The East has its Peach Blossom Spring, the West its Utopia. Past or present, people the world over have never stopped yearning for paradise on Earth. But where ancient philosophers merely imagined their ideal countries, over the last couple of hundred years several groups have attempted to build their own utopias in the real world. One such, British socialist Robert Owen, immigrated to the United States in the early 19th century to create his New Harmony Society. Anarchists established a "social collective" in Europe in the late 19th century to resist the exploitation of mainstream society. Hippies in the US also established numerous communes in the 1960s. The Amish, who immigrated to the US from the German-Swiss border in the 18th century and have preserved their religious lifestyle there for almost 300 years, are another example.

Utopias have been founded on any number of social and political bases. But the religious doctrines at the core of religious communes make them distinct by involving them in every aspect of their members' lives, both physical and spiritual. Although some Amish communities use modern technologies such as telephones and computers, hundreds of thousands of Amish still manage to live in the 21st century without electric lights, television, newspapers or automobiles. The way that they reject every aspect of modern civilization and live simple agrarian lives is indicative of the power of the religious model.

The larger-than-life personalities of the founders and leaders of new sects are crucial to attracting devoted disciples. Adherents must remember to avoid excessive or irrational reverence for their leaders. The photo captures a dedication ceremony following a night of spiritual dancing at the Ananda Marga community in Yuching, Tainan County.

Subverting tradition

The fear and uncertainty that resulted from the Cold War's ever-present threat of nuclear warfare inspired the formation of new religions of all kinds. Some sects reflected attempts to reform traditional religions. Others went in their own directions, creating their own doctrines and frequently setting themselves up as alternatives to mainstream society and cultural values. They also formed religious communities where believers gathered together to cultivate their spiritual lives.

Osho, an Indian spiritual leader, established such an organization in the 1960s, and succeeded in attracting many American and European adherents. Osho claimed that his doctrine, which incorporated elements of many schools, including Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, yogic practice, and Jainism, consisted of those portions of the Eastern and Western philosophic traditions that were most meaningful to people in the modern age. The doctrine encourages its adherents to live their true selves by boldly following their hearts and becoming autonomous "traitors to the world."

Osho, who opposed religious precepts and promoted radical autonomy, had no patience for the kind of asceticism advocated by traditional religion. Adherents paid exorbitant fees to be instructed in meditation and energy healing techniques at his Pune compound in India. The community attracted numerous Western intellectuals and artists, who made repeated pilgrimages to the site. Though Osho himself passed away in 1990, the community still boasts over 3,000 residents.

G. I. Gurdjieff's "Fourth Way" is another example. The sect, which got its start in Europe, takes inner exploration and expansion of higher consciousness as its objectives. A Gurdjieff follower went on to found the artistically inclined Apollo community in the mountains of California in 1980. Home to 600-700 residents, the community has its own vineyard, winery, music hall, orchards, vegetable gardens, maintenance facility, elementary school, and rose garden. Residents can choose to labor in the vineyards and gardens, do white-collar work in the office, or bounce between white- and blue-collar work in the workshops.

Naturally, many of these new religious communities have gone to extremes. In 1978, the US government began investigating the Peoples Temple, a Christian sect with a largely poor and black membership, in response to concerns voiced by people with family members living in the group's commune. An inquiry followed. In the conflict that resulted, the congressman leading the investigation was shot to death by members of the group near their Guyana commune. The next day, more than 900 Peoples Temple adherents died after taking poison.

Urban religious communities cannot provide their members with pastoral lives, but they can and do stress cultivating one's spiritual side in the everyday world. The photo shows members of the Amitahba Pure Land Buddhist Association, formerly the Modern Zen Society, in Taipei's Hsiangshan neighborhood.

A Taiwanese utopia

In Taiwan, the 1987 lifting of martial law led to rapid development and contention among various schools of religious thought. Local and foreign sects all picked up new adherents, and organizations with a communal orientation proliferated. The Chung Tai Chan Monastery, a largish community founded by Grand Master Wei Chueh in the mountains around Puli, Nantou County, is one such. The monastery's facilities include the Pu Tai Elementary and Junior High School, a boarding school built with donations whose student body includes children of government officials, businesspeople, and celebrities, and a residential unit where followers live and pursue Buddhist spiritual practice together. Its activities include educating the public about organic growing practices and developing the Benevolent Heart Organic Certification mechanism. Its Fuchih Educational Park, meanwhile, aims to cultivate moral, intellectual, and spiritual leaders of the future, and serves as a spiritual home for the sect's adherents around the world.

There are other smaller groups that similarly pique outsiders' curiosity with their communal living and spiritual practice arrangements.

