Inside the Ling Shen Ching Tze temple, a bald nun clad in Tibetan
maroon robes carries out rituals with a brass bell and a dorje--a stylized
thunderbolt--twisting in her hands.
Above a platform filled with colorful statues of deities hangs a yellow banner
whose message is written in the angular letters of the Tibetan language.
Ten-foot thanka meditation paintings line the walls, depicting Tibetan-style
sacred mandalas.
But this is not a temple attended by Tibetans. The nun is a Taiwanese woman, and
nearly all of the roughly 250 people who worship here are from Taiwan and
China, first-generation immigrants who in many cases speak nothing but Chinese.
After a decade of celebrity conversions, performing monks and a jet-setting
leader in the Dalai Lama, the once-obscure realm of Tibetan Buddhism is now
familiar to many Americans. But little noticed here was a similar surge in its
popularity among Chinese in Taiwan and other Asian countries outside China.
The Ling Shen temple, opened in 1994 in the shell of a Presbyterian church at
1035 W. 31st St., is this trend's local incarnation.
The Bridgeport temple is part of the True Buddha school, an international sect
led by Sheng-yen Lu, an unconventional spiritual leader from Taiwan who has
adopted the trappings of Tibetan Buddhism.
His sect combines elaborately ritualistic Tibetan traditions with Chinese
customs and shortens them to fit in with the time demands of modern life.
"Ours is condensed," said Teck Teng, president of the school's home
temple in Redmond, Wash. "The traditional Tibetan practice takes hours to
do. But with the short amount of time allowed in this modern world, we try to
allow the practice within an hour.
"It is similar to the Tibetan tradition, but not the same," Teng
said.
Indeed, Chicago's tiny population of Tibetans does not worship at the Ling Shen
temple, said Tsering Phuri, the president of TIBETcenter, a cultural group.
Instead most Tibetan immigrants prefer to worship at home or borrow space from
other temples or churches for occasions such as the Dalai Lama's birthday.
Lu is one of a number of charismatic clerics who have risen to prominence in
Taiwan in recent years, according to Philip Clart, a professor at the
University of Missouri-Columbia who has studied new religious movements in
Taiwan.
He has distinguished himself, Clart said, by creatively fusing Tibetan Buddhist
elements with traditional Chinese practices to make it more attractive to
people used to the latter.
That inventiveness extends to his status as a "living Buddha" among
followers, a claim that Phuri, a former official in the Dalai Lama's
government-in-exile in India, said may be far-fetched.
"People should not say, `I am a living Buddha,'" Phuri said.
Born a Christian in Taiwan in 1945, Lu went through a succession of traditions
before hitting upon Tibetan Buddhism, known more generically as Tantric
Buddhism. He opened the Redmond center in 1982, according to official
histories.
The True Buddha school's precepts lay out strict guidelines for how to regard
Lu--devotees should "see only good qualities" and "never any faults"
in him, for example.
But in at least one instance Lu has been accused of misusing his status. In a
lawsuit filed in December 2000 in Washington, a former devotee said Lu had told
her she would die if she refused sex with him, which he allegedly called the
"Twin Body Blessing."
Kevin Wang, 36, a temple member from River Forest who is originally from
Taiwan, said the lawsuit rattled some people at the Chicago temple, where a
beaming Lu is depicted in an array of resplendent hats derived from those of Tibetan
lamas.
"We don't practice that. We don't practice that in my school," Wang
said of the supposed "blessing." "Even my grandmaster, he
doesn't practice that."
Officials at the Chicago temple said Lu has been on a meditation retreat in
Tahiti since mid-2000 and is unavailable for comment.
Although the temple's blend of Tibetan and Chinese traditions is unusual,
scholars say the divide between the two has never been airtight. Throughout the
Qing dynasty, the ritual needs of the Chinese royal court were served by
Tibetan lamas, and Chinese nationalists who fled to Taiwan in the 1949
communist revolution were joined by Tibetan spiritual advisers.
In addition, Tibet's remoteness has long bred fascination among some Chinese,
scholars say, a fact that may explain the Tibetan-script banner on the Ling
Shen temple's wall.
"People don't understand the Tibetan; they can't read the script--but for
some this may increase the mystery," Clart said.
With few options among Chicago's still-scarce Buddhist temples, people come
into the Ling Shen temple for all kinds of reasons--be it strict Tibetan-style
rituals, traditional Chinese ancestor worship or simply to share community,
said Paul Numrich, a Loyola University Chicago religion scholar who has studied
the temple as part of a project on immigrant religions.
"You've got an inner core of believers dedicated to a certain
tradition," he said, "but then concentric circles coming out, each
with a variety of people who attend for various reasons but may not believe in the
core beliefs."
For Susan Terry, 45, a former chairwoman of the board at Ling Shen, the temple
means a place to meditate as well as a place where karate is taught in the
basement and a place to stockpile group donations to a local food bank.
Terry, originally from Taiwan and now living in Wilmette, said she started out
going to Roman Catholic masses with her American husband, but they left her
cold.
"Since I go to the temple every weekend, since I pray there, I feel that
my life is not ups and downs," she said. "I feel that before I became
a True Buddhist my life was ups and downs, always ups and downs. No more."