To Beg or to Cook? Food Ethics, Cross Cultural Borrowing, and the Meal Rituals of Nanlin Buddhist Nuns in Central Taiwan

Abstract

This paper studies how the female Buddhist community of South Forest Nunnery (Ch. Nanlin sengniyuan南林僧尼苑) in central Taiwan integrates alms begging into their monastery architecture and food practices. Using vinaya literature, with a focus on the Pāli vinaya of Theravāda communities in Southeast Asia and the Chinese version of the Dharmaguptaka vinaya called Vinaya in Four Parts (Ch. Sifen lü 四分律), as well as ethnographic notes from field research in Jiayi 嘉義, Taiwan and Bagan, Myanmar, I show that the alms food begging initiative at South Forest was implemented as part of broader Taiwanese Buddhist monastic reforms designed to emulate the economic model of Buddhist right livelihood prescribed in early Indian Buddhism. Through integrating alms begging at daily meals, South Forest nuns ritually enact the everyday behavior that they believe the Buddha and his early community observed and prescribed in the monastic codes. Drawing from cross-cultural practices, meal rituals at South Forest materialize the ethics of right livelihood as a distinctive food culture that sets the nuns apart from their peers in Taiwan. South Forest ritually (re)structures the food culture in the Chinese monastery through reimagining eating rites, so that meals become the material signifier of paradigm shifts in the economics and ethics of daily monastic life. The paper first provides emic descriptions and then engages in etic analyses that incorporate historical and ritual perspectives to address the religious significance of South Forest’s adoption of alms practice. This combination of perspectives circumvents the constraints of anthropological approaches that analyze Buddhist monastic culture of alms through contemporary theories of the gift economy, and often prioritize social dynamics and politics of identity formation over religio-cultural impetus. Rather than focus on social or political impact, South Forest nuns’ reimagining of food practices is an attempt to proximate the Buddha’s actions and moral charisma through constant ritual repetition. Ultimately, their reform of the monastic food economy occurs primarily through ritual performance.