Buddhist Responses to Christianity in Postwar Taiwan: Awakening the World by Scott Pacey (review)

Abstract

Buddhist Responses to Christianity in Postwar Taiwan is the latest contribution to positioning Chinese Buddhism in a multicultural context through examining a period of interaction with other traditions.1 This book unveils one intriguing facet of the intricacy between religion and secularism in China during the early twentieth century. Pacey has a specific and carefully chosen niche: Buddhism and Christianity in Taiwan between 1955 and 1975. Although all Christian missionaries left the People’s Republic of China after 1949, interfaith engagement continued in Taiwan under the Nationalist regime (Guomindang 國民黨, KMT). Pacey states that his primary interest is to write a historiography of religion in context. His book examines “how contact with Christianity led certain Buddhists to reassess their identity within an overarching normative framework of values dominated by the KMT” (p. 53). And it explores “the idea that religious identity is . . . also a selfrepresentation that emerges in the process of interfaith competition with reference to particular external values” (p. 53). In his conclusion chapter, Pacey recaps that “religious identity grows not only out of religious values and beliefs, but within a context of interfaith competition, power-relations, and the aspiration towards external value-sets” (p. 214). Buddhism in Taiwan, Pacey writes, “thus bears the imprint of its engagement with Christianity in the middle of the twentieth century”: the influence of Christianity is “seen in contemporary Buddhist selfconceptualizations, as well as the Buddhist hospitals, universities, and media—of today” (p. 15). Pacey writes about a “small and inter-connected group of Buddhist figures” (p. 51) influenced by Taixu 太虛 (1890–1974), including Yinshun 印順 (1906–2005), Zhuyun 煮雲 (1919–1986), Dongchu 東初