Moral education in practice: Taiwanese Buddhist short-term renunciation

Project Description:

Every year tens of thousands of Taiwanese men and women enter Buddhist monasteries to take part in ‘short-term renunciation’ programmes in which they live as monastics for a period of between 24 hours and three weeks. Temporary ordination is very common in some South East Asian Buddhist traditions and there are precedents for lay Chinese Buddhists taking temporary vows at home. However, the attempt by Taiwanese Buddhist organisations to reform the ethical life of the nation through mass participation in monastic asceticism has emerged only over the past fifteen years, and it is something quite new in terms of its form, ambition and scale. The purpose of the programmes is to introduce the participants to monastic life in order to encourage them to form habits in their ordinary lives that will promote the Buddhist virtues of mindfulness and compassion. This project will use interviews and participant-observation to produce an account of the programmes and of the way in which short-term renunciation is experienced by those taking part.