yin and yang, secular and religious, and other nonoppositionals
This has been a multi-part weekend in mime format, with the result that I have kind of lost track of when is what and the backwards and forwards of any given item, so there is going to be a little bit of fragmentation going on while I search for the essential narrative quality that surely underlies it all, plus try to get some sleep after several consecutive days of talking into the wee hours. Please bear with; and be warned that digressions outnumber actual narrative by a ratio of quite a bit.
Friday was a wonderful evening spent in Jennifer’s bar, talking to my friend Tiffany (her taken, not given, name, obviously—I figure English versions are easier for non-Chinese speakers to keep track of, and are also pseudonyms of sorts) and stealing food from Canadians (J’s Place was hosting a bar-b-q for some Canadian expat group, and I was very hungry). I was asking Tiffany about where people go to pray in The Neighborhood I study (aside from being one of my best friends here and a professor in landscape and urban studies—loose translation—she is also a resident of The Neighborhood and one of the early participants in the protest movements there.) The Neighborhood has about three small temples within about five minutes’ walking distance of one another; about ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away is Longshan Si, one of the oldest, biggest, and most important temples in Taipei. People come from all over the city to pray here. (It was also the site of a lot of early democracy movement events, meetings and speeches that were held in the courtyard in front of the front gates; it’s been called “democracy’s birthplace.”) Tiffany drew the distinguishing line at native place: people who grew up in the area tend to pray at the local Neighborhood temples, while the majority, who moved in around the late 1970s-early 1980s, go to Longshan.[i] A propos of the relation between the religious and secular spheres, she also told me a nice story about the newly appointed District Head of that area and his newly built District Administration Building.
The District Administration Building has been under construction for over ten years now, and one of the reasons that it’s been taking so long was that nobody, no District Head, had dared to use it. The Administration Building, which was going to be very tall, was being built, for whatever reason, just a little ways away from, and looking down onto, Longshan Temple. Worse yet, the District Head’s office itself directly faces the temple gates from above, a “very disrespectful” position. This newly appointed District Head, whom Tiffany happens to know pretty well from her student days, is a very devout Buddhist who has been “reading Buddhism,” practicing seriously, for decades. When he first got the appointment, the building hadn’t ever been used. He first “cleaned out the building,” getting rid of over 80 “unclean things”—ie he had it exorcised—and then held a ceremony in his office, in which he offered his respects to the main god of the temple, the Guanyin Buddha. Now, he told Tiffany, when he goes in to work every morning, the first thing he does is face the temple and read a sutra.
The stand-alone temples in The Neighborhood are relatively small affairs (there’s at least one altar in an open room of whose status I am uncertain—I don’t think it’s a full blown temple). The two smaller ones have just one room with a big altar and a place to burn incense, lay offerings, and kneel. The biggest one includes not only two temple rooms housing gods, but a little courtyard complete with a betel nut and soda stand at the edge, and bounded by a pretty decent sized stage at the other end. This space is used for things like hanging out (all the time), traditional Taiwanese opera performances (during ghost month), banquets in the courtyard with karaoke on the stage (on gods’ birthdays and other important feast days), and political speeches (for instance, when I went to the Cultural Association meeting a couple of weeks ago, I caught everyone just as they were heading out to the temple courtyard to listen to a DPP city councilor talk about what a farce the whole KMT investigation into the alleged fakedness of the assassination attempt on the President and Vice-President was). They also, it turned out when we went to ascertain the next day, are all yinmiao, temples of the dark, or at least the somewhat darker, side.
Yinmiao (as in yin, the dark, lunar, feminine opposite of yang, the bright, solar, masculine; and miao, temple) have been explained to me in a couple of ways. On the one hand their yinity can have to do with the origin of the god(s) that occupy them: these temples are usually not official offshoots of other temples, opened with the normal ceremonies of transferring some god and some incense to the new temple and asking the god’s spirit to come reside there. Rather, they are found-god assemblages occupied by gods that are usually fished out of the river or otherwise found in some not altogether wholesome state. (Gods fished out of the river, for instance, haven’t had their eyes covered while they’ve been wandering about, and so might be occupied by all manner of thing.) On the other hand, Tiffany described it as a function of the scope of their responsibilities: yin gods are the ones to pray to for things like revenge, and for winning the lottery. “Guanyin Buddha is not going to help you suddenly get rich, that’s not the sort of thing she’s interested in; for that you have to go to an yinmiao,” says Tiffany. She says there was an explosion of yinmiao in the early eighties, with the introduction of the national lottery.
On Saturday afternoon I tagged along while Tiffany went to visit a neighborhood in northern Taipei. The next day she was supposed to participate, in her capacity as urban studies scholar and neighborhood activism expert, in a little roundtable there to discuss potential neighborhood projects; she wanted to check the place out first. The neighborhood has two points of interest: its temple and its dragon boats, which are carved by an elderly resident for the summer dragon boat races down the river.
