Taiwan

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Taiwan is an island in East Asia whose Buddhist history has been shaped by three successive and sharply distinct political regimes: Qing-dynasty rule following Han Chinese settlement (1683–1895), Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), and the Republic of China under the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT), which imposed martial law from 1949 until 1987 before giving way to a pluralistic, democratic society. Each regime change reconfigured the island's Buddhist institutions and their relationship to political authority. Radical Buddhism, understood as a sustained fusion of Buddhist thought with left-wing or anti-colonial politics, appears only rarely in this history, and is concentrated in two windows: the Japanese colonial period, epitomized by the monk-activist Lin Qiuwu (林秋梧, 1903–1934), who combined Marxist historical materialism with Mahāyāna philosophy and Taiwanese anti-colonial sentiment; and the years after the 1987 lifting of martial law, when more politically and socially engaged strands of "Buddhism in the human realm" (人間佛教, renjian fojiao) re-emerged and rediscovered Lin as a precursor.

Buddhism in Taiwan

Chinese Buddhism arrived in Taiwan with Han Chinese settlers from Fujian province after the Qing court took control of the island in 1683. Monastic ordination lineages traced their authority back to Gushan Yongquan Temple (鼓山湧泉寺) near Fuzhou, and this mainland connection persisted, largely uninterrupted, into the twentieth century. Alongside this "orthodox" monastic Buddhism, much of the island's popular Buddhist religiosity took the form of lay vegetarian sects (zhaijiao, 齋教) — chiefly the Longhua (龍華), Jinchuang (金幢), and Xiantian (先天) sects — which descended from the Ming-dynasty Luo Teaching (羅教) and combined Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and folk elements around a mythology of a creator-goddess, the "Unborn Venerable Mother." Organized around vegetarian halls (zhaitang) rather than monasteries and led by lay masters rather than tonsured clergy, these sects considered themselves authentically Buddhist, even as outside observers, Qing and Japanese alike, classed them separately.

Japan's acquisition of Taiwan after the First Sino-Japanese War (1895) brought a second wave of institution-building, as Japanese Buddhist sects arrived alongside the colonial administration. The Sōtō (曹洞宗) lineage was first to establish a foothold, conferring precepts and founding the Taiwan Buddhist Middle School (1916) in Taipei; the Rinzai (臨濟宗) lineage's Myōshinji branch made Kaiyuan Temple (開元寺) in Tainan its southern headquarters after 1915, following the suppression of the anti-colonial Xilai'an Incident; and the Jōdo and Jōdo Shinshū Pure Land lineages eventually built thirty-seven branches across the island, emphasizing lay education, youth programs, and missionary work among Taiwan's aboriginal population. In 1921–1922 the colonial government sponsored the island-wide South Seas Buddhist Association (南瀛佛教會, SSBA) as a liaison body between Japanese and Taiwanese Buddhists, which ran lecture programs aimed at eliminating "superstitious" practice. A growing number of Taiwanese monastics, and eventually nuns as well, were sent to study in Japan, most prominently at the Sōtō-affiliated Komazawa University under the modernist scholar-priest Nukariya Kaiten (忽滑谷快天), producing a generation of reform-minded clergy that included Lin Qiuwu. After the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Japanization (kōminka) movement and an accompanying Temple Rectification Movement intensified pressure on local religious practice, folding many remaining Taiwanese temples directly into Japanese sectarian structures.

