FO GUANG SHAN TIMELINE
1927: Hsing Yun was born Li Guoshe in Jiang-du, Jian Su province, China.
1937: founder ordained and named Jin Jue by master Zhi Kai of Da Jue Temple, Jian Su.
1945: Hsing Un was admitted to Jiaoshan seminary, Jian Su.
1947: Hsing Yun became manager of Dajue temple and principal of Baita elementary school; he founded the Angry Wave magazine.
1949: Hsing Yun arrived in Taiwan among 2,000,000 refugees led by the Nationalist Guo Min Dang under General Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai Shek). Li Guoshe changed his name to Hsing Yun.
1949: Hsing Yun was arrested and held for twenty-three days; after release he joined the Guo Min Dang (GMD).
1954: Hsing Yun arrived in Yilan and became a resident monk at the Lei Yin temple. He began to have female disciples. From this point on, females have made up ninety percent of his Saṅgha.
1967: Hsing Yun bought a parcel of land in Gao Xiong where he founded the seminary Fo Guang Shan (FGS), also known as the Eastern Buddhist Academy.
1972: Hsing Yun founded the Fo Guang Shan TV station.
1973: Xing Yun founded Shou Shan Buddhist Seminary in Gao Xiong, Taiwan.
1975: Jiang Jie Shi died.
1978: Hsing Yun founded a temple in Los Angeles, first called Baita Temple; he changed its name to Xi Lai in 1988. This was the first of 200 more international FGS branches.
1985 (September 22): Hsing Yun resigned as abbot.
1989: Martial law ended in Taiwan.
1991: The University of the West was founded in Los Angeles.
1992: Hsing Yun founded and headed the Buddhist Light International Association (BLIA) as a global extension of FGS for laity.
2013: Zhao Liyun became the first female president of the BLIA.
2014: Hsing Yun was invited to meet the Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jin Ping, who told him he had read all his books.
2021: Buddha Memorial Museum was completed to honour the third acquisition of a Tooth of the Buddha and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
2023: Hsing Yun died.
FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY
Fo Guang Shan (“Buddha Light Mountain”) was founded in 1967 by Hsing Yun (1927-2023), originally as a monastic organization (Saṅgha) for both men and women. It is one of several movements founded in Taiwan under the influence of the Chinese monk Tai Xu (1890–1947) and known in English as “Humanist/Humanistic Buddhism.” In most of the world Humanist Buddhism is best known as “Engaged Buddhism,” a term coined in 1967 by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022).
Hsing Yun was born as the second son of a poor shopkeeper in Jiang-du in 1927. The Japanese invaded China when he was about ten. His father left in search of work, lost contact and never returned. Hsing Yun and his mother then began a search. A monk they met on the way asked Hsing Yun if he would like to join the Saṅgha. He accepted and joined a large local temple, Qixia. There he lived in extreme hardship, but received next to no formal education. The master who gave him the tonsure (admission to the Saṅgha) was Zhi Kai of Da Jui temple, and through him Hsing Yun became forty-eighth in the lineage of Lin Ji. For ten years his master never allowed him to go home or treated him with any warmth. Later in life, Hsing Yun said he now realised that this treatment showed that his master had very high expectations of him.
In 1945, World War II ended and the Japanese left China. After six years of monastic life, Hsing Yun was admitted to the Jiaoshan Buddhist seminary and began to study classical Buddhist texts. In 1947, he became manager of his home temple in Da Jui and principal of Baita elementary school. He and a friend founded a Buddhist magazine called Angry Wave and edited the local newspaper. At this early period of his life he began writing. He published and preached virtually every day, even though he was at home only in his own local dialect of Chinese. He was briefly imprisoned by both Communists and Nationalists, as local power changed hands.
The only guide he found was Tai Xu (1890-1947), whose lectures he could occasionally attend. From Tai Xu he adopted the saying: “Never think of what Buddhism can do for you, only of what you can do for Buddhism.” Under the same influence, Hsing Yun asserted that the Saṅgha should work to help the laity: “monks and nuns should teach the Dharma (Buddhism) and nuns should take nurturing roles; human life should be presented as valuable and to be enjoyed…Buddhism is not a religion of empty talk. We have to start by improving people’s lives.”
