive terms—contribute to the development of a female charisma? It appears that gender matters in the context of Tzu Chi in two ways. First, female gender matters as an object to be contemplated, leading to a modification of expectations of the role of women within traditional Taiwanese cultural and religious structures. Cheng Yen began pursuing the Buddhist priesthood when she realized the limitations of women’s roles and influence within an individual family. The first two stories of devotees vividly reflect Taiwanese women’s roles. What makes the glorification of the charismatic leader by other women so “extraordinary” is the stark contrast between Cheng Yen’s life and the lives of women inhabiting the roles normally prescribed to them in Taiwanese society.

Second, female gender matters in the embodiment of both the leader’s personal appeal and in the followers’ acceptance of her appeal. For example, the immediate emotional response to Cheng Yen—such as uncontrollable crying and inexpressible joy—are the embodiment of her personal magnetism. In their words, beixin (compassionate heart)—used both in the context of the collective emotive reaction to the Venerable Cheng Yen, and in reference to the compassion one develops for poor people and others—is consistent with the core philosophy of the movement. Here, “compassionate heart” can be understood as “emotion” in Michelle Z. Rosaldo’s definition, as embodied thoughts. “Emotions are thoughts somehow ‘felt’ in flushes, pulses, ‘movement’ of our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin. They are embodied thoughts . . .”44 The embodiment experience women have in the movement, like their gender, becomes an object to contemplate and to interpret. In so contemplating and interpreting, the followers become engaged in the leader’s mission, which is to be engaged in the suffering of all the living beings. Does female gender have its distinct source of charisma? Is charismatic appeal itself gendered? Based on the limited selective stories collected from my fieldwork, the answer to both questions is yes. The embodiment can be gender neutral: men also cried in Tzu Chi and when they encountered Cheng Yen, although much less frequently, according to my fieldwork.45 Nevertheless, men rarely, if ever, drew the interpretations of the embodied charismatic experience by reflecting upon their gender role. There were men who felt “ashamed” by the contrast between Cheng Yen’s frailty and her immense accomplishment. This might be the closest to a specific male gendered reflection of female charisma from my fieldwork in Tzu Chi. The other case, which immediately resulted in punishment, was contempt, that is, when a man felt “attracted to” Cheng Yen. Such dyadic romantic imagination cannot be tolerated in the hierarchical relation between the leader and the follower.46 The contemplation and comparison of the common gendered role remains exclusively between female leader and female followers, at least in Tzu Chi’s case.

There appears to be a significant resonance of a breakthrough in female gender roles in both the leader’s and the followers’ tales. On a general level, religion—in this case, Buddhism—is the source of power. Yet in a more limited purview, charisma, in the sense of the expectation of the extraordinary, is what gives rise to, and, in turn, is narrated by, the followers’ tales of their transformation of female gender roles. What then is the distinct source of female charisma? How is charismatic appeal gendered, at least in the case of female gender? I would argue that the appeal rests on the common understanding and experience of the structure and limitations of women’s roles in the everyday world wherein both the leader and her followers live and share. The love for the leader, as reflected in the opening vignette, stems from the fact that the leader has or at least had experiences so ordinary and everyday that every average woman in the same cultural world could sympathize with her. If this argument holds, one could reason that the expectation of the extraordinary and the making of the extraordinary, in the context of female gender, would be what makes things happen, socially and collectively. An earlier version of this essay was presented as an invited lecture at Washington

University, St. Louis, in May 2007. I thank Professors Lingchei Letty Chen and Beata Grant for inviting me and for their insightful comments, and the professors and students who participated in the open discussion. Thanks also to Vincent Goossaert and David Ownby for including my article in the “Mapping Charisma in Chinese Religion” issue, and to Yumi Selden for making the paper readable. I am indebted to the editors of Nova Religio, especially Douglas E. Cowan, Rebecca Moore, and Catherine Wessinger, and the anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions for clarity and for saving me from perplexing errors. Part of the research was funded by a grant from Taiwan’s National Science Council (NSC 952412-H-007-003).

ENDNOTES

1 Ciji jijinhui, , its formal name in English, Tzu Chi, literally means Compassion Relief. This article uses the Pinyin Romanization for all Chinese terms except for names which have already appeared otherwise in English literatures. The subject of the study uses the Wade-Giles Romanization system on its website and English literatures and registrations, and spells “Tzu Chi” for its organization and “Cheng Yen” for its leader.

2 A body of literature on Tzu Chi is proliferating. For an earlier introduction, see Chien-yu Julia Huang and Robert P. Weller, “Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (1998): 379–96. For the latest accounts of the movement, see Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Chapter 2; and C. Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

3 Although Cheng Yen at one point when facing a direct inquiry on whether Tzu Chi is renjian fojiao, said self-effacingly though much in line with her style in public that Tzu Chi is “not yet” renjian fojiao.

