In the wellness-loving West and elsewhere, Buddhism is often associated with harmony and silence. But a group of musicians from Taiwan is shattering this image. Dharma from Taipei combines death metal, perhaps the most brutal form of rock music, with mantras and temple aesthetics. At their gigs, a real Buddhist nun takes center stage. The seven members of Dharma emphasize that this is not a gimmick to attract attention. Almost all of them are devout Buddhists.
“There are many ways to find peace,” says band founder Jack Tung, a hulking long-haired man with a childlike smile. The idea of combining the heaviest of heavy metal with Buddhist themes had been spinning around in his head for a good 20 years – until he finally found the right people to turn the project into reality in 2018. His only concern at the time was how the Buddhist dignitaries would react in Taiwan, where around 20 percent of the citizens practice Buddhism and where, as Tung explains, “there are more temples than 7-Eleven stores”.
In 2019, Tung made a pilgrimage from temple to temple to play his group’s first demo recordings to the masters, monks and nuns of Taiwan’s various Buddhist orders. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t committing sacrilege with a Buddhist update of the inherently blasphemous death metal music. “Even though they were over 80 and had never heard heavy metal before, the reaction of the masters was overwhelmingly positive,” Tung recalls. Buddhism in Taiwan is more open-minded than in Thailand, for example, where it is already considered disrespectful to have a Buddha tattooed on the arm.
Buddhism: Important pillar of Taiwan’s civil society
In fact, Buddhism in Taiwan fulfills not only spiritual needs, but also social and even geopolitical functions. Taiwan is a secular country where the state and religion are strictly separated. But because most of the world does not recognize Taiwan as a state, Buddhism steps into the breach and forges diplomatic contacts worldwide. Taiwan’s two largest Buddhist groups, Tzu Chi and Fo Guang Shan, maintain temples, academies, publishing houses and other branches on all five continents.
Fo Guang Shan is currently building a new temple in Berlin, its glazed ceramic façade looking like a lost art museum in the otherwise unglamorous Gesundbrunnen city district. It was designed by the office of the French architect Fréderic Rolland, who also built the largest Buddhist temple in Europe near Paris.
Fo Guang Shan, “Buddha’s Mountain of Light,” is a multi-million dollar globally operating organization active in 173 countries and even publishes its own newspaper – “only with good news,” as Miaoshiang Shih, the master of the Berlin temple, points out. In contrast to other schools, Taiwanese Buddhism is cosmopolitan and focused on humanism, explains the Buddhist nun with the shaved head. Besides religious practice, serving the common good, such as feeding the poor and organizing charity events, is the pillar of the community, she says.
Together with Tzu-Chi, Fo Guang Shan is one of Taiwan’s largest charities. Even in times of martial law, the organizations had taken on tasks that the state could not or would not fulfill, especially in the health sector. Tzu Chi alone runs six major hospitals in Taiwan. When an earthquake devastated large parts of central Taiwan in 1999, Tzu Chi’s often voluntary but tightly organized rescue teams were immediately on the scene while the government’s disaster management lagged.
Buddhism makes Taiwan internationally visible
At the same time, Taiwanese Buddhists are reaching far beyond the island’s borders. Since 1991, Tzu Chi has been providing international disaster relief. This includes providing food and clothing and rebuilding homes. And this even in Mainland China, which is otherwise highly suspicious of civil organized religious communities, for example, the Falun Gong movement, which has been banned and persecuted since 1999. Tzu Chi has been active in Europe with refugee aid and supplying Covid masks, among other things. Its German website lists the good deeds of the past years in chronological order.
In recognition of its global aid programs, Tzu Chi even received consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in 2003. The US religion sociologist Richard Madsen calls the principle “moral representation“: Diplomatically isolated and geopolitically largely powerless, Taiwan would be able to project a positive, committed image of itself to the world through organizations like Tzu Chi – which maintain significantly more foreign representations than the Taiwanese state.
And this representation now indirectly includes death metal with Buddhist lyrics. “I immediately wanted to join. It’s a brand new way of bringing Buddhism to younger people,” says Mao Ben, the nun of the Fo Guang Shan school who recites mantras during Dharma’s concerts. In Buddhism, the Sanskrit word Dharma stands for the teachings of the Buddha and the universal order.
The band is currently planning their first European tour, several weeks in a minibus across nine countries. Will that not be too much for her at the age of 52? The band members laugh: “The master has much more travel experience than we do.” As the singer of a Buddhist choir, she last toured Europe for two months before the pandemic. When it comes to cultural diplomacy, these metalheads can still learn a thing or two from the Buddhist nun.
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