Special Focus: Buddhists and the Making of Modern Chinese Societies Scientific and Sacramental: Engaged Buddhism and the Sacrilization of Medical Science in Tzu Chi (Ciji) C. Julia Huang National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan Journal of Global Buddhism Vol. 18 (2017): 72-90 Corresponding author: C. Julia Huang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Email: juliahuanglemmon@gmail.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internation- al License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ISSN 1527-6457 (online). Abstract: Tzu Chi (Ciji), a lay Buddhist charitable movement under monastic leadership, stands out among the new and large-scale Buddhist organizations in Taiwan, for its continuous focus on medical care. Presently it runs an island-wide medical network in Taiwan and the largest bone marrow databank of the Chinese diaspora. How and why is medical care important to Tzu Chi? What makes Tzu Chi’s medical charity Buddhist? This paper focuses on the core of medical concerns in the Tzu Chi movement and the impact Tzu Chi’s mission has on medical practice in Taiwan. I will give a brief history of Tzu Chi’s medical charity, to show how it unfolds into an engaged Buddhism and the sacralization of its medical practice. I will argue that the process of bestowing sacramental meanings on the scienti ic is a Buddhist comment on modern medical practice—a sacralization of medical science. Keywords: engaged Buddhism; Tzu Chi or Ciji; Taiwan; medical care; sacralization Introduction T he late Ms. Lee was a pious lay Buddhist and a charity volunteer in her late-ifties in Taipei. She said to me, I remember once the Master (shifu 師父) recalled, in the old days, she often encountered people sufering from illnesses who requested that she lay her hands on them so as to cure their illness. The Master asked in return: “Had I possessed such magical power for healing, why would I bother to work so hard to build a hospital?” Ms. Lee was one of 35, 961 core members with the title of weiyua (委員 “commissioners”) 1 in thirty countries (in 2010) who were devoted to the mission of their Master, the Venerable Cheng Yen (Zhengyan 證嚴), 2 a Mahayana Buddhist nun born in Taiwan in 1937. With her disciples, Venerable Cheng Yen founded the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu 1 Weiyuan is the title given to core volunteers who are qualiied to represent Tzu Chi. Weiyuan proselytize and collect donations, and they are seen as embodying the Tzu Chi spirit. Tzu Chi translates weiyuan into commissioner in English. For a list of title groups in Tzu Chi, see Huang, 2009a. 2 I use Tzu Chi’s original Romanization and providing Pinyin within parentheses.