Buddhist temples across Asia

The ultimate goal of traditional Buddhist ordainment is liberation (Nibbāna in Pāḷi), typically understood as a solitary path to achieve a spiritual mental state. However, this sacred belief system has been largely challenged owing to the changes in societal values across Asia, such as the rise of individualism, materialism, and secularization. For example, ordinary social members from East and Southeast Asia increasingly support a secular view of Buddhism, wherein Buddhism is no longer considered a manifestation of absolute spirituality, but an evolving socio-cultural structure that should reflect the changing societal demands on religion. This new perspective led some monks to reject the lonely route to liberation and redefine the temple as a cultural space to serve people and society, while others continued to claim that a Buddhist temple should be exclusively a sacred space for monks’ meditation practice. From an organizational perspective, if these contradictory perceptions of organizational identity cannot be expected to go together, they inevitably create an identity conflict that divides members’ response to the question. This study was motivated this internal identity conflict in Buddhist temples triggered by the societal-level changes.

What is special about Korean temples?

The empirical setting of this study, published in the Journal of Management Studies, is one of the largest Korean Buddhist temples that is highly regarded in Korean society for its strict monastic rules and meditative traditions. It offers a suitable empirical setting for this study. First, K-Temple is highly concerned about the radical societal changes witnessed by the dynamic modern history of Korea, over the past 20 years. Korean society has become radically urbanized, individualized, industrialized, and highly secularized. Second, owing to the societal changes, the public have begun to doubt the benefits of the Buddhist meditative spirit and question how the isolated practice of the monks can be aligned with the role of religion in contemporary society. Furthermore, Buddhist believers demand practical benefits from their commitment to Buddhism, such as a cultural-aesthetic experience and clinical therapy service, which the sacred elements of Buddhism hardly cater to. Altogether, these are the significant external changes that may be an immediate threat to Korean Buddhist temples, as the lives of Buddhist monks rely on donations from believers and visitors. This context offers an opportunity to investigate how societal-level changes trigger an internal identity conflict and how members cope with it.

How does the Korean Temple manage organizational identity conflict?

This study found that the Korean Temple has faced a significant dilemma of having to choose between preserving traditional monastic life (meditation-oriented) and transforming to meet the changing demands of religion (culture-oriented) triggered by macro societal-level changes of Korea. Some monks have begun to embrace a new idea that religion is a cultural service, while others still believe that temples should maintain a sacred meditative life. The division has led to the formation of two subgroups and a subsequent identity conflict. These two groups (service provider group and meditator group) have organically performed two distinct organizational functions that are key to maintaining organizational sustainability in the changing environment, despite mild intergroup conflict. The service providers have increasingly legitimized the service logic in the Korean Temple, by adopting societal changes favorable to their outlook. Subsequently, the identity of the temple as an open cultural space arose. In the meantime, the meditators have protected the meditation logic, thus preventing it from being delegitimized by the external forces that have pressured the temple to entirely transform. The two logics are now explicitly manifest and persist in the Korean Temple through the discrete identities of the two groups. Yet, this divide has paradoxically sustained the organizational system.