The Place of Chinese Religion in the Contemporary Period in North America
By Lyren Chiu
For Laurence Thompson (1975), Chinese religion is a singular rather than a plural term. He used "Chinese religion" to convey his interpretation of the character of religious expression in Chinese as a manifestation of Chinese culture. The Chinese worldview (religion) has been influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, and having originated from Dao, it is expressed in three important philosophical concepts: chi (material or vital force), yin and yang, and wu-hsing. God is not transcendent or separate from the world and heaven is not outside of the universe for humans to want to go for refuge.
Thompson points out that "Even the impact of Buddhism failed to change materially the fundamental Chinese outlook. Instead, after a thousand years, Buddhism itself was largely accommodated to these ingrained views." By this, he describes the unchanging nature of the Chinese worldview and accordingly, suggests that the Chinese worldview and its manifestation in culture are generally a reflection of Chinese characteristics from the past two thousand years. He believes that the developments of the contemporary period can only be understood in relation to traditional religion; and that traditional religion is still very lively. Extending from Thompson's assumption of the unchanging nature of the Chinese worldview, the Chinese are thus assumed to preserve their traditional worldview even as acculturation occurs in North America.
Although a number of interesting studies have appeared on Chinese religions in North America, a general ignorance about Chinese religions in America is found and the direct application of Western schemes and labels to the study of Chinese religion in North America is problematic. Chinese religions are not represented solely by "joss houses," not merely characterized by ancestor worship in private homes, and not adequately defined by the European-American encounters with them. Rather, the religious experience of Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans must take into account the perspective of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans themselves. Situating new and unfamiliar religious groups in today's categorical schemes leads to a biased understanding of the new culture. For example, Charles Prebish (1979) uses the term "American Buddhism" to describe the struggle of a foreign religious tradition to acculturate and accommodate to the American mindset. Nevertheless, Prebish neglects to consider the Buddhism of Asian-Americans. To bring their experience into his framework, one would need to develop new labels and expand the perimeter of the term "acculturation of Buddhism" to account for the Buddhist experiences of the Asian-Americans.
Chinese religion in North America is characterized by the superposition of the two culturally differentiating factors: non-European heritage and non-Judeo-Christian belief. Therefore, the Chinese religion should be separately studied and the study of Chinese religion should be distinguished in methodology.
Empirical Studies
Traditionally, religion has been an important source of cultural ideals, and provides images, rituals, and symbols for linking the individual to a larger reality (McGuire, 1993). My previous studies of spirituality and spiritual resources with Chinese in Taiwan and in the US demonstrate that Chinese religion is a salient medium for Chinese women with breast cancer, who create meaning through religion and then go beyond to link with a larger reality (Chiu, 2000, 2001). The US study included Chinese women from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and the majority of the informants were Taiwanese immigrants. The results reveal six cultural themes in spiritual resource, including family closeness, traditional Chinese values, religion, alternative therapy, art, prose, and literature, as well as Chinese support groups.
Spiritual resource is multi-dimensional and involves values and belief, systems and culture, and a variety of activities and people. The Chinese women gained spiritual strength and support in their connectedness with their families. They consciously and unconsciously anchored themselves in their culture values that provided spiritual strength and power of interpretation to their health and illness and their current situations. Regardless of the resources that were available, each woman respected her religion as a source for their spirituality. Extending from their cultural beliefs, the Chinese women found hope and strength in a wide variety of alternative therapies and inspiration from art, prose, and Chinese literature. The women also found strength in breast cancer support groups where members could not only exchange information about breast cancer, but also speak in their native language and share their cultural values and stories.
Discussion: Issues Related to Immigration Integration
1. Spiritual Resource among Three Chinese groups
One of biggest challenges in conducting this research in the US was the recruitment of informants. Statistics on Chinese immigrants with breast cancer have not been reported and limited services exist that can directly access Chinese immigrants with breast cancer.
