Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990

Examines the institutional and political history of Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan. The text seeks to shed light on the ways in which changing social circumstances have impacted Buddhist thought and practice and it traces Buddhism's development on the island from Qing times through to the late 1980s. It looks in particular at a number of significant changes that modernization had brought: the decline in clerical ordinations; the increasing prominence of nuns within the monastic order; the enhanced role of the laity; alterations in the contents of lay precepts; and the founding or large, international organizations.