A Hyperreal Sacred: Exploring Buddhist Museums in Taiwan

Scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to the phenomenon of booming Buddhist museums across Asia. Buddhist museums serve as interstitial spaces wherein heritage and aesthetic practices intertwine with spiritual and ritual awakenings, and where the care for sacred matter through ritual or semi-ritual means coexists with heritage education and commercial endeavours (Gabaude 2013; Srisinurai 2021; Suzuki 2007; Tythacott and Bellini 2020; Wilke 2008; Zhu 2015). However, recent attention has delved into the motivations behind establishing Buddhist museums and their socio-political objectives within Asian societies. Scholars have come to realize that Buddhist museums are not merely leisure places “without agenda” (McDaniel 2017) but rather subtly “influence” visitors, directing them towards Buddhist teachings and practices (Goh 2022). These museums operationalize the doctrine of skilful means in Mahāyāna Buddhism, employing diverse methods to educate adherents on Buddhist moral choices without relying solely on religious scriptures or literal interpretation. Museums facilitate connections between visitors and Buddhist practices through aesthetic and embodied experiences, fostering empathy and emotional comprehension. Our paper examines how these subtle influences on visitors’ perception of Buddhism manifest through specific material designs and treatments of sacred matter. Materiality, and how it is crafted and handled, plays a pivotal role in Buddhist skilful means. The material assemblages and subtle influences to which visitors are exposed vary based on each Buddhist organization’s worldview rather than directing visitors towards a broader, standardized Buddhist practice.

This paper is based on ethnographic research conducted individually and jointly by the two authors between 2017 and 2024 in two Buddhist museums – the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum and the Museum of World Religions – and the Ciyou Gong temple in Xinzhuang. On the one hand, Chinese folk temples often include exhibition spaces to celebrate the history and legacy of their communities, preserving precious artefacts from periodical temple renovations. On the other hand, Buddhist museums in Taiwan assemble sacred icons alongside artificial recreations of shrines and meditation spaces, thereby blurring the differences between ritual and museum spaces. Some of these museums attract visitors by providing a space for experimenting with religion and reflecting on Buddhist groups’ doctrines through embodied experiences and re-enactments, rather than solely displaying religious objects. Ritual re-enactments and embodied experiences may trigger spiritual responses from visitors regardless of the artificiality of ritual space recreations. Consecrated religious icons and artificial recreations equally serve the purposes of Buddhist organizations. In such a setting, Buddhist organizations utilize museums as a means to communicate with the public and differentiate themselves from Chinese folk religion and municipal museums. In the latter, when sacred objects become “heritage” displayed in the museum, they must be “deconsecrated”.

Our perspective on materiality in Buddhist museums is crucial, especially in a context like Taiwan, where religion itself is considered a vital aspect of the island’s identity and material religion thus becomes part of Taiwanese heritage. The configuration of museum assemblages – from the selection of artifacts for displays to the arrangement of the visitor experience – is crucial for understanding the social and political objectives pursued by each religious organization. This paper delves into how Taiwanese Buddhist museums imbue museum artifacts with a sacred aura for ideological purposes, aiming to influence and persuade visitors toward the core values of Buddhist organizations. It advances existing scholarship by asserting the intricate connection between museum design and the socio-political and religious agendas within contemporary Buddhism. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes the significance of comprehending how Buddhist organizations intersect with broader heritage processes concerning sacred matters. It argues that Buddhist organizations cannot be universally categorized or divorced from local context. The extent to which Buddhist museums conform to or diverge from conceptualizations of sacred matter reveals their unique socio-political and religious contributions to contemporary society.

This paper investigates how the “hyperreal” sacred works in Buddhist museums by advocating for a micro-scale ethnographic analysis focusing on materiality and material engagements.  According to Eco (1986), the hyperreal is an abstract or artificial model that emulates the original in its most intimate structure to improve and structure a perceptual field that exceeds the latter. A hyperreal sacred confirms and strengthens the organization’s consensus on what the “original”, in this case, Buddhist sacredness, practice and doctrine, represents for them. A hyperreal sacred thus transmits to visitors this consensus on the “original,” urging them to take a position, adhering or not to the “original” Buddhism. This paper demonstrates how Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum and the Museum of World Religions adopt different forms of “hyperreal” sacredness that reflect their founders’ ideologies. On the one hand, the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum intentionally imparts Fo Guang Shan’s values through ritual re-enactments, echoing Hsing Yun’s statement on how aesthetic consumption might guide a bodhisattva’s path. On the other hand, the Museum of World Religions displays sacred matter alongside 3-D models and shrine reconstructions, thereby sustaining Hsin Dao’s interreligious doctrine, which regards each religion as a moral system potentially equal to the others, and which can be understood through meditation and life cycle rituals. 

References

Gabaude, Louis (2003). “A New Phenomenon in Thai Monasteries: The Stūpa-Museum”. In The Buddhist Monastery: A Cross-Cultural Survey, edited by Pierre Pichard and François Lagirade, pp. 169–186. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.

Goh, Aik Sai (2022). “Enlightenment on Display: The Origins, Motivations, and Functions of Hagiographic Buddhist Museums in Singapore”, Southeast Asian Studies 11(1): 79–114.

McDaniel, Justin Thomas (2017). Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Srisinurai, Siriporn (2021). Curating the Sacred, Enchanting the Ordinary: Things, Practices and Local Museums in Northeast Thailand.  Ph.D. diss., Humboldt University of Berlin.

Suzuki, Yui (2007). “Temple as Museum, Buddha as Art: Hōryūji's "Kudara Kannon" and Its Great Treasure Repository,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52: 128-140.

Wilke, Annette and Esther-Maria Guggenmos (2008). Im Netz des Indra. Das Museum of World Religions, sein buddhistisches Dialogkonzept und die neue Disziplin Reli­gionsästhetik. Munster: LIT Verlag.

Zhu, Yujie. (2015). “Cultural Effects of Authenticity: Contested Heritage Practices in China,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (6): 594–608.