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Since 1995, thousands of people in Taiwan have pledged each year to donate their cadavers to the medical college run by the Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation. The "surge of cadavers" seems intriguing in a society where ancestor worship continues to be salient. Drawing on my fieldwork in 2012–2013 and 2015, the purpose of this paper is to describe a series of practices involving the transformation of a cadaver into a Buddhist moral subject: the donor, the family, and the medical school engage in various endeavors and rituals involving "emotional practices" to honor the deceased; situate the donation as a "good death"; and fulfill the family's obligations to ancestor worship. I argue what makes the ritual transformation efficacious is the dominant currency of emotional practices. Emotional practices "authenticate" the ritual transformation. The main ethic for commemorating the cadaver donation is not generosity or dāna but equanimity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the concept of the NGO, or nongovernmental organization, a global catchall? This article tries to respond to the globalization of the concept of NGO by tracing the historical and local development of a Taiwanese grassroots Buddhist organization, the Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation, in the public sphere of Taiwan since the late 1960s, and particularly the controversies surrounding the group's rapid growth during Taiwan's democratization since the late 1980s. The development of the Buddhist group from an unknown grassroots to a global United Nations NGO, as the article will show, attests to the plural genealogies of NGO-ness. In addition, the article argues that the genealogy of Ciji illustrates the nuanced relationship between society and the Taiwan "state," and that Ciji embodies the shifting cultural "state" of civil society in Taiwan. The concept of the "regime of civil morality" will be introduced for the understanding of the cultural politics of NGO-ness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation of Taiwan is a lay Buddhist movement under monastic leadership that has a mission of relieving all living beings from suffering. The founder and leader is the Venerable (or the Dharma Master) Cheng Yen (Zhengyan fashi). Cheng Yen is an ordained nun and, at the same time, commands considerable personal appeal. While Tzu Chi's current membership of several million does include a significant number of men, the majority of followers, especially the core members, continue to be women. What do Taiwanese women see in Cheng Yen and in Tzu Chi? Drawing from ethnography in southern Taiwan and the Tzu Chi literatures on Cheng Yen, this paper attempts to show a pattern of normalizing female charisma—in the sense that female followers struggle for a breakthrough from the cultural constraints of their female gender roles by means of, and by virtue of, the Tzu Chi mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at religion through weeping, a nonverbal expression of emotion that recurs in multiple contexts. Background on crying in Taiwan; Reason devotees cry; Conclusions.