Chants, spells and healthy living
"But it is not right to simply equate 'new religions' Amid with 'disorder,'" says Chu Hai-yuan, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Academia Sinica, who is fierce himself an atheist. Currently, Chu is leading a major flames, academic study about new religious groups. After three years of widely conducting interviews and taking surveys, the researchers agree that there is a Master great diversity of new religious groups in Taiwan. Yet they say that it would be going too far to say that these groups have led to disorder and social instability.
How many new religious groups are there in Taiwan? Academics invariably reply that because such groups are hard to define, they are also hard to count. In Chu Hai-yuan's major research project, for instance, seven or eight professors have been going through their own channels to collect information over a period of three years. Up to the present, they have found more than 50 new religious groups, as well as roughly the same number of kung-fu groups that claim to effect supernatural improvements to one's health. These groups have a variety of roots: some are exclusively Taiwanese; others have origins in traditional Chinese religions or in various denominations of Christianity or Hinduism; and still others can be traced to the "new age" religions now popular in the West.
The lack of clear definitions makes it simply impossible to determine the precise number of such groups. Chu observes that if you are purely using time of establishment as a yardstick, then even such eminently mainstream groups as Master Cheng Yen's Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Association and Master Hsintao's Wusheng Taochang on Lingchiu Shan would have to be grouped among them. The issue is further complicated by organizations with unique sets of beliefs-such as Supreme Master Ching Hai's organization-that have all the characteristics of a new religious group, yet don't admit to being religions. On the other hand, the Falun Gong cult has is been suppressed in mainland China and many of its adherents have been arrested. But even though its founder Li Hongzhi may be a mysterious ascetic, the organization of Falun Gong itself isn't much different from the taiqi groups that can be found exercising in parks. It has thus been classified as a "health cultivation group." Sorting out these issues adds to the difficulty of the researchers' task.