Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism

Fo Guang Shan (佛光山, Buddha’s Light Mountain), an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan, runs a regular ‘Short-Term Monastic Cultivation Retreat’, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養, xiuyang). Contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated especially with religious traditions, and the compromise and accommodation that result from the exigencies of everyday life. This retreat, we argue, shows instead that the experience of ethical shortcoming can be a positive instrument and aspect of religious striving. While much debate in the anthropology of ethics assumes on all sides an a priori conceptual framework that opposes ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ exigency to ordered transcendence, exigency and order in the Fo Guang Shan Retreat are instead mutually constitutive and dynamically related. And failing and being corrected are not imperfections in, but central and indeed ritually scripted elements of its ethical pedagogy.