Chapter 16: Every tradition: services and what they need · Part 9
Chinese religion
Chinese folk temple
A Chinese community temple (miao) to a patron god, here Mazu, the Holy Mother in Heaven and goddess of the sea (others honour Guan Di or Beidi), with Guanyin, Guan Di, the earth god and the year's Tai Sui on side altars. It isn't a denomination or a congregation: it's Chinese popular religion, mixing Daoist, Buddhist and ancestral rites, and most who light incense there wouldn't name it as their religion. There's no weekly service in the Christian sense. The doors are open every day, and people come alone or as a family to bow at the great censer and before each altar, ask the god a question with the moon blocks and fortune sticks, buy incense, paper and charms, and burn paper money in the furnace; more come on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month and on Sundays. There's no weekly gathering to hold: the temple's week is its open hours, and its rites are its great days', when volunteers chant the god's scripture before the altar. A few days are enormous: Lunar New Year's Eve, when crowds press in at midnight to plant the first incense, the god's birthday, and the Ghost Festival. Ceremonies follow lunar dates and are held on the nearest Sunday. The money comes per service rather than by pledge: lamps of brightness renewed each New Year ($30), Tai Sui protection ($20), fortune readings, memorial tablets at the Ghost Festival, and the box. The player is the temple's board (an association or the temple's own nonprofit, with a chair); there are no resident clergy. A keeper opens the doors and tends the incense and lamps, volunteers chant and cook, and Daoist priests are hired for rites and funerals, which are mostly held at funeral homes. The temple as written is modelled on Ma-Tsu Temple of U.S.A. in San Francisco, a Taiwanese temple with a division of incense from Beigang. Its variants are a Chinatown association temple, on the top floor of a district or clan association's building, and a Fujianese village temple in a storefront, whose members are villagers from home and whose leaders take turns. Practice varies from temple to temple; much here is unverified and awaits a consultant.
1 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Daoist temple
Daoism is China's own organised religion, with its scriptures, its gods (the Three Pure Ones, the Jade Emperor, Lü Dongbin) and a priesthood of two orders: Zhengyi priests, who marry and live at home, and Quanzhen monastics, celibate and vegetarian. A Daoist temple with ordained priests barely exists in America as a local congregation. Daoist priests here are mostly ritual specialists hired by Chinese families and folk temples for funerals and great rites; the Western side of American Daoism is chiefly tai chi. The temple as written follows the pattern of the Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism and its Taoist Tai Chi Society, by far the largest body: tai chi classes several times a week are the gathering and the way nearly everyone comes in, taught by unpaid volunteer instructors; most who come do so for their health and never look at the altar, and a few stay on for the chanting, which is held on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month and at the festivals of the Daoist year (the Three Officials' days, All Souls, Lord Lao's festival). The Institute is a central international body: it holds the property, accredits the instructors and keeps the set as its own, and its branches are run by volunteers. Here a priest leads the rites the temple offers: memorial plaques for the dead in its memorial hall and rites at funerals, for fees. Members are mostly Western converts, with Chinese families among them. Its variant is a priest's temple serving Chinese families: a Zhengyi priest, ordained by register after an apprenticeship (often to a father or uncle), whose temple is open daily for incense and lives on the rites for the dead, merit rites, Tai Sui and lamps, and the yearly ceremonies. How far the Fung Loy Kok pattern fits any temple with priests is uncertain, and both forms are drafts for a consultant to correct.
1 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Yiguandao (I-Kuan Tao)
Yiguandao, "the Way of Unity", teaches that the Eternal Venerable Mother (Wuji Laomu) is calling her lost children home in the last age, that the Way behind Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam is one, and that receiving it now registers a soul in heaven. Banned in Taiwan for thirty-five years and legal since 1987, it is now one of Taiwan's largest religions, organised in some eighteen lineages, each answering up its own line to Taiwan; it is not a Buddhist temple, though Maitreya and Guanyin sit on its altars. This is a public hall of the Fa Yi Chong De lineage, the one best documented in America (its Los Angeles temple in El Monte, its Flushing centre): around it are many family altars in members' homes, each a shrine room with the Mother lamp, opened by a master when a household agrees to cook no more meat. One belongs by initiation (qiudao): brought by an introducer and vouched for by a guarantor, the seeker receives the Three Treasures from a transmitting master. Many are initiated, often at first contact, and most never come back; a few go on to the two-day classes, the vows, lecturing, an altar of their own, and mastership. Everyone is lay and unpaid: masters are appointed up the lineage, not elected, and fund the hall rather than drawing a salary; no one is asked for money. The week is a Sunday class on the Tao with a short rite before the Mother lamp and a free vegetarian lunch, with incense offered morning and evening; the year is the four Grand Ceremonies to the Mother and the patriarchs' days. Men and women sit apart. Everything at the hall is vegetarian, with no alcohol or tobacco; those who take the vow of the clean mouth also give up onion, garlic and the other pungent plants, and the hall's kitchen keeps to it. How American halls set their holy days, and how many there are, is unverified.
2 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →