Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public Sphere

Maria Rovisco, Sebastian Kim, Maria Rovisco, Sebastian Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415819381
• eBook ISBN: 9781317812203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although emerging scholarship in the social sciences suggests that religion can be a potential catalyst of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, few attempts have been made to bring to the fore new theoretical positions and empirical analyses of how cosmopolitanism -- as a philosophical notion, a practice and identity outlook -- can also shape and inform concrete religious affiliations. Key questions concerning the significance of cosmopolitan ideas and practices – in relation to particular religious experiences and discourses -- remain to be explored, both theoretically and empirically.

This book takes as its starting point the emergence of cosmopolitanism -- as a major interdisciplinary field -- as a springboard for generating a productive dialogue among scholars working within a variety of intellectual disciplines and methodological traditions. The chapter contributions offer a serious attempt to critically engage both the limitations and possibilities of cosmopolitanism as an analytical and critical tool to understand a changing religious landscape in a globalizing world, namely, the so-called 'new religious diversity', religious conflict, and issues of migration, multiculturalism and transnationalism vis-à-vis the public exercise of religion. The contributors' work is situated in a range of world sites in Africa, India, North America, Latin America, and Europe.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of globalization, religion and politics, and the sociology of religion.

Part I

Contexts

1 The discourse and practice of a Buddhist cosmopolitanism

Transnational migrants and Tzu Chi Movement

Weishan Huang

In this chapter, I will focus on the way in which Tzu Chi is globally institutionalized and mobilized. The study will illustrate the formation of the imagined global moral community of Tzuchians by offering an ethnography of its global structure and its New York regional office. How do groups’ local cultures interact with the globality of cosmopolitan moral discourse? This study shows how the religious discourse of Buddhist cosmopolitanism plays a critical role in the deterritorialization and relocalization of the Tzu Chi Movement. While Christianity and Islam have established themselves as missionary-based world religions and have been studied extensively, there is far less literature on the phenomenon of Buddhist globalization, especially in the Mahayana Buddhist Movement. This article seeks to contribute to covering this gap in the literature by studying a global network of reformed Buddhists known as the Tzu Chi Foundation.

Using the conceptual framework described by Thomas J. Csordas in Transnational Transcendence (2009), I argue that the Tzu Chi Foundation demonstrates the increasing global influence of religious groups and movements, thus challenging the stereotype that contemporary international religious manifestations are secondary to the primarily economic dimensions of globalization.¹

While Tzu Chi is not a missionary-based religion, the movement is globally institutionalized in a number of ways. Transnational Taiwanese migration is the main factor contributing to its global development (Huang 2003). How is Tzu Chi globally mobilized? Earlier scholars had suggested that Buddhist universalization is the main mechanism behind the globalization of Tzu Chi. Buddhist universalism can only describe the ‘being’ of connecting to a universal moral, but cannot explain the ‘doing’ of a universal moral. I propose that the religious discourse of Tzu Chi is closer to Buddhist cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes transnational actors and movements. Its religious cosmopolitanism transcends national states and political authorities, and it espouses a cosmology that is beyond the secular world.

Globalization and religion

Historically, globalization as a process has been continuous with modernity, with the capitalist world system, and with the world system of national states. Globalization serves as an analytical category that indicates that these processes, while continuous, have entered a qualitatively new phase. Some scholars argue that we should use theories of globalization to study recent developments in religion in the USA, Europe, and the rest of the world. Earlier literature, including the works of theorists such as Peter Beyer (1994, 2006), followed Roland Robertson’s (1992) theoretical concepts of globalization and its interaction with religion. The argument was that religious revivals are forms of traditional identities that emerge in reaction against modernity. The work of Jean and John Comaroff in Africa, based on contemporary ethnography and historical documentation, moves further along this line of thinking with its interpretation of the interaction between religion and globalization. More recently, some scholars have focused on the ethnography of religious groups and movements to show how their influence has extended from the margins to the metropole, and how they challenge the view that international religious expressions are secondary to the primarily economic phenomenon of globalization (Csordas 2009). These studies on religious actors have helped us understand how the actions and religious identities of non-state actors, as political actors engaged in local forms of articulation, are free of the constraints of territorial and national states (Casanova 2001: 423).

