名人推薦
VENERABLE MASTER HSING YUN: A LIFE REMEMBERED
Most Venerable Hsin Bau summarizes Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s life as the embodiment of the vow, “For the sake of Buddhism, give rise to the bodhi mind.” The bodhi mind (bodhicitta in Sanskrit) is at the core of Mahāyāna Buddhism. It is defined as the aspiration to attain complete enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, and marks the beginning of the bodhisattva path. It has two aspects: the aspiration for enlightenment and the engagement with sentient beings. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra states, “If you want to see all the Buddhas of the ten directions, if you wish to bestow an inexhaustible treasury of merit and virtue, and if you want to extinguish the afflictions and suffering of all sentient beings, immediately arouse bodhicitta.” Keeping this vow, Venerable Master Hsing Yun was able to achieve great things. He was both ordinary and extraordinary. As he expressed in his own verse:
A mind with the compassionate vow to deliver sentient beings,
A body like a boat on the Dharma ocean, unbound.
Should you ask what I have achieved in this lifetime?
Peace and happiness shine upon the five continents.
Venerable Master Hsing Yun (1927–2023) entered monastic life at the age of twelve and spent the next eighty years in unwavering service to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. He propagated the Dharma across the world, established over four hundred temples and cultural enterprises, nurtured more than a thousand monastic disciples and millions of lay followers, and tirelessly advanced the vision of Humanistic Buddhism as the teaching most suited to the needs of humanity in the contemporary world. When he passed away on February 5, 2023, he left behind not only an extraordinary institutional legacy, but also a living community of practitioners, scholars, and friends whose lives had been touched, and sometimes transformed, by his teachings and his spirit.
This eighth volume of Studies on Humanistic Buddhism is dedicated to his memory. The title, Venerable Master Hsing Yun: A Life Remembered, reflects the dual nature of the tribute it offers. The articles here are acts of remembrance in the truest sense: they do not merely look backward, but carry forward the commitments, inquiries, and communities that Venerable Master Hsing Yun spent his life building. The contributors include monastics and lay scholars, longtime disciples and independent researchers, practitioners, and academics. Together, they demonstrate the breadth and vitality of the Humanistic Buddhist tradition he shaped. To read the volume as a whole is to encounter an extraordinary life not from a single vantage point, but from many angles—philosophical, institutional, ethnographic, personal, and finally, in the Venerable Master’s own voice.
The fourteen articles in this volume have been arranged in three themes, each illuminating a distinct dimension of Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s life and legacy. The themes move from the inner to the outer, and from the institutional to the intimate: from the philosophical and spiritual foundations of his vision, through the ethical systems he put in place, to the communities and institutions he built, to the embodied memories and personal recollections that carry forward his legacy.
The volume opens with Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s own “An Honest Revelation—An Open Letter,” written in October 2014 and addressed to his Dharma protectors, friends, and disciples. It is fitting that the opening voice in a tribute volume should be that of the person being remembered. The letter is remarkable for its directness, its generosity, and its characteristic refusal of self-importance. “All my life, many have thought of me as rich,” he wrote, “but the truth is, staying poor has always been my motto.” He owned no desk, no cupboard, no savings; everything he built belongs to the public, to the monastery, to the world. Using a Buddhist framework, he pointed out that “Everything in this Dharma realm belongs to me, yet the phenomenon of impermanence also tells me that nothing is mine.” He also provided guidance to practitioners of Humanistic Buddhism, “Remain connected to the world [...] but [...]we must not be overly deliberate or discriminative.” He reflected on the difficulty of fairness, the importance of the bodhi seeds planted in the Buddhist colleges, and the necessity of transmitting Humanistic Buddhism not as doctrine but as lived practice—conveyed in ways that “reach out to families and are accepted by people.” His closing words were a wish for his disciples that is also, for the reader of this volume, a blessing: “The banner of Dharma cannot be toppled. The lamp of wisdom must never be extinguished.”
The second article is a tribute by Most Venerable Hsin Bau, Head Abbot of Fo Guang Shan Monastery and Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s successor. Most Venerable Hsin Bau frames Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s entire life as the embodiment of a single vow: for the sake of Buddhism, give rise to the bodhi mind. This was not merely an aspiration, but a daily practice, sustained across eight decades. What distinguished Venerable Master Hsing Yun from others who shared his reformist vision, Most Venerable Hsin Bau writes, was precisely this: that his motivation was never self-serving. “Benefiting others is benefiting oneself” was not a slogan, but the lived logic of a life in which selflessness and self-cultivation were always understood as two aspects of the same practice. The bodhisattva path, as practiced at Fo Guang Shan, is not cultivated in solitude, but collectively, in the midst of activity, among the multitude.