Chinese immigrants, especially those from China, tend to feel ashamed about having breast cancer and often refuse to contact any outside services. The lack of a valid gatekeeper and trusting relationships with Chinese women from China creates limitations when comparing spiritual resources among the three Chinese sub-groups. In this study, the women from Hong Kong also tended to be conservative and limited their resource in their family and cultural tradition.
2. Spiritual Resource Person
The findings revealed that the majority of informants obtain spiritual strength from their family and friends. Members of the clergy and their Chinese churches are also spiritual resources. Comparing these findings with those of Sodestrom & Martinson (1987), where the sample had a higher rate of using the clergy and health care professionals, informants in this study did not report a heavy reliance on the clergy and health care professionals as spiritual resources. This pattern may be explained by the nature of the Chinese culture in problem-solving, when individuals seldom go outside of their families to seek assistance or connections (Suen & Ng, 1986).
3. Is Confucianism outdated?
Chinese culture has been dominated by Confucianism for over two-thousand years. Confucius, a scholar, teacher and philosopher, lived from 551 to 479 BC. He expounded the virtues of filial piety, loyalty, social decorum, humility, obedience and self-awareness. His ideal, "the Perfect Man," as opposed to "Every man," epitomized all virtues that are attainable by human nature.
The teachings of Confucius were collected and compiled by his disciples and had profound influences on politics, education, music, art, customs and beliefs. He expressed no specific religious beliefs but only vaguely referred to the presence of a supernatural power as "Heaven." He saw ancestral worship as an acceptable and important ritual.
Overall, Confucian teachings provide a structured, hierarchical life system that can lead to a peaceful and orderly society (Suen & Ng, 1986), though these concepts are not necessarily in accord with current values and practices.
Many of the informants in this study indicated that, for them, Confucianism was outdated and had no relationship with their spirituality. Nevertheless, some informants would rather see Confucianism to evolve with Buddhism or modernity. This idea is in accord with one of the foremost authorities on Neo-Confucianism, Professor Wei-ming Tu (1984), who views the continuing expanding aspects of Confucianism as reflecting on modernity in Confucianism, and regards Confucianism as a religious belief and the personal quest of a reflective human being.
For women in Taiwan, Confucianism is still an important ideology (Chiu, 2000). In the experience of the women living with breast cancer in Taiwan, they seem to always work with accepted images of the feminine and the "perfect person", as defined by the culture, even as they attempt to create their personal alternate reality.
4. Religion Shift
Compared with the Taiwanese sample in Chiu's (2000) study, where 60 percent of informants were either Buddhist or Taoist, the informants in this study had a greater religious preference for Christianity or Catholicism (67 percent). Informants generally have either compromised or adopted a new belief about the new society or utilized available spiritual resources for the new society. Some informants were Christian before immigrating to the US.
5. Chinese Support Groups in the US
A majority of informants indicated that they benefited greatly from involvement in Chinese breast cancer support groups, where they were able to use their native language to share information and obtain spiritual support. Not until 1991, however, was a Chinese cancer society established in the US. Chinese breast cancer support groups are only found in some Chinese aggregate places such as New York City or San Francisco. Chinese immigrants who reside in other areas of the US may find difficulties in obtaining group support. Since the Chinese tend to look for assistance inside of their families or communities, Chinese breast cancer support groups may be valuable resources for them to better cope with cancer.
6. Is There Some Sort of Institutionalizing Social Relations to Create and Maintain Religious Ideologies?
In this study, no indications suggest that the informants related to any Chinese religious organizations in the US. Some related to their religious places when the women visit their homeland. In the review (Irene Lin, 1999) of the His Lai Temple project, the temple is a typical example that institutionalizes social relations to create and maintain religious and cultural ideologies. Furthermore, Lin's interpretation captures the heart of acculturation of Chinese religion.