José Casanova suggests that one of the most important effects of globalization on religions is the ‘deterritorialization’ of the latter (Basch et al. 1994; Casanova 2001). By deterritorialization, he means the dis-embeddedness of cultural phenomena from their ‘natural’ territories. Cultural systems throughout history have been territorially embedded. By territory what is meant is simply ecology in the strict sense of the term, that is, relations between organisms and their physical environments. At the peak of European modernity and global colonial expansion, as Basch et al. (1994), and Casanova (2001) have described it, the world is undergoing a particular form of territorialization. As Castells notes, global markets, global media and information systems, global subcultures and identities, global movements and organizations of a global civil society, all proliferate and become increasingly more relevant, traversing national borders and transcending national territories (Castells 1997). Globalization facilitates the return of the old civilizations and of world religions not only as units of analysis, but also as significant cultural systems and as imagined communities, overlapping, and at time in competition, with the imagined national communities (Casanova 2001). As new transnational imagined communities emerge, the most relevant ones are likely to be once again the old civilizations and world religions. While Casanova used Catholicism and Pentecostalism as examples, I will use the transnational character of reformed Mahayana Buddhism as a case study here.

Cosmopolitanization, as Beck stresses, comprises the development of multiple loyalties as well as the increase in diverse transnational forms of life, the emergence of non-state political actors (ranging from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization), and the development of global protest movements against (neoliberal) globalism and in support of a different kind of (cosmopolitan) globalization. Examples of cosmopolitanization include people campaigning for the worldwide recognition of human rights, for the right to work, for the global protection of the environment, for the reduction of poverty, and so on (Beck 2006). By taking advantage of local structural opportunities, Tzu Chi builds relations between its Buddhist teachings and the physical environments in host societies.

Transnational Buddhism

Are global networks really global? Networks that cross international political borders and connect two or more countries are global. However, networks also could be short-term or function within the national frame of reference (Holton 2008). I am interested in this chapter in exploring long-term and tangible global connectivity between organizations and movements. The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation is an international Buddhist relief organization founded in 1966 and based in Hualien, Taiwan, which has millions of members in Taiwan and overseas. Tzu Chi is indeed the largest social group in Taiwan today, controlling 120 billion Taiwanese dollars in funds, more than 300 Tzu Chi offices in 40 countries, four supporting missions, and 300,000 certified volunteers worldwide (Himalaya Foundation 2007). The founder, Master Cheng Yen, was initiated as a Buddhist nun in 1963 and was influenced by her master, Yin Shun, who taught his followers: ‘Be committed to Buddhism and to all living beings.’² Unusual among Buddhist organizations, Tzu Chi defines social service rather than religion as its primary goal, a change that dates to the late 1960s. This reform is truly the Reverend Cheng Yen’s own innovation.

Hualien is a sacred land for Tzu Chi members. Every May, the majority of Tzu Chi New York commissioners, like other Tzu Chi commissioners worldwide, fly back to Hualien to attend the Global Tzu Chi Day on Mother’s Day and to participate in a variety of activities during the following week.³ Branch directors are required to send reports to the headquarters and to attend board meetings held annually at the headquarters. Hualien exerts little direct control over the New York branch, and the director and the commissioners operate the branch as they see fit.

Although Tzu Chi New York operates under a denominational hierarchy, one of its important missions is to be a ‘leader’ in regional expansion. In the last few years, Tzu Chi New York has ambitiously extended its self-owned Tzu Chi centres (Tzu Chi Hui Sou) to New Jersey; Flushing, Queens, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Taiwanese immigrants are located.

The spread and settlement of ethnic Chinese immigrants in many major cities worldwide is the second significant reason for the global network. By examining the history of the establishment of Tzu Chi centres in other cities, I found that the local founders, drawn from the community of local immigrants, are largely responsible for the success of outreach programmes and for the setting up of new missions. I constantly heard Tzu Chi commissioners mention the names of members and leaders in different cities. They knew each other from attending the same events and meetings in Taiwan as well as in cyberspace. In the age of information, new technologies facilitate the process of network building.

Tzu Chi has 33,389 trained and certified commissioners and 20,388 Faith Corps members globally.⁴ Among them, 29,766 commissioners and 19,064 Faith Corps members are in Taiwan. And 3,623 commissioners and 1,324 Faith Corps members are overseas members. Commissioners and Faith Corps members are lay leaders who are the backbone of global missions. In general, they require at least two years of training in each locality and are certified by the Religious Bureau at the headquarters. Among all the overseas branches, the United States has the most commissioners (1,407 commissioners and 591 Faith Corps members among 99 US branches). Therefore, the study of Tzu Chi USA has significant value. According to my field research in Hualien in 2010, the process of membership indigenization in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Africa is significantly different from the practice in the United States.

