Chan Buddhism, Governance, and Subjectivation
–The Formation of Monastic Subject in a Modern Chan Monastery
Changshen Shih
Dharma Drum Mountain (DDM) is an exemplary case of contemporary monastic reform: a sangha that transformed itself from traditional Chan monasticism to a modern Buddhist organization. DDM is a paradigm of a modern Chan Buddhist monastery—a spiritual space in which monastics practice outreach and social engagement in conjunction with their Chan cultivation. Modern Chan monastics differ from the solitary Chan ones of the past: Modern Chan monastics play official roles in an organization that itself has modern institutional structures of power; they actively participate in systematic Chan cultivation and outreach; and they apply Chan practice when carrying out the duties of their official positions, interacting with followers, and organizing activities.
Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the three dimensions and threefold structure in the formation of subject, knowledge-being, power-being, and self-being, in this paper I offer a theoretical framework to contextualize the formation of modern monastic subject in relation to religious governance and modernity. Deleuze uses concepts such as “fold,” “outside,” and “subjectivation, ” to explain the process of subject formation. To Deleuze, the so-called “I” is “the relation to oneself,” that is, the subjectivity is folded from outside: “The most general formation of the relationship to oneself is the affect of self by self, or folded force. Subjectivation is created by folding.” Deleuze further uses the three dimensions and the threefold structure of Knowledge-Being, Power-Being, and Self-Being, to discuss the process of subject formation constituted by and situated in discourse and power of its particular historical conditions. Modern Chan teachers have been shaped and molded by the socioeconomic conditions and the modern “secular” demands of instrumental rationality and social outreach. Seeing the formation of monastic subject in DDM in becoming suggests that we reconsider the process of subjectivation of monastics in the Chan Buddhist revival in Taiwan in correspondence with the political, economical and social changes, a new religious governance that have been produced by modernity.