Furor Over Donations to Democrats Bewilders Asian Contributors

When she made out a check for $5,000 in April on the occasion of a Democratic Party fund-raiser at a Los Angeles-area Buddhist temple, Hsiao Pi-hsia said she had no idea that it was a political contribution.

“I just gave the money automatically, without asking what it was for,” Hsiao said Sunday during an interview here at the sprawling Taiwan temple headquarters of the Lo Kuang Shan, or Buddha’s Light Mountain, monastic order, where she serves as a lay practitioner and master vegetarian chef. “For me, it was like giving to one of those charity boxes you see in grocery stores to help needy people.”

Hsiao, 55, who holds a green card and owns a home in Los Angeles but speaks virtually no English, was not at the Hsi Lai Temple gathering in Hacienda Heights--though she was in Los Angeles at the time--but was one of the donors to the event that raised $140,000 for the Clinton-Gore campaign.

The guest of honor at the banquet was Vice President Al Gore, a favorite in the Lo Kuang Shan order since his visit to the Taiwan temple as a senator in 1988.

But like others involved in the Hacienda Heights fund-raiser--including 69-year-old Venerable Master Hsing Yun, evangelical founder of Lo Kuang Shan--Hsiao said she is bewildered by the controversy over the donations.

In the waning days of the U.S. presidential campaign, the fund-raising event has become a focus of questions about the influence of foreign contributions on U.S. politics in general and the fund-raising methods of the Democratic Party in particular.

“I have no interest in politics,” said Hsiao, who inherited money from her wealthy family in Taiwan. “I saw it as a gesture of good ties.”

She said no one asked her to make the donation but that she routinely donates money at special temple events, including those aiding charities and disaster-relief efforts.

Temple officials contend that the controversy stems from a classic cultural misunderstanding of--or at least a miscalculation about--how politics works in Asia and the West.

In Asian politics, particularly in the emerging democracy of Taiwan, wealthy people or organizations routinely donate large sums of unreported cash to candidates, often anonymously.

“I think it is a storm in a teacup,” said Man Hua, a tiny, energetic nun who guided a visitor around the tree-shaded compound where work is underway on a new, 3,000-bed lodge for Buddhist pilgrims.

“How could something that is a good thing turn into something that is a bad thing?” asked Hsing, the religious leader who preaches an activist “humanistic Buddhism” that has proven extremely successful in Chinese communities outside of Taiwan and mainland China.

Since he founded the Lo Kuang Shan order in 1967, Hsing has built an international following of more than 1 million devotees. The order has 130 temples, including the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, and operates in 100 countries.

The massive Lo Kuang Shan temple complex about an hour’s drive from Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s main port and second-largest city, has become an important tourist destination and pilgrimage site.

Surveyed from above by a 120-foot statue of Buddha, the compound includes monasteries, libraries, museums and a walk-through animated grotto modeled on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland.

On sale in the temple stores are books, videotapes and cassettes featuring Hsing, who was born in mainland China and fled the Communist regime in 1949 to Taiwan.

“Hsing Yun,” said one Taiwanese journalist admiringly, “has to be one of the most entrepreneurial Buddhist monks in the world.”

Lo Kuang Shan is not the largest religious order in Taiwan, but it is certainly the most visible and international.

Unlike some religious leaders, Hsing urges engagement with the outside world and its political leaders. Lo Kuang Shan publications prominently display photographs of Taiwanese and foreign leaders.

A large photograph of Gore, smiling and wearing a garland of flowers, is the centerpiece of the Lo Kuang Shan museum.

One of the recent issues of the order’s Chinese-language newsletter, Awakening the World, featured a front-page photograph of President Clinton shaking hands with the abbess of the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights.

Following Gore’s initial contact with the order in 1988, the religious leadership has come to look upon the Clinton administration, in the words of Stuart Chandler, a Harvard doctoral candidate doing research here, as “Asian-friendly.”

A Lo Kuang Shan description accompanying the Clinton photograph praises him as “the first U.S. president to pay particular attention to Asian Americans. So far, 197 Asian Americans have been appointed as top officials.”

One of those Asian Americans appointed as a top official was John Huang, the naturalized native of Taiwan who served in the Department of Commerce under the late Ronald H. Brown before joining the Democratic National Committee as a fund-raiser concentrating on the Asian community. Huang helped organize the April fund-raiser at the Hacienda Heights temple.

“By holding the banquet in Los Angeles,” said Chandler, the Harvard researcher, “they were hoping to develop the kind of rapport with Gore that they have with politicians here. Most important, they felt they were doing it on behalf of the Chinese American constituency.”

But because of the controversy surrounding the banquet, many here in the spiritual heart of Buddha’s Light Mountain feel burned by the experience, victims of a double standard in which Asian Americans have been encouraged to participate more actively in U.S. politics but get criticized when they do.

As he talked about this, Hsing’s normally jovial countenance darkened. “The more we Asians try to participate, the more we get criticized,” Hsing said, prompting nods of agreement among his aides.

Would his organization still host the fund-raiser now, after he has seen the political ramifications?

“We asked ourselves, ‘What is our mistake?’ ” he said. “The only mistake I can think of is that we were Asian.”