Lewis R. Lancaster, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the foremost scholars of Buddhist studies in the English-speaking world, contributes a personal memoir of three encounters with Venerable Master Hsing Yun spanning more than three decades. His article “Encountering the Extraordinary: Meeting Master Hsing Yun” is based on a talk he gave at Fo Guang Shan. It is a tribute not only to the work of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, but to the man himself. The first meeting took place in 1988, when Venerable Master Hsing Yun gave his public endorsement, the only voice raised in support in a silent auditorium, to Lancaster’s then- speculative proposal to use computers in Buddhist research. The second unfolded years later, when Venerable Master Hsing Yun provided the decisive support needed to install a groundbreaking virtual reality exhibit of maritime Buddhist archaeology at the Buddha Museum in Kaohsiung, a project that has since welcomed over two million visitors. The third and final encounter was a wordless one: Venerable Master Hsing Yun, with his sight and speech severely impaired due to suffering from several strokes, reached out and took Lancaster’s hand and simply held it. Lancaster draws on these memories not to eulogize, but to illuminate: each story reveals something essential about Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s character—his openness to imperfect beginnings, his capacity to live within what the Perfection of Wisdom calls endlessness, and his undiminished practice of loving-kindness to the very end. Lancaster describes their final meeting, “It was an extraordinary encounter. It was extraordinary.”
The next three articles discuss the philosophical foundations that underlie Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s vision. Venerable Juewei’s “Embodying Emptiness, Manifesting Wonder” traces the doctrinal roots and distinctive character of one of Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s teachings: wondrous manifestations arise from emptiness (空中生妙有). Writing as the founding director of Nan Tien Institute’s Humanistic Buddhism Centre (HBC), she looks at the concept of śūnyatā from its early Mahāyāna expression in the Perfection of Wisdom texts through the Chinese Buddhist philosopher Sengzhao’s insight that the everyday phenomenal world is itself intrinsically empty, to the modern expositions of masters such as Hsu Yun, Sheng Yen, and Cheng Yen. Against this backdrop, Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s contribution emerges as distinctive: rather than emphasizing the ontological meaning of emptiness, he focuses on its functional dimension, redefining emptiness as the condition of affinities in an interdependent world. Emptiness, on this reading, is not negation but possibility. Emptiness is the generative ground from which wondrous manifestations arise through the cultivation of good causes and conditions. She then discusses how this teaching has been embodied in the first decade of the HBC’s own organic, unplanned, yet intentional growth. She guided HBC from a center with no budget to a national hub for Humanistic Buddhist research and community engagement, offering the institution as a living case study in what “boundless and collaborative spacious creativity” looks like in practice.
Yi Jizhang’s “Philosophical Foundations of Humanistic Buddhism: Middle Way and Nonduality” draws on Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy and the Chan teaching of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng that “Dharma is nonduality.” Yi proposes that middle way and nonduality provides a precise and generative interpretive lens for Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Humanistic Buddhism, one that is grounded in dependent origination and the mutual implication of conventional and ultimate truth. Yi concludes by examining Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s famous teaching “I am Buddha” as a case study, showing how this bold affirmation functions not as an ontological claim, but as a skillful means (upāya) rooted in nonduality: an invitation to practitioners to recognize their own Buddha-nature and take responsibility for their lives.
The theme of Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s philosophical vision closes with Nathan Jishin Michon’s “The Three Acts of Goodness as the Bricks to Build a Pure Land: Connecting Three Keys in the Eightfold Path to Leadership and Social Change.” Michon draws together the threads of individual ethical practice and collective social aspiration that run through the preceding articles. Michon takes seriously Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s teaching that a Pure Land can be created in this world. A Pure Land is not a distant destination, but a present possibility, contingent on the purification of human minds and the transformation of human communities. Working carefully through the Buddha’s teachings on right view, right speech, and right action within the noble eightfold path, Michon demonstrates the deep resonance between these classical teachings and the Three Acts of Goodness. He then extends the analysis into the realms of leadership and social change, drawing on both the Buddha’s advice to rulers and contemporary organizational leadership theory to show how the cultivation of good thoughts, words, and actions—practiced by individuals, embodied by leaders, and modeled across communities—is the practical path toward the Pure Land that Venerable Master Hsing Yun envisioned and worked to realize throughout his life.