4 Note that the Buddhist expression for beauty should be zhuangyan; lit. solemn.

5 C. Julia Huang, “Weeping in a Taiwanese Buddhist Charismatic Movement,” Ethnology 42, no. 1 (2003): 73–86.

6 Hwei-syin Lu has also explored the gender aspects of Tzu Chi from the perspectives of space, family, and body, see Lu, “Fojiao ciji gongdehui de liangxing yü kongjian zhi guanxi” (“The Relation between Gender and Space in the Buddhist Tzu Chi Merit Association”), paper presented at the conference on Space, Family, and Society, 22–26 February 1994, Yilan, Taiwan; “Xingbie, jiating yü fojiao: yi ciji gondehui weili (“Gender, Family, and Buddhism: A Case Study of Tzu Chi Merit Association”), in Xingbie, shenge yü taiwan zongjiao lunshu (Gender, God’s Status, and Taiwanese Religious Discourse), ed. Fong-mao Lee and Rong-gui Chu (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1997), 97–120; “Gender and Buddhism in Contemporary Taiwan: A Case Study of Tzu Chi Foundation,” Proceedings of the National Science Council, Republic of China, Part C: Humanities and Social Sciences 8, no. 4 (1998): 539–50; “Xiandai fojiao nüxing de shenti yüyan yü xingbie chongjian: yi ciji gongdehui weili” (“Body Language and Gender Reconstruction of Contemporary Buddhist Women: A Case Study of Tzuchi [[[Tzu Chi]]] Merit Association”), Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica 88 (1999): 275–311. She rightly observes in Tzu Chi the coexistence of the feminization of leadership and the androginization of practice, see Lu, “Gender and Buddhism in Contemporary Taiwan.” She also points out that Cheng Yen exists as the head as well as the mother of the Tzu Chi extended family, see Lu, “Gender, Family, and Buddhism,” 111. I hope to expand on Lu’s pioneer works on Tzu Chi and explore specifically the gendered charisma of Cheng Yen through the parallel and identification of both leader’s and the followers’ narratives.

7 Field Notes, in Taipei on 5 December 5 1997, see Huang, Charisma and Compassion, Chapter 1.

8 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1968] 1978), 216.

9 Liah Greenfeld, “Reflections on the Two Charismas,” British Journal of Sociology 36, no. 1 (1985): 117–32; Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, [1990] 1993); Max Weber, Economy and Society, 241, 1133.

10 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 325.

11 Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest, 330–31. 12 See for example Henrietta L. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1988). 13 For example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Arvind Sharma, ed., Women in World Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Susan Starr Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

14 Janice P. Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin, 1989), 9. 15 Sered defines female dominant religion in terms of (1) female majority and leadership, (2) shared gender identity, and (3) a recognition of the religious group as independent from a larger, male-dominated institutional context. See Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister, 3–4. 16 Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 17 Thomas J. Csordas, Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 18 For example Lindholm, Charisma.

19 For example Jiang Canteng, “Jieyanhou de Taiwan fojiao yü zhengzhi” (“Taiwanese Buddhism and Politics after Martial Law”), Shiyuan 20 (1997): 403–26. 20 Charles Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660–1990 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 180. 21 Karma Lekshe Tsomo, “Mahaprajapati’s Legacy: The Buddhist Women’s Movement: An Introduction,” in Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations, ed. Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 20. 22 David W. Chappell, “Introduction,” in Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace, ed. David W. Chappell (Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publications, 1999), 15–25. 23 The last name, Wang, is being given first, as is Asian custom.

24 Jinyun; lit. bright and beautiful clouds, is a fairly common name for girls in Taiwan. Tzu Chi literature does not indicate any special meanings for the name. Cheng Yen (Zhengyan); lit. witnessing solemn, is the Buddhist name given by the Venerable Yinshun when he accepted her as a monastic disciple. 25 Adoptions, especially the adoptions of girls, were not uncommon in Taiwan, even though by the late 1930s the practice of adopting daughters-in-law had largely disappeared. See Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China,1845–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980); Margery Wolf, Women and Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972). From people I know who have adopted girls, the reasons for choosing girls are various. Some childless parents adopted girls so as to produce a “queue” leading to the conception of their own child, preferably a son. 26 Chen Huijian, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie (The Venerable Cheng Yen’s World of Tzu Chi) (Taipei, Taiwan: Ciji wenhua chubanshe, [1983] 1998), 5. 27 In fact, she was called “the filial daughter” (xiaonü) in her hometown, Fengyuan, see Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 12. 28 Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 5–6; Peter Faun, The Miracle World of