The production of locality and globality: Tzu Chi USA and the making of Buddhist cosmopolitanism

The development of Tzu Chi USA reflects, on the one hand, the increasing numbers of well-established Taiwanese immigrants who arrived in the United States after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, and, on the other hand, the creation of a new transnational religious identity among Tzu Chi’s participants and members. According to the report of the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission (OCAC) of Taiwan, Taiwanese Americans account for over 55 per cent of overseas Taiwanese; more than 60 per cent of them have bachelor’s, master’s or PhD degrees (OCAC 2013). As is evident from the OCAC’s data, the majority of these immigrants are middle-class businesspersons, investors, and other professionals.

The establishment of the new Buddhist cultivation school, Tzu Chi Denomination (Tzuchi Zhongmen), in late 2006, once again sought to claim Tzu Chi’s religious legitimacy and authority in the existing Buddhist world. Being a Tzuchian carries the symbolic meaning of being a Buddhist cosmopolitan, with the member’s worldly humanitarian practices finding global recognition, breaking her/him away from the otherworldly orientation of traditional Buddhism seeking only individual cultivation. As the middle-class constitutes the majority of overseas Tzu Chi members, we start to wonder if their cosmopolitanism is often understood as an elitist/bourgeoisie subject position or identity. In this case, Tzu Chi religious cosmopolitanism is not a capitalist cosmopolitanism as Marx described, nor middle-class consciousness as Calhoun described (Marx and Engels 1976: 488; Calhoun 2002). As middle-class immigrants are marginalized in the global north, the cosmopolitan discourse of the Tzu Chi Foundation provides the pride and empowerment to reposition Tzu Chi followers on a higher and more meaningful moral ground by implementing their institutional cosmopolitan idea locally, which I will elaborate further later in the religious discourse section.

For Tzu Chi, the concept of ‘Great Love’ is more like a global moral community, but without suggesting a single political entity, such as a world state (Held 1995). The core belief shared by moral cosmopolitanism perspectives is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, belong to multiple communities in different ways, with some focusing on concentrating on moral norms, relationships, markets, or various forms of cultural expression (Robbins 1998; Nowicka and Rovisco 2009; Nussbaum 1996).

In the case of the Tzuchians, the image of a Tzuchian breaks away from the typical representation of traditional Buddhist individualism and instead offers an image of collective action at the grassroots level. The media frequently show groups of Tzuchians in uniform engaged in humanitarian relief activities, which contradict the conventional image of the isolated Buddhist meditating in peaceful surroundings. Tzuchians are actively engaged with this world, rather than detaching themselves from earthly troubles.

With both a Buddhist and a cosmopolitan identity, Tzu Chi USA distinguishes itself from other existing overseas Buddhist organizations. The provision of welfare services and the organization of international relief are its two most distinguishing features, although these reforms were initially developed in the headquarters of Hualien, Taiwan, where the parent temple is also located.

The Tzu Chi New York branch is under the leadership of the Los Angeles-based headquarters.⁵ In the United States in 2000, Tzu Chi had ten branches, two branch offices, 24 contact locations, and 13 contact places in 23 states.⁶ Tzu Chi’s social service model has influenced the teachings and practices of other international Buddhist groups, and the relatively small New York branch has already spread its influence beyond its base in Flushing, Queens. It is operated by lay leaders; no resident religious leaders are assigned to the New York office. Its principal commissioners and members are mostly Taiwanese Americans. The majority of members are women. In Taiwan, Tzu Chi’s membership includes the rich and the poor, but overseas they tend to be middle- or upper-class, which reflects the economic background of overseas Taiwanese immigrants. Leading donors are also upper- or middle-class Taiwanese Americans. Taiwanese and Mandarin are the two most frequently used languages among members.

Tzu Chi’s New York efforts began in 1990 with a group of about 40 Taiwanese American housewives who met in the homes of interested members in Bayside, Queens. The gathering was based on the idea of the ‘love-spreading tea party’, led by Yufen Chiou, a senior Taiwanese immigrant merchant in Shanghai, who was visiting her sister living in Bayside.⁷ The love-spreading tea party (Ai-Sa Chahui) has become a classic Tzu Chi function and a typical Tzu Chi outreach activity. Mrs Tzu-ding Kang, a convert to Buddhism who turned to the religion in the face of family problems, and who was later appointed as the first executive director of Tzu Chi New York, told me how she first got involved in the organization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Contexts
• Part II Debates
• Index