The next set of articles examine the ethical systems and practices through which Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s vision was lived and transmitted. The five articles on this theme span practical ethics for a changing world, the concept of giving in Humanistic Buddhism, comparative ethics, and the ethics of emerging digital technology.
“Hsing Yun’s Humanistic Buddhism: An Ethics of Care in the VUCA World,” coauthored by Venerable Miao Guang and Maria Majorie R. Purino, brings the philosophical vision of Venerable Master Hsing Yun into direct conversation with contemporary ethical theory and the urgent realities of modern life. Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, Joan Tronto’s understanding of caring as a relational and sustaining activity, and the concept of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world first introduced in leadership studies and now widely used to characterize the crises of the twenty-first century, the authors argue that Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Humanistic Buddhism provides precisely the ethical framework that this world requires. The four immeasurables (brahmavihārās) and the six perfections (pāramitās) of the bodhisattva are not abstract ideals, but practical virtues, relational and outward-facing, oriented toward the web of relationships in which every human life is embedded. The Three Acts of Goodness (do good deeds, speak good words, think good thoughts) and the Four Givings (give others confidence, joy, hope, and convenience) are here understood as the bodhisattva vow made operational in everyday life—a “skillful means” for cultivating compassion, empathy, and social responsibility in a world of rapid change and deep uncertainty.
In “Toward a Buddhocentric Environmentalism: Humanistic Buddhism and the Cultivation of a Pure Land on Earth,” Henry Shiu also raises the topic of creating a Pure Land in this world, in this case from the perspective of environmental ethics. Shiu posits that Venerable Master Hsing Yun held a distinctive alternative to environmentalism that is neither strictly anthropocentric nor simply biocentric. Its orientation is explicitly soteriological: to reconfigure humanity’s relationship to the environment as a mode of Buddhist practice known as “Working Chan.” For this reason, he describes the approach as “Buddhocentric.” Environmental awareness and protection, in this framework, become integral to realizing a Pure Land on earth, through the purification of the mind that perceives and engages with the natural world.
Tracy Xinying Liu’s “Connecting the Self with Others: The Ethics of Giving in Fo Guang Shan Humanistic Buddhism” brings this ethical inquiry to the ground level through ethnographic fieldwork at Dajue Temple in Yixing, China—the ancestral temple of Fo Guang Shan. Drawing on participant observation at a five-day Cultural Creativity Market, Liu examines how monastics, lay devotees, youth volunteers, artists, and non- Buddhist visitors enact Humanistic Buddhist giving in practice. Her analysis identifies three distinct but interrelated modes of giving: providing material and immaterial support to those in need, making offerings to the Triple Gem, and giving to develop affinities (jieyuan 結緣). What distinguishes Humanistic Buddhist giving from the alms-based model of other traditions, Liu argues, is its dissolution of the fixed monastic-lay performative divide in favor of an ontological equality between giver and recipient grounded in shared merit accumulation. This is not (guanxi 關係), the instrumental cultivation of social networks, but an engaged enactment of dependent origination: every act of generosity plants a seed whose fruit will ripen in accordance with the law of cause and effect, for the benefit of both giver and recipient. Humanistic Buddhist giving can assist practitioners in nurturing selflessness and overcoming attachments, thereby embodying the bodhisattva spirit of benefiting the self through benefiting others.
Liu Qingquan’s “Filial Piety and Compassion: Family Ethics in Humanistic Buddhism and the Practice of Social Responsibility” shifts the lens from a regional case study to a comparative ethical analysis. Liu examines how Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s model of charity, based on the idea that “all sentient beings are one family,” transforms the Confucian virtue of filial piety into Buddhist compassionate practice by taking the family as the basic unit of spiritual cultivation and extending ethical concern outward from parent to child, from family to community, from community to all sentient beings. Through a detailed comparison of Fo Guang Shan’s global charitable network with the Zhejiang Anfu Lisheng Charity (An Foundation), a regionally focused Buddhist welfare organization in mainland China, Liu illuminates both what is distinctive about the Hsing Yun model and what it shares with other contemporary expressions of Buddhist social responsibility. The article situates Humanistic Buddhism within the broader history of the Chinese Buddhist synthesis of Confucian and Mahāyāna ethics, arguing that Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s achievement was to give that synthesis a modern institutional form capable of operating at a global scale.