Taiwan's retrocession to Chinese rule in 1945, and especially the Nationalist government's retreat to the island in 1949, brought a third reconfiguration. Two waves of mainland clergy arrived: ordinary refugee monks and nuns, and a smaller group of well-connected mainland BAROC (Buddhist Association of the Republic of China, 中國佛教會) functionaries who quickly took over confiscated Japanese temple properties and reconstituted the BAROC as the sole officially sanctioned Buddhist body, marginalizing native Taiwanese clergy in the process. Under martial law (1949–1987), the BAROC's conservative, traditionalist leadership held a near-monopoly on ordination and religious legitimacy; a 1953–1954 controversy over the reformist scholar-monk Yinshun (印順, 1906–2005), whose critical study of Pure Land practice drew organized condemnation from BAROC branches, illustrates the limits placed on doctrinal or institutional dissent during this period. Despite this, Yinshun's reformulation of Taixu's "Buddhism for Human Life" as "Buddhism in the Human Realm" (人間佛教, renjian fojiao) — a this-worldly, welfare-oriented Buddhism focused on the affairs of the living rather than funerary ritual or postmortem rebirth — gradually gained wide acceptance and became the dominant idiom of mainstream Taiwanese Buddhism.

Large-scale Buddhist organizations independent of BAROC control had in fact begun to form somewhat earlier, notably the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (慈濟, founded by the nun Zhengyan 證嚴 in 1966) and Fo Guang Shan (佛光山, founded by Xingyun 星雲 in 1967), joined later by Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山, founded by Shengyan 聖嚴). It was only after the 1987 lifting of martial law, however, that these organizations were able to expand freely and come to dominate Taiwanese Buddhism's public profile. International in reach and oriented toward education, disaster relief, and social welfare under the banner of renjian fojiao, they have generally kept a deliberate distance from politics; Tzu Chi in particular discourages its members from political activity.

Radical Buddhism in Taiwan

Explicitly left-wing or anti-colonial currents within Taiwanese Buddhism are historically rare, and the conditions that made them possible existed only briefly. Under Qing rule, no comparable synthesis had reason to emerge, since organized Marxist and socialist thought had not yet reached the island. The most fertile period was the Japanese colonial era, when rising Taiwanese cultural and political nationalism — expressed through bodies such as the Taiwan Cultural Association (臺灣文化協會, founded 1921) — intersected with Marxist, anarchist, and socialist ideas circulating among Taiwanese students in Japan and mainland China. Beyond Lin Qiuwu, the clearest evidence of Buddhist sympathy for Marxist social ideals in this period is a 1925 speech by the eminent monk Shanhui (善慧, 1881–1945) to Taixu's East Asian Buddhist Conference in Tokyo, in which Shanhui praised the egalitarian society promised by Marxism and proposed Buddhism as a nonviolent means of achieving it; unlike Lin's sustained doctrinal synthesis, however, Shanhui's remarks amounted to little more than an acknowledgment of Marxism's contemporary appeal.

Lin Qiuwu

➣ Main article: Lin Qiuwu

Lin Qiuwu, ordained as the monk Zhengfeng (證峰) in 1927, was Taiwan's most significant radical Buddhist figure and remains its principal claim to a place in the history of Buddhist Marxism. A student of the modernist Sōtō priest Nukariya Kaiten at Komazawa University, Lin argued that the Pure Land should be understood not as a realm to be reached after death but as a classless society to be built in this world through non-violent class struggle, and that bodhisattva compassion demanded immediate, this-worldly social action rather than deferral to a future life of supernatural power. His most philosophically ambitious contribution was a doctrine of the unity of all beings in a single "one Buddha" (一佛), which he used to explain the origin of class society itself in a delusive, dualistic view of the self. Lin combined this synthesis with practical activism: political organizing, journalism, campaigns against "superstitious" ritual, and advocacy for women's equality. He died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of thirty-two, only seven years after his ordination.

Martial Law (1949-1989)

After 1949, the KMT's imposition of martial law and the accompanying "White Terror" foreclosed nearly all Marxist or left-wing political activity on the island, Buddhist or otherwise, for four decades, and the conservative, mainlander-dominated BAROC had neither the interest nor the latitude to entertain social radicalism. The large lay organizations that expanded rapidly after 1987, chiefly Tzu Chi and Fo Guang Shan, remained wedded to a charitable, apolitical model of renjian fojiao that treated welfare work and personal cultivation as sufficient ends in themselves.

