Modern medicine may be good for sore throats, but when it comes to matters of the mind, many Taiwanese turn to the temple.
In the aftermath of a massive earthquake that struck central Taiwan on September 21, 1999, killing more than 2,000 people, psychiatrists joined medical teams, hoping to provide relief to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Most found themselves idle, watching the locals queue up to be treated in a shamanistic ritual that reclaimed their "frightened souls."
The ritual is Taoist and is known as shoujing in Mandarin. It is little known to anyone but those who are familiar with Taiwan's folk traditions. All the same, evidence of its popularity can be seen even in cosmopolitan Taipei, which is mostly a bubble of modernity compared with the rest of the island. At the downtown Hsingtien Temple, where the Taoist God of War is worshipped, every day, from 11:20am to 10pm, crowds shuffle forward in patient lines, waiting, one by one, to receive a cure or a blessing from a volunteer temple priestess. In each case, the entire affair occupies less than a few minutes. The priestess takes the name of her petitioner, and then, with a few esoteric gestures and a flick of the incense stick, she casts her spell.
The believers will tell you there is no need to list your symptoms, because the shoujing ritual is a catch-all--"It cures if you're ill, and blesses if you're not," says the Hsingtien Temple on its promotional website. So potent is the ritual that, in extreme cases, the "patient" does not even need to be physically present. For those who are too old or too sick to go to the temple, all that relatives need to bring is something unwashed that the sufferer has worn--the soul inhabits the clothes of those who wear them, after all, and a suit of blessed clothes is almost as good as a visit to the doctor.
Shoujing is actually just the tip of the alternative-healing iceberg. According to one age-old tradition, for example, it is possible to have the gods prescribe your remedy by reaching into a vast urn and randomly selecting an inscribed bamboo shaft, which can be exchanged for a selection of medicines by a temple medium. And then there are the eggs. In the right hands, illness can be transferred into an egg, which leaves the yolk blackened but the human sufferer cured.
Meanwhile, presiding over all temple cures is the presence of the spirit medium, or the jitong. The Taiwanese pantheon of gods is almost innumerable, and every temple has its patron god, which communicates with its congregation through the jitong, who alone speaks the language of the temple god. Remedies for illness can be had, and mostly free of charge, but patients will usually donate money to the temple in gratitude.
Anachronisms perhaps, throwbacks to darker times even, for some these practices are nothing more than superstition--rituals that should have disappeared with the advent of modern medicine. But truth is, in modern Taiwan, the seekers come from all walks of life.
"Grandma took my mother to shoujing, my mother took me, and I take my son," says 37-year-old Lee Jung-ping, who has an advanced degree in labor affairs. "I don't know how or if it cures, but I don't think it will hurt."
According to the Taiwan Social Change Survey, which has been conducted once every two years by the Academia Sinica's Institute of Sociology since 1983, educational background, social status, and residential district have little to do with whether people believe in the healing powers of folk rituals. Chang Hsun, a researcher at the Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology, says that the less educated are more likely to seek a spiritual healer the moment they feel that something is wrong with their health, while the highly educated tend to put off a visit longer, but in the end both will go to the temple.
According to Chang, the reason Taiwanese continue to flock to the corner temple with their ailments is that folk religion offers something that modern science does not. Science, says Chang, needs a symptom before it starts looking for a cure. Taiwanese folk religions, on the other hand, treat mind, body and soul as one. While some illnesses can be traced to an invasive virus, clinically healthy people who feel something is awry need somewhere to turn. And that's a way of saying that, for Taiwanese, there is a spiritual dimension to physical health.
Of course, as in all broadly Chinese folk religions, luck has a role to play in the equation, but the important point is that luck is a question of faith, or spirituality. In folk religion, illness is just one of many misfortunes that can strike us--others might be a car accident or a fall, or failure in an important exam or business deal. With faith, such things can be avoided.
"Misfortune, whatever form it takes, strikes because somebody's belief is not strong enough," Chang says. "In this thinking, the cause is always the same, so the cure should also be the same, regardless of what the symptoms are."
In a sense, these therapies are not unlike the beliefs of Christian Scientists who believe that spiritual means--prayers and spiritual treatment--work more efficiently than medical care. Christian Scientists argue that all disease springs from the mind's blindness to God's presence and our authentic relation to God, revealed in the life of Christ. They hold that treatment is a form of prayer or communion with God, in which God's reality and power become so real as to eclipse the temporal reality of disease and pain. In other words, healing happens when people's sense of God becomes greater than their sense of the problem.
Unfortunately, there are no dependable statistics on just whether the practices of Christian Scientists or Taiwanese folk rituals actually do any good, though believers are legion and will attest to miraculous cures. In a seminar discussing the relationship between spiritual belief and medicine held last March at Fu Jen Catholic University, scholars from different religious backgrounds shared stories about how spirituality and healing came together in ways that still perplex medical professionals.
Perplex them, perhaps, but not exclude them. The comparison between Christian Scientists and Taiwanese folk belief only goes so far. While Christian Science holds that medical and spiritual treatment are not compatible due to their concern that one path for healing can be derailed by another, most Taiwanese see no reason why folk healing rituals and modern medicine cannot co-exist. Chang notes that most people who go to a shoujing ritual also seek the help of modern medicine.
"They recognize that while the ritual may not relieve their sore throat or stomach ache, illnesses have their roots in both physical and spiritual problems," she says. "Pills take care of physical symptoms, but people also feel that they need something for their souls, if they want to heal completely."
Whether a priest or a jitong, the intervention of the spirit world in modern medical practice has long been frowned upon, or even outright scorned, by doctors. For many doctors, modern medicine's great strides against disease have largely been achieved by conquering superstition. Even so, the medical community's attitude toward spiritual or religious healing has begun to see some changes in recent years.
"Scientists are starting to admit that there are things about the healing process that they don't fully understand, and there could be other possibilities beside treating diseases from a purely medical point of view," says Chang. "There's also a fresh consensus that the progress of science doesn't have to follow a single trajectory. That's leading researchers to look into alternative therapies that have been neglected for a very long time."
Perhaps, when it comes to "alternative therapies," spirit mediums at the temple may be stretching things somewhat, but few doctors today are likely to be urging their patients to stay at home. After all, modern medicine and folk religion may be at odds in many ways, but their aim is one--at least according to the World Health Organization's definition of health, which is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.
And, when it comes to a complete state of health, who is to say that Hsingtien Temple or the local church does not have a part to play?