Take, for example, the New Testament Church, a splinter Christian group whose Mt. Zion commune in Kaohsiung is a self-supporting agrarian community that educates its children on site. Or the Ananda Marga, an Indian spiritual group established in 1955 that went on to build a model community in Yuching, Tainan County. Though the community later dissolved, the group has been working to repurpose and rebuild it. Then there's the I-Kuan Tao, which draws on the Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and Islamic traditions, and formed its own "Maitreya Community" not far from the Ananda Marga model community. The Modern Zen Society, the reformist Buddhist organization behind the Mt. Hsiang Buddhist Practice Community on the outskirts of Taipei, is another case in point.

These spiritual communes may be organized differently, but all share an emphasis on cultivating the spirit or putting religious faith into practice in one's life. Members choose to live together to learn from one another and provide mutual support. Those in which members are close to one another, such as Mt. Zion and the Maitreya Community, even pool their assets and share their work and meals. They're a bit like huge families in which the children think of all the adults as aunties and uncles, and the founder as "Grandfather."

A number of Taiwan's religious communities are utilizing a self-supporting agrarian model that allows them to keep worldly influences at bay and focus on spiritual practice. The photo shows the orchard at Mt. Zion in Kaohsiung County.

Why such devotion?

In recent years, we've seen dramatic changes in society and the disintegration of the value system. As a result, people have become desperate for a spiritual safe haven. In such circumstances, it's only natural that people would turn to religion and reevaluate the meaning of their lives. But why do they find it necessary to make such radical changes, giving up their natal families, work, and personal property?

"People with a strong religious bent are drawn to this kind of life," says Lin Ku-fang, head of Fo Guang University's Graduate Institute of Art Studies. Lin says that most people don't seek solace in religion until they run upon hard times, but a few are dissatisfied with the material world even when they themselves are prospering. This latter type often seeks to understand the meaning of life and make peace with death.

The solution most commonly offered by religion is a belief in something larger than ourselves (a personal god) that resolves the difficulties of us lesser beings. Monotheistic faiths such as Christianity are of this type. And Pure Land Buddhism, with its emphasis on focused chanting of the Buddha's name and its notion of rebirth in the Western Pure Land paradise, also tends in this direction. New religions that stress the adulation of their founder also fall into this category.

For those wanting to integrate themselves into a greater whole, a collective that lives and works together can help keep the outside world at bay. Members draw strength and conviction from their communal pursuit of religious practice and typically have access to personal instruction and spiritual guidance from the founder or leader of their sect. These communities resemble traditional Buddhist or Catholic monasteries, except that the members haven't themselves become monks and can still move back and forth between the cloister and the workaday world.

But there is a downside. Within these communities, members who have had no rigorous religious education have no place to hide. Every aspect of their lives is open to scrutiny, and they may well feel compelled to change themselves in order to fit in. Those who sacrifice their lives out in the world to fully participate in one of these communities but then find that, for whatever reason, they don't fit in, are often left without any support.

In Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, author Tara Brach highlights this risk in her description of the humiliation she experienced after eight years living in an American ashram.

Brach, a clinical psychologist married to another member of the ashram, spent many busy years attending to her studies, her work, and her community. When she eventually found herself unable to keep up, the leader of the ashram began targeting her with criticism. Some time thereafter, she became pregnant. Initially ecstatic at the prospect of welcoming a new life into the world, she ultimately miscarried. In her pain, she turned to the ashram's leader seeking answers. Perhaps he felt that her questions reflected doubt in him or a lack of faith in his teaching. In any case, he chose to attack her in front of several hundred of her fellow community members. He claimed that her worldly ambitions and self-centeredness had killed the child, that she engaged in sex merely for pleasure, and that she hadn't really wanted a child. Grief-stricken and terrified, she almost had a breakdown. She feared that she would no longer be accepted by the group or her husband, explaining that the community so adored the teacher that she didn't see how she could continue to be a part of it. She ultimately chose to leave, and, after learning afresh how to accept herself, wrote her book.

Brach is a strong, highly educated woman who has been cherished her whole life. Imagine instead those with fragile personalities who are rejected by the teacher they venerate, lose the protection of their spiritual community, then go into a self-imposed exile. How would these kinds of people respond to such a battering?

In the US, the Pennsylvania Amish community has managed to retain its religious way of life for nearly 300 years. Amish women still don prayer caps and eschew makeup, and both genders wear very plain clothing to symbolize their purity and obedience.

A blessing and a curse

Living in a spiritual-practice collective isn't without risks, but the charisma of the leadership of such communities attracts hordes of disciples nonetheless. Lin Ku-fang observes that there is often something about the personalities of the founders and spiritual leaders of new religions that enables them to attract a particular type of disciple. Adherents throw themselves into these organizations like people falling in love, happily casting aside their worldly positions and possessions.

"The respect and admiration these disciples have for their leader is a blessing and a curse," says Lin Pen-hsuan, associate professor of Economics and Social Studies at National United University, who studies new religions.