Buddhist Activism in the Early 1990s

A distinct and explicitly political current emerged in the early 1990s in direct reaction against this quietism. Its mouthpiece was the journal Buddhist Culture (佛教文化), founded around 1990 and edited by Li Zhenglong (李政隆), whose opening editorials argued that Tzu Chi-style charity work was insufficient and that Buddhists should instead engage actively with environmental protection, socioeconomic reform, and cultural change. Li explicitly held up the social engagement he saw in Christianity, to which he himself converted a few years later, as a model Buddhism had failed to match. In a symposium reported in that journal, the philosopher Yang Huinan (楊惠南) — who also produced the standard scholarly study of Lin Qiuwu's "one Buddha" thought — distinguished this "organic" model of liberation, attentive to the interdependence of sentient beings and requiring state action, from the "mechanical," individually focused model he associated with organizations such as Tzu Chi. It was in the pages of this same journal, and in Yang's academic writing, that the nearly forgotten Lin Qiuwu was rediscovered and presented as a precedent for a genuinely socially and politically engaged Buddhism, in contrast to the charitable but non-political mainstream. The movement proved short-lived, and no comparably explicit fusion of Buddhism with left-wing politics has since taken hold in Taiwan on a comparable scale.

Literature in English

• Brons, Lajos (2022). A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism. punctum books, pp. 88–96. [A recent, freely available open-access study that situates Lin Qiuwu within a comparative history of Buddhist Pure Land utopianism across East Asia and traces the post-1987 revival of activist "human realm Buddhism" in the journal Buddhist Culture.]
• Lin, Pei-ying (2020). "A Survey of the Japanese Influence on Buddhist Education in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895–1945)". Religions 11.2: 61. [An open-access survey of the Sōtō, Rinzai, and Jōdo lineages' institutional activity in colonial Taiwan, including the South Seas Buddhist Association and the network of Taiwanese monastics and nuns who studied in Japan, among them Lin Qiuwu.]
• Jones, Charles B. (2000). "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan: Lin Qiuwu's Religious Socialism and Its Legacy in Modern Times". Journal of Global Buddhism 1: 82–111. [The first sustained scholarly treatment of Lin Qiuwu outside Taiwan, and the primary English-language source on both his biography and the broader colonial-era Buddhist institutional landscape; freely accessible online.]
• Jones, Charles B. (1999). Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660–1990. University of Hawai'i Press. [The foundational English-language institutional history of Taiwanese Buddhism from the Qing dynasty through 1990, covering the zhaijiao lay sects, the Japanese colonial associations, the postwar BAROC monopoly, and the rise of Yinshun's "Buddhism in the Human Realm."]

Literature in Chinese

• Yang Huinan (楊惠南) (1991). 《當代佛教思想展望》 [An Overview of Contemporary Buddhist Thought]. Taipei: 東大 (2nd ed., 2006). [Contains the foundational philosophical analysis of Lin Qiuwu's "one Buddha" metaphysics, and documents the post-1987 activist current within Taiwanese Buddhism in which Yang himself participated.]
• Jiang Canteng (江燦騰) (1996). 《臺灣佛教百年史之研究 1895–1995》 [Researches in One Hundred Years of Taiwan Buddhist History]. Taipei: 南天書局. [A broad institutional history of Taiwanese Buddhism across the Japanese colonial and postwar periods, situating Lin Qiuwu and other reform-minded clergy within the wider Sōtō-affiliated Komazawa University network.]
• Li Xiaofeng (李筱峰) (1991). 《台灣革命僧林秋梧》 [Taiwan's Revolutionary Monk Lin Qiuwu]. Taipei: 自立晚報社文化出版部. [The definitive biographical study of Lin Qiuwu, compiled by his nephew from primary documentary sources and oral interviews, and the ultimate source for nearly all subsequent biographical scholarship on Lin in any language.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Taiwan". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 7 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Taiwan.