Compassion (Taipei, Taiwan: Ciji wenhua chubanshe, 1991), 3–4; Shu-chun Pen, “Reflecting Mountains When Facing Mountains, Reflecting Water When Facing Water: The Story of Dharma Master Cheng Yen [Zhengyan],” in Still Thoughts by Dharma Master Cheng Yen (Taipei, Taiwan: Shin yang wenjiao jijin hui, 1992), 243. 29 Cheng Yen’s vow was to shorten her life by “one era year” (yi jinian in Mandarin), see Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 5. According to one of her disciples, Cheng Yen did not know until later that the traditional term “one era year” means twelve years. She nevertheless was willing to do anything in exchange for her mother’s life. Vowing to begin a vegetarian diet in exchange for the granting of a wish is not uncommon, especially in the case of praying to a Buddhist deity. By contrast, giving up years of one’s life is an unusual sacrifice. 30 Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 6; Pen, “Reflecting Mountains,” 243. 31 Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 9; translation and emphasis mine, see Huang, Charisma and Compassion, 20. 32 Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 10.

33 Beata Grant, “The Red Cord Untied: Buddhist Nuns in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Buddhist Women across Cultures, 91–103. 34 Examples of family objections to a daughter’s religious pursuit are not uncommon. A well-known extreme case occurred in 1997 when most of the participants in a Buddhist summer camp for college students at Zhongtai Chan Si Temple in Taizhong, central Taiwan, decided to stay on and shaved their heads to become nuns. The mass media dubbed this episode the “Zhongtai shaving incident” and focused largely on the girls’ families’ angrily accusing the temple of “abducting” their daughters. But not all family tension results in outand-out antagonism. The status of novice, that is, living in a monastery without shaving the head, is a period of negotiation and, in many cases, struggle with family. For example, although Tzu Chi Abode mandates a minimum two-year observation period for each novice, the disciple of Cheng Yen who spoke with me remained a novice for seven years until she could finally obtain her family’s agreement on her religious pursuit. Even in our interview in 1998, she still appeared sad when talking about her father’s objections.

35 This accords with Yu-chen Li’s excellent analysis of the mother-daughter complex in the context of the daughter’s chujia (leaving home to become a nun). Li points out that the daughter’s religious pursuit changed both mother and daughter, but argues that the source of tension mainly comes from the mother’s gender role model for the daughter, see Yu-chen Li, “Taiwan nüxing chujia yü jicheng jiating jiaose de liangnan” (“The Mother-Daughter Complex: Gender Identity and Subjectivity of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns”), in Affect, Emotion and Culture: Anthropological and Psychological Studies in Taiwanese Society, ed. Tai-Li Hu, Mutsu Hsu, and Kuang-Hui Yeh (Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 2002), 363–404.

36 Weiyuan is one of the titled core memberships in Tzu Chi. It is also the title that existed earliest in Tzu Chi history and the Tzu Chi literature uses “commissioner” as its English translation. Commissioners are the only members authorized to collect membership dues. In many ways, commissioners represent Tzu Chi and embody the Tzu Chi spirit. There are many criteria for earning the title of commissioner, among them, the key and the most distinctive is proselytization. During my research in 2001, the minimum requirement was 40 households. Mass media in Taiwan often confuse commissioner with the other title, honorary trustee. The former is mainly based on commitments in proselytization, volunteer works, and retreat training, and the latter is solely based on monetary donation of over NT$ 1 million (about US$ 330,000; US$ 1 equals to NT$ 30) in the course of one year. For an introduction and analysis of commissionership and other titled groups in Tzu Chi, see Huang, Charisma and Compassion.

37 I interviewed Jingheng in a restaurant in Hualian on 9 August 1998. 38 Field notes, in Hualian on 9 August 1998. 39 I interviewed Mama Jiang at her home in Meishan on 27 November 1997. 40 Field notes, in Meishan on 27 November 1997. 41 Field notes, in Meishan on 27 November 1997. 42 I first interviewed Ajing in the Dalin branch office on 15 November 1997. 43 Wolf, Women and The Family in Rural Taiwan.

44 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Toward An Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143. 45 Huang, “Weeping in a Taiwanese Buddhist Charismatic Movement.” 46 This was an example from my fieldwork, see Huang, Charisma and Compassion. Charles Lindholm argues that there is a fine line between romantic love and charismatic authority. He points out charismatic authority is antagonistic to romantic dyad love because the latter demands equal force and would prevent the follower from complete submission to the leader. See Lindholm, Charisma, 186.