My first contact with the Taiwanese was as a Naval Intelligence recruit at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California in 1967. I had joined the Navy to avoid the draft, and was sent by them to Monterey to study Chinese. I was vulnerable to being drafted because I had dropped out of Catholic seminary when I found that it was totally corrupted by faggots in charge.
At that point in my life, I was basically trying to stay out of trouble by doing what I was told, and at the Language Institute, I was given a “Sun Yat Sen” award by the Taiwanese teaching staff for “understanding Chinese culture.” What that meant was that the most beautiful of my teachers was trying to go to bed with me, and I had systematically declined. This bribe failed to motivate me. My roomate, who was actually the most brilliant student, thought that I was politically naive, and he was right. He had gone off to Berkeley on the weekends, and had gotten himself a nice Red girlfriend from the Chinese mainland, and his story was “They’re not teaching us Chinese.” Everybody thought he was crazy, and I was no exception. Only this year did I finally dork out that what the Taiwanese were teaching us was a lowlife dialect that would have immediately excluded us from any kind of meaningful interaction with any real-world Chinese that we tried to speak this to. Why would they do that? I’ll get back to this.
My focus at DLI was the Chinese language itself. That was a full-time job for me, and I did not want to be bugged by either Chinese goddesses on the make, or politically perceptive roomates. On the weekends, what I had been doing was to go off to San Francisco and to involve myself with a Sufi group there, which was under the direction of Avatar Meher Baba, then still in the body.
Fast forward to 1969. I was stationed on the island of Taiwan, having absolutely played all my cards right from a political point of view. I was stationed on Zhong Shan Bei Lu(中山北路)in Taibei in what was then called the “MAAG Compound.” The whole vibratory atmosphere in Taipei just felt corrupt. Eveybody had a hidden agenda. One day I come home and found a very expensive air conditioner in my shared room, placed there by the Taiwanese houseboy, whom I overheard saying, in Chinese, that he was trying to make friends with me. I had to threaten to throw the thing in the garbage bin to get him to remove it. The interactions in my intelligence work group were still normal, thank God, but anything on the outside immediately dripped with secret agendas, and this included the other US government agencies. I was in the business of uncovering secrets, and I was good at it. I still am. I can smell hidden agendas at three hundred paces blindfolded. Usually I choose to let them alone. However I can be pushed too far, and I’ll get back to this point too.
On 31 Jan 69, while I was in US Naval Intelligence stationed on Taiwan, Avatar Meher Baba took Mahasamadhi (left the world), and his followers were invited to come to India for the Last Darshan program, which had been set up by Baba before he passed away. It was clear to me that this was my last and only chance to gain a personal connection to the beloved Avatar of God, and I was bound and determined to go. This was the point at which I stopped being politically naive, because that determination was opposed by every single one of my personal connections, including my Sufi teacher. However, I faced her down, and literally got written permission from then CincPacFlt Adm. Elmo Zumwalt to to on pilgrimage to India. Yay! I’m not even going to describe what happened in India, but I will say that it obliterated the determinsitic force of my birth karma, and since then everything that should have been a binding for me has simply and progressively unravelled, leaving me free to belong to Baba.
Fast forward to roughly four years ago. Walking into a new Taiwanese Buddhist temple on the 2nd floor of the Chinese Cultural Center in Honolulu, I heard the entire Sangha chanting the Diamond Sutra, which I had studied in detail under Prof. Lewis Lancaster in the process of taking a BA in Oriental Languages at UC Berkeley after getting out of the Navy in 1970. This was being led by a bona fide Buddhist Saint named Yi Jiao, who was then the Fo Guang Shan Abbess in Honolulu, and I was immediately reduced to tears. So I joined Fo Guang Shan, and ultimately took Refuge and Lay Precepts and learned a lot more Chinese language. However, the ugly head of Taiwanese corruption, which originally wasn’t there, later reared up in that temple.
I first perceived the stink of corruption in the use of primitive apocryphal “Repentance Rituals” which have been forbidden on the Chinese Mainland, for the reason that they encourage corruption. How so? Because this is how the upper classes, in traditional Confucianist Chinese society, which is thoroughly corrupt from any Western POV, absolve their crimes. They buy the performance of these rituals, in which everyone repents for all possible crimes, in other words, the Buddhasangha repents for the crimes of the individuals who buy this performance. It is the belief that this annihilates the karma involved, leaving that individual free to then go commit the same crimes all over again without karmic retribution. By the conventions of Confucianist society, the temple, having received money from that individual, is now also obligated to support them politically.
On the face of it, what’s wrong with repentance? Nothing. The wrong is in the hidden agendas that lurk, by over 1,000 years of impure motivation in the use of these rituals. There is also an issue of psychological health involved in the denial of individual responsibility here. I never objected to this in the temple itself, but I did write this on this blog, and the result of that was a lot of attitude towards me in the temple. Furthermore, the more I objected, the more this caused previously unscheduled Repentance Rituals to be performed ad hoc. That was being pushed too far. That behavior is not the teaching of the Buddha. Furthermore, the present Abbess is not a Saint. She is a political creature completely.
What made it clear to me that my original intuition was correct, i.e., that the real root of all of these Repentance Ritual games was corrupt money, was Leslie T. Chang’s epoch-making book “Factory Girls.” Leslie doesn’t name names. That would be political suicide in East Asia. But she does name countries of origin. And guess what is the nationality of the employer who is the second most brutal towards their employees, after local Chinese, in the Pearl River Delta? Would you believe the Taiwanese?
Traditional Chinese corruption, which is a direct and necessary result of the flawed and failed Confucianist ethical code, is the biggest presenting hereditary cultural curse in East Asia. The Chinese on the mainland still suffer from it, but at least they realize what a curse it is, and realizing that as they do, they will inevitably obliterate it over time. But the Taiwanese, far from understanding this curse for what it is, have literally become the planetary upholders of the Confucianist drivel which justifies and perpetuates it. This has become a first-class, world-class ethical nuisance, and there is absolutely no valid reason for any Buddhist sect, including Fo Guang Shan, to be taking money from such people, or to be supporting this in any other way, including corrupt Neo-Confucianist apocryphal liturgy, i.e. Repentance Rituals.
Oh, and hey, why would Taiwanese teach a flawed version of their language to US servicemen in Monterey in 1967? Because, when your entire birth culture is fundamentally corrupt, you create barriers to communication, automatically and as a matter of course, because you need such barriers to hide behind.
Namu Amida Butsu
amerbud