The His Lai Temple in Southern California is the largest overseas branch of the Fo Kuang Shan in Taiwan, which was founded in 1967 by Master Hsing-yun and is the largest Buddhist centre in Taiwan. The stated goals of the His Lai is threefold: to offer a spiritual and cultural centre for the US; to provide Westerners a place for learning about the dharma; and to facilitate the exchange of culture between East and West. The temple provides not only a place of worship but also a forum for lectures, discussions, classes, communal rituals, and other Buddhist services and activities. Communal practices and other activities are conducted in Mandarin Chinese, with simultaneous English translation for most occasions, especially for childhood immigrants and second-generation Chinese-Americans.
Apart from being a religious organization, the His Lai Temple serves as a community center helping Chinese immigrants cope with American society. To preserve, strengthen, and even create the Chinese identity of its members, the His Lai Temple offers Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Cantonese classes, mainly to childhood immigrant and second-generation Chinese-Americans.
Much of the His Lai Temple's success can be attributed to its ability to retain cultural continuity with Taiwan while at the same time modifying its social base to accommodate American culture. By providing a community that is accepted by the American public, and the world at large, as well as being home to the Chinese-American Buddhists through its plausibility superstructure, the temple makes its members feel at ease with their unique identity and worldview. At the same time, the temple makes it easier for the members to confirm the reality of their world.
7. Social Policy Issues
In the US, the 1965 constitutional amendments abolished the 1924 discriminatory national origins provision, which was retained in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, favoring immigrants of Western European origins. The subsequent series of amendments of the 1952 act in 1990, collectively referred to as the Immigration Act of 1990, provides for an overall increase in worldwide immigration. The 1990 act increases the allocation for both family-related and employee-related immigration and further creates a separate basis by which "diversity" immigrants can enter the US.
From 1965 to 1990, the Chinese-American population increased by about four-and-a-half times, driven primarily by immigration. The heterogeneity characterizing Chinese immigration since 1965 resulted in a proliferation of Chinese religious organizations in the US (Lin, 1999). Several worldwide Chinese religious organizations were founded after 1965 and should be studied for their provision of the context for post-1965 Chinese-Americans in constructing their cultural identity. Examples of these organizations include the His Lai Temple, the Buddhist Tsu-Chi Association of America, and the Falun Gong, which has ancient historical roots in Buddhism and Taoism.
Conclusion-Comments
Chinese religion is a manifestation of Chinese culture, involving cultural identity and ideology. Chinese religion has been acculturated through immigration and integration. In the US, no single Chinese identity is present for the world of the Chinese diaspora (Lin, 1999). The term "Chinese-American" is both a political label and a symbolic identity (Tu, 1994). Although the second-generation Chinese-Americans are not studied here, the old concept of ethnicity based on the assumption of "bio-cultural-territorial isolate frame of reference" is no longer applicable to the overseas Chinese in diasppora who have come to the US from different parts of the world. More applicable to these overseas Chinese is the concept of new ethnicity - "an effective/symbolic and behavioral strategy frame of reference, which is contingent upon the larger social environmental context (cited in Lin, p148)." "New ethnicity" represents an effort by ethnic minorities to balance the need for a sense of belonging with the desire to "alter the established distribution of power, privilege and prestige so as to gain economic, political, and cultural rights/advantages (p.148)."
Because religious systems may compensate for the loss of native culture, immigrant communities often reinscribe aspects of older traditions in their new context. In the case of post-1965 Chinese-Americans with nostalgia for Chinese roots, the His Lai Temple provides an instance of religion reviving, self-understanding and constructing Chinese culture and identity. From my empirical studies, Chinese are implied to be ready to give some of traditional values and religious beliefs and take multi-cultural resources from the host country or learn from other cultures by retrofitting aspects of that culture into their own.
In summary, the place of Chinese religion in North America should not only be understood within the proliferating religious organizations (the social base), but also in Chinese-American's efforts in constructing a new ethnicity and revitalizing the Chinese worldview in the dominant culture. Following the tendency of the Chinese people and Chinese culture that has been "constantly amalgamating, restructuring, reinventing and reinterpreting themselves," overseas Chinese have been constructing their own cultural identities in non-Chinese environments.
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