First, these new religions haven't existed for long enough to really refine and polish their doctrines. Instead, these typically consist of whatever their founders have learned from their own spiritual practice. They don't stand up to close scrutiny, and sometimes simply reflect the efforts of the blind to lead the blind. Modern Zen Society founder Lin Yuan-sung's public statement of repentance to the Buddhist community prior to his death is a case in point. It also split his followers. (See "A Pure Land Right Next to Taipei 101.")

Even if these sects start out well, their founders are only mortal. What happens when they pass away?

"These groups often fragment when their leader dies," says Lin Ku-fang. He explains that disciples find it easy to offer hearts and souls to a founder they revere, but have a much harder time doing so to someone who became involved in the sect around the same time they themselves did. Acceptance will not be forthcoming unless the new leader has taken great strides in his or her spiritual practice. Without an authoritative leader, it becomes very hard for disciples who have differing personalities or interpretations of doctrine to stay together.

When Osho passed away, his Pune, India commune was transformed into a vacation resort that integrated the spiritual with the commercial, much to the dismay of many of his long-time followers. The 20-person inner circle that Osho himself had appointed was also wracked by disputes that led to the departure of some members. "No one had enough personal charisma to win disciples to their side," wrote Chang Chih-yi, a graduate student in sociology at Tunghai University, in her master's thesis. "As a result, Pune's mystical attraction has been vanishing."

The 40-acre Osho Meditation Resort attracts pilgrims from around the world, both adherents and others drawn by Osho's reputation. During group meditation, participants wear red robes to help create a "unifying atmosphere."

Searching for freedom

"One of the big issues in religious practice is the question of how you deal with other living beings," says Lin Ku-fang. Why it is that, historically speaking, most utopias burn out quickly? He argues that it's because they simplify the complexities of the human character and of social changes, then attempt to address objective social conditions based on their subjective desires.

Buddhism, for example, believes that all living things have their own individual characters. It has therefore established 84,000 ways to become a Buddhist, running the full gamut from the "emptiness" of the Zen (Chan) school to the "world affirmation" of the Tantric school (under which even the pursuit of wealth or marriage is a potentially valid spiritual pursuit). In other words, a degree of doctrinal flexibility is necessary if adherents are to seek freedom and Nirvana, and if a religion is to survive in the long term.

In contrast, many new religions are hidebound institutions that take a dim view of the differences between people. Some even form their own little nations centered around their founders. This kind of "purity" always leads to conservatism, insularity, and arrogance. Such communities become ossified internally and in their dealings with the rest of the world. As a consequence, when such groups disintegrate following the passing of their leaders, members often have a difficult time reintegrating into mainstream society.

New religions also tend to put forward broad, simplistic doctrines. And where traditional religions ask adherents to study canonical texts and make no promises that even decades of practice will lead them to "the way," new religions typically suggest that modern people hungering for answers can find their way simply by taking up their particular variety of spiritual practice. Still other organizations allow people to drop into spiritual communities as visitors. While this kind of drive-through service may help relieve some of life's stress, it is doubtful that it does much to make people more spiritual.

Debating the evidence

Looking at the broad picture, what significance do religious communities have for non-adherents and society at large? Are they simply a means for members to segregate themselves from the world and advertise their own purity and superiority? Is communal living truly, as some scholars have suggested, a rejection of progress?

"We should be asking what it is that has isolated them,'" says Yu Chao-chin, a professor of architecture at Chung Yuan Christian University. Yu sees the issue from the standpoint of sustainability: If we persist in evaluating these self-supporting organic-farming communities in terms of the large-systems perspective of industrial society, we'll forever see them as religious nuts and miss the positive significance of their actions. Yu argues that these communities in fact represent experimental challenges to industrialization and consumer culture.

Even before the 1970s, it was becoming plain that industrialization and urbanization were giving rise to a number of crises. People were losing their connection to nature, to life, to work, to other people, and even to themselves. In more recent times, globalization and technologies such as the Internet have brought this severing of ties to a head.

Yu argues that if we are to address "a future without petroleum" and the warming of the global climate, we must put aside our model of endless expansion and progress. If we are to adapt to a completely different economic model and environment, we must begin to think differently. In his view, a "small-systems" approach to production and life, as exemplified by the Mt. Zion community, is a step in the right direction. A number of these kinds of model communities have appeared in Europe in recent years, increasing numbers of which have an environmental rather than spiritual orientation.

Perhaps religious utopias will not by themselves bring their adherents to truth or enlightenment. But as long as they aren't too extreme, they can help people cleanse their minds and bodies, and bring them more into harmony with the natural world. If some day you should happen to tire of the hustle and bustle of the workaday world, you might consider seeking out one of these beautiful earthly paradises.