[i] Everyone in The Neighborhood, and in my experience most people in Wanhua, the district in which The Neighborhood is located, will tell you that, since this is the oldest settled section of Taipei, it has seen the most movement and change; most people who live there are migrants. In The Neighborhood, at least, they are mostly people from southern and central Taiwan (中南部 zhongnan bu, how we talk about the rest of the country, more or less) who came between around 1975 and 1985. Aside from some city government administrators who have worked with Wanhua neighborhoods directly, almost every other non-Wanhua resident I’ve talked to about the district has told me that, because it’s the oldest settled section of Taipei, it is mostly populated by permanent, multi-generational, non-migrant residents.
dragon boat from afar
Friday was a wonderful evening spent in Jennifer’s bar, talking to my friend Tiffany (her taken, not given, name, obviously—I figure English versions are easier for non-Chinese speakers to keep track of, and are also pseudonyms of sorts) and stealing food from Canadians (J’s Place was hosting a bar-b-q for some Canadian expat group, and I was very hungry). I was asking Tiffany about where people go to pray in The Neighborhood I study (aside from being one of my best friends here and a professor in landscape and urban studies—loose translation—she is also a resident of The Neighborhood and one of the early participants in the protest movements there.) The Neighborhood has about three small temples within about five minutes’ walking distance of one another; about ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away is Longshan Si, one of the oldest, biggest, and most important temples in Taipei. People come from all over the city to pray here. (It was also the site of a lot of early democracy movement events, meetings and speeches that were held in the courtyard in front of the front gates; it’s been called “democracy’s birthplace.”) Tiffany drew the distinguishing line at native place: people who grew up in the area tend to pray at the local Neighborhood temples, while the majority, who moved in around the late 1970s-early 1980s, go to Longshan.[i] A propos of the relation between the religious and secular spheres, she also told me a nice story about the newly appointed District Head of that area and his newly built District Administration Building.
The District Administration Building has been under construction for over ten years now, and one of the reasons that it’s been taking so long was that nobody, no District Head, had dared to use it. The Administration Building, which was going to be very tall, was being built, for whatever reason, just a little ways away from, and looking down onto, Longshan Temple. Worse yet, the District Head’s office itself directly faces the temple gates from above, a “very disrespectful” position. This newly appointed District Head, whom Tiffany happens to know pretty well from her student days, is a very devout Buddhist who has been “reading Buddhism,” practicing seriously, for decades. When he first got the appointment, the building hadn’t ever been used. He first “cleaned out the building,” getting rid of over 80 “unclean things”—ie he had it exorcised—and then held a ceremony in his office, in which he offered his respects to the main god of the temple, the Guanyin Buddha. Now, he told Tiffany, when he goes in to work every morning, the first thing he does is face the temple and read a sutra.
The stand-alone temples in The Neighborhood are relatively small affairs (there’s at least one altar in an open room of whose status I am uncertain—I don’t think it’s a full blown temple). The two smaller ones have just one room with a big altar and a place to burn incense, lay offerings, and kneel. The biggest one includes not only two temple rooms housing gods, but a little courtyard complete with a betel nut and soda stand at the edge, and bounded by a pretty decent sized stage at the other end. This space is used for things like hanging out (all the time), traditional Taiwanese opera performances (during ghost month), banquets in the courtyard with karaoke on the stage (on gods’ birthdays and other important feast days), and political speeches (for instance, when I went to the Cultural Association meeting a couple of weeks ago, I caught everyone just as they were heading out to the temple courtyard to listen to a DPP city councilor talk about what a farce the whole KMT investigation into the alleged fakedness of the assassination attempt on the President and Vice-President was). They also, it turned out when we went to ascertain the next day, are all yinmiao, temples of the dark, or at least the somewhat darker, side.
Yinmiao (as in yin, the dark, lunar, feminine opposite of yang, the bright, solar, masculine; and miao, temple) have been explained to me in a couple of ways. On the one hand their yinity can have to do with the origin of the god(s) that occupy them: these temples are usually not official offshoots of other temples, opened with the normal ceremonies of transferring some god and some incense to the new temple and asking the god’s spirit to come reside there. Rather, they are found-god assemblages occupied by gods that are usually fished out of the river or otherwise found in some not altogether wholesome state. (Gods fished out of the river, for instance, haven’t had their eyes covered while they’ve been wandering about, and so might be occupied by all manner of thing.) On the other hand, Tiffany described it as a function of the scope of their responsibilities: yin gods are the ones to pray to for things like revenge, and for winning the lottery. “Guanyin Buddha is not going to help you suddenly get rich, that’s not the sort of thing she’s interested in; for that you have to go to an yinmiao,” says Tiffany. She says there was an explosion of yinmiao in the early eighties, with the introduction of the national lottery.
On Saturday afternoon I tagged along while Tiffany went to visit a neighborhood in northern Taipei. The next day she was supposed to participate, in her capacity as urban studies scholar and neighborhood activism expert, in a little roundtable there to discuss potential neighborhood projects; she wanted to check the place out first. The neighborhood has two points of interest: its temple and its dragon boats, which are carved by an elderly resident for the summer dragon boat races down the river.
[i] Everyone in The Neighborhood, and in my experience most people in Wanhua, the district in which The Neighborhood is located, will tell you that, since this is the oldest settled section of Taipei, it has seen the most movement and change; most people who live there are migrants. In The Neighborhood, at least, they are mostly people from southern and central Taiwan (中南部 zhongnan bu, how we talk about the rest of the country, more or less) who came between around 1975 and 1985. Aside from some city government administrators who have worked with Wanhua neighborhoods directly, almost every other non-Wanhua resident I’ve talked to about the district has told me that, because it’s the oldest settled section of Taipei, it is mostly populated by permanent, multi-generational, non-migrant residents.
dragon boat from afar
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