The final article on the theme of ethics is David Starlyte’s “The Bodhisattva in the Machine: Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Vision for Humanistic Buddhism in the Digital Age.” This qualitative study examines Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s prescient embrace of technology, from the wheelbarrow-mounted loudspeaker of his early Dharma propagation in Taiwan to Fo Guang Shan’s current use of AI-powered translation tools and virtual reality experiences such as Journey to the Land of Buddha, as expressions of a consistent principle: that any technology capable of alleviating suffering and spreading the Dharma is a valid skillful means. Engaging with Buddhist doctrines of dependent origination, non-self, and Buddha-nature, the article proposes a Buddhist ethical framework for AI development grounded in compassion, wisdom (prajñā), and the bodhisattva vow. The utility of Buddhist values in the development and integration of new technology lies in the mindful, ethical, and interconnected matrix it provides. The question the article poses is both contemporary and perennial: can technology be made to serve the alleviation of collective suffering, or will it become another vehicle of greed, aversion, and ignorance? Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s answer, Starlyte argues, was always the same: progress without moral vision is hollow; technology must remain yoked to compassion.
The third theme turns from doctrine, ethics, and institutional history to the most intimate dimension of any life: how it is remembered by those who knew and loved the person being commemorated.
Sioh-Yang Tan’s “Commemorating Venerable Master Hsing Yun through an Invented Food Practice in the Communal Context of Fo Guang Shan” moves from the individual act of remembrance to the communal and embodied. On February 12, 2025—the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year and the second anniversary of Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s passing—Fo Guang Shan temples around the world joined together to hand-make tuanzi, glutinous rice dumplings filled with shepherd’s purse that are a traditional delicacy in Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s hometown of Yangzhou. Venerable Master Hsing Yun had recalled eating them with unusual relish on his first trip back in 1994, a sentimental homecoming after decades away. Tan proposes that making tuanzi is an invented, semi-ritualized, semi-formal communal food practice that allows both monastic and lay Fo Guang members to connect with Venerable Master Hsing Yun and with each other as a community in an embodied manner. She examines this new communal food practice through the lens of lived religion and material religion, analyzing the tuanzi making in three registers: the material (the dough, the fillings, the temple kitchen, the altar where finished dumplings are offered), the individual (the personal memories and reflections of monastic and lay participants), and the social (the Fo Guang Shan community’s bonds of belonging and its characteristic integration of the formal and the festive). The act of kneading dough, Tan describes, is a practice of patience and mindfulness; the sharing of food across five continents is a form of communal cultivation; and the tuanzi, carried from kitchen to altar to dining hall, become at once an offering to Venerable Master Hsing Yun, a gift to the community, and a vehicle for the kind of embodied memory that keeps a teacher alive in his disciples.
Daniel Wu provides a comprehensive account of the Buddha’s Light International Association (BLIA), the lay organization Venerable Master Hsing Yun founded in 1992 as the essential counterpart to the Fo Guang Shan monastic order. Likening Fo Guang Shan and BLIA to the “two wings of a bird,” Wu examines the organizational innovations that have made BLIA a distinctive force in the modern transmission of the Dharma: its formal democratic governance structure, its cultivation of lay Dharma teachers, its rotation of leadership to prevent stagnation, and its ability to engage with secular institutions such as governments, non-governmental organizations, interfaith bodies, and the United Nations. Wu also addresses the challenges BLIA faces: generational transition, linguistic barriers in diasporic communities, the rise of secular Buddhism, and competition from other Buddhist traditions in the West. His article is both a historical account and a forward-looking analysis, asking how BLIA can remain true to Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s founding vision while adapting to an ever-changing world.
Lourdes S. Lim’s tribute article provides a vivid and deeply personal complement to Wu’s structural analysis, focusing on the impact of Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Humanistic Buddhism in the Philippines through the testimony of BLIA Philippines members. The Philippines presents a distinctive and instructive case: a predominantly Catholic country where Buddhism has taken root, not through conversion, but through what Venerable Miao Guang has analyzed as a long-term process of acculturation and mutual acceptance. Lim traces the growth of Fo Guang Shan and BLIA in the Philippines from the founding of Chu Un Temple in Cebu in 1989 through the establishment of Guang Ming College, the integration of the Three Acts of Goodness into the moral education curricula of over three hundred public schools, and the internationally staged Prince Siddhartha the Musical. Drawing on survey responses and personal testimonies from thirty-four BLIA members, she shows how Humanistic Buddhism has transformed individual lives, strengthened families and communities, and created a model of interfaith harmony that is at once distinctly Buddhist and deeply Filipino.
May this volume serve as one small offering in repayment for the great compassion and loving-kindness of Venerable Master Hsing Yun.
