Religion in Taiwan
The majority of Taiwanese people practice a combination of Buddhism and Taoism often with a Confucian worldview, which is collectively termed as Chinese folk religion.
Many statistical analyses try to distinguish between Buddhism and Taoism in Taiwan, which, along with Confucianism, are rather aspects within broader "ancient Chinese religion".
Prior to the 17th century, the island of Taiwan was inhabited by the Taiwanese aborigines of Austronesian stock, and there were small settlements of Chinese and Japanese maritime traders and pirates.
[7] Many Ming loyalists fled to the south, including Zheng Chenggong alias Koxinga, a military warlord who fought against the Manchu dynasty.
[7] As the settlers were mostly males, came from different areas, and at first not many people shared the same surnames and belonged to the same kins, ancestral shrines of kinship gods did not develop until the 1790s, when sufficient generations of families had established on the island.
[9] During the mid-Qing dynasty, sects of popular Buddhism which the Japanese authorities would have later lumped together with the religions of fasting (zhāijiāo) because of their vegetarian precepts, began to send missionaries from the mainland to Taiwan.
[10] Japanese researches of the early colonial period identified zhaijiao sects as a line of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism, although contemporary scholars know that they were centered on a female creator deity, Wusheng Laomu, and identify them as branches of Luoism disguising as a form of Buddhism free of ordained clergy.
[12] In 1895, the Manchu government ceded Taiwan to Japan as part of the terms of surrender following the First Sino-Japanese War.
[12] During the fifty-one years of Japanese rule, governors enacted regulations to control the activities of "native religions".
[13] During the Japanese period many indigenous groups were forced to practice Shintō, only a few (such as the Saisiyat people) were able to resist and maintain their traditions.
[14] Buddhism, as a shared heritage of China and Japan, received better treatment than Chinese folk religion and Taoism.
[17] The hermitage was a zhaijiao Buddhist hall where the follower Yu Qingfang (余清芳) started an anti-Japanese uprising, in which many other folk religious and Taoist sects took part.
[17] The Japanese government discovered the plot and Yu Qingfang was executed in a speedy trial together with ninety-four other followers.
[18] In 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Tokyo ordered the rapid acculturation of the peoples of Japan's colonies.
[19] This included an effort to disaccustom people from Chinese traditional religions and convert them into the nexus of State Shinto.
Chinese family altars were replaced with kamidana and butsudan, and a Japanese calendar of religious festivals was introduced.
[19] The outbreak of open war between China and Japan in 1937 led to a proscription of practices and even stronger measures, as Japanese officials saw the religious culture centered around folk temples as the major obstacle to Japanisation.
[20] Consequently, some local officials began to close and to demolish temples, burning their images, confiscating their cash and real estates, a measure that they called "sending the gods to Heaven".
[22] The policies also resulted in the disappearance of the small Muslim community, until Islam was reintroduced by the Kuomintang with their retreat from mainland China to Taiwan after the end of Chinese Civil War in 1949.
[24] In the field of religion, this promoted the rise in importance of some Buddhist, Taoist or folk temples as island-wide pilgrimage sites.
The rapid economic growth of Taiwan since the 1970s and 1980s ("Taiwan Miracle") accompanied by a quick renewal of Chinese folk religion, challenging Max Weber's theories on secularisation and disenchantment, has led many scholars to investigate how folk religious culture, with its emphasis on values like loyalty, its social network of temples and gods' societies, may have contributed to the island's economic development.
They promoted Humanistic Buddhism reformist movement in Taiwan, which was pioneered by Master Taixu in mainland China.
Despite this, there are still tensions from past events, including Taiwan being removed from the United Nations by the People's Republic of China.
Other salvationisms with an important presence in Taiwan, though not documented in the 2005 official statistics, are Confucian Shenism (also called Luanism) and the recent Weixinism.
Taoism in Taiwan is almost entirely entwined with folk religion,[37] as it is mostly of the Zhengyi school in which priests function as ritual ministers of local communities' cults.
For instance, the Japanisation of Chinese Buddhism, the introduction of clerical marriage and the practice of eating meat and drinking wine, was not as successful as in the Buddhist tradition of Japanese-occupied Korea.
[41] The history of the Baháʼí Faith (Chinese: 巴哈伊教; pinyin: Bāhāyījiào) in Taiwan began after the religion entered areas of China[42] and nearby Japan.
In the 2005 official statistics on religion issued by the Department of Civil Affairs, the Baháʼís had 16,000 members and 13 Local Spiritual Assemblies.
Since the 1980s, thousands of Muslims from Myanmar and Thailand, who are descendants of nationalist soldiers who fled Yunnan as a result of the communist takeover, have migrated to Taiwan in search of a better life.
The table shows official statistics on religion issued by the Department of Civil Affairs, Ministry of the Interior ("MOI"), in 2005.
