Mazu, the Wang Ye Boats and the Temple Economy

The Dajia Mazu pilgrimage is the clearest window into how Taiwanese religion actually works. Each spring the goddess's palanquin leaves Jenn Lann temple in Dajia and travels roughly three hundred kilometres over nine days, visiting scores of temples, while participants number in the hundreds of thousands and strangers along the route feed and shelter them without charge. Devotees lie in the road so the palanquin passes over them. The event is entirely voluntary, funded by donation and by temple wealth, and it is also a political fixture that no candidate for national office can afford to skip.

The Wang Ye cult of the southwest coast is stranger and less known. Plague deities are received, honoured for days, and then sent away in an elaborately built boat that is burned on the shore at dawn, taking pestilence with it; the Donggang burning occurs every three years and takes years to prepare. Both illustrate the two features that distinguish Taiwanese practice from a state religion: authority is local and derives from a temple's founding lineage rather than from any hierarchy, and the same person will consult a Taoist priest, a Buddhist monastery and a spirit medium without experiencing any of it as inconsistent. Modern Buddhist organisations grew inside this environment rather than against it, and Tzu Chi became one of the largest relief agencies in Asia.