In 1949, Hsing Yun arrived in Taiwan among some 2,000,000 refugees from the Chinese mainland led by the Nationalist Guo Min Dang under General Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai Shek). In the ensuing political chaos, Hsing Yun was accused of being a Communist and again imprisoned. Fortunately, Sun Zhiang Qing Yang, a rich wife married to the Commander-in-Chief of the army intervened so that he was released after twenty-three days. He was advised to become a Guo Min Dang member, and he did so. However, it took time for the government to trust him, and so he began his sermons by declaring himself a supporter of Jian Jie Shi. This led to his converting the secret police who were keeping track of him to Buddhism. Although for a while he again had to do manual work, he maintained his commitment to proselytising and to both reading and writing.
His religious career began in Yilan province in northeast Taiwan. In 1951, he organized a youth choir at Lei Yin temple, and in 1952 began a chanting society. In 1954, a local businessman, Mr. Li, invited him to become resident monk at the Lei Yin temple.
Showing a versatility barely conceivable in an autodidact, throughout his monastic career he actively encouraged his followers to participate in every form of the arts and to dedicate their efforts to Buddhism in just about every form of literature and journalism, in music, in the visual arts and even in architecture. Within this aesthetic and practical framework he always tried to promote togetherness and cooperation. Like Tai Xu, he knew no English. Moreover, he did not even master Hokkien, the form of Chinese which is the mother tongue of most Taiwanese. Rather, he always spoke Chinese with the regional accent of the area in southeast China where he was born. For public speeches to a Taiwanese audience he commonly used an interpreter into Hokkien. Nevertheless, he produced an impressive number of writings and speeches. In 1972, he began to broadcast his own daily TV programme, using Mandarin subtitles for his own speech. That programme lasted for a generation and won a national award for social education. He kept a diary, which he began to publish on the internet in 1989. He wrote on many aspects of Buddhism, both practical and theoretical, Buddhist plays and songs, calligraphy, autobiographical works, and a range of sermons, especially for large public ceremonies. He also wrote letters to the press on public affairs.
In 1957 he began daily morning radio broadcasts from a private radio station in Yilan. The programme, called “The Sound of Buddhism” (Fo jiao zhi-she), included teachings for all and Buddhism for children, chanting, and biographies of important monks. He took turns with disciples in running the programme, which was broadcast for four years and had a great impact. In 1960, on the Buddha’s birthday, he organised university students from across Taiwan for seven days to host a competition of Buddhist speeches. In 1961, a chair of Taiwan Radio’s Yilan office invited Hsing Yun to host a Buddhist programme from his public station. When Taiwan’s first TV station opened in the following year, he immediately made ample use of the new opportunities, broadcasting “The Sound of Awakening” every morning. In 1984 in Xi Lai (Los Angeles), he began broadcasting on the Chinese language radio station “The Buddha’s Light Illuminates the World.” This conveyed to Americans not only Buddhist teaching but also Chinese culture.
In 1959, Hsing Yun established a Buddhist Cultural Service office in Taipei, and there published booklets to teach Buddhism simply. He also sold aids to Buddhist practice, such as reference works and physical items (e.g. robes, bells). He edited books on Buddhism for children, and published an album of Buddhist songs. His office thus became the FGS publishing house. Its three main tasks were to publish: an FGS Tripiṭaka (which adds punctuation to the canonical text); a Buddhist dictionary; and a history of Buddhism.
Hsing Yun was expert at improvising in unusual venues rather than temples as well a to recruit young volunteers locally to help, so as to reach wide audiences. In 1956, at his very first preaching event in Yilan, there were not enough seats, but people stood in the rain for two hours to listen and watch. He also preached in army bases, adopting a style calculated to entertain soldiers. An effect of his preaching in prisons was that his nun disciple, the Ven. Ci Rong, became Chief Probation Officer in a local court. Events at the national level included preaching in Sun Yi Xian (or Sun Yat Sen) Memorial Hall and the National Art Museum. His programmes mostly included dancing and illuminations. FGS has organised all kinds of excursions, particularly pilgrimages, though these tend to offer touristic enjoyments too. FGS has its own travel agency, which organizes cruises, on which Buddhist ceremonies are performed. The group even hired a jet to visit the North Pole and see the Northern Lights. Participants are treated to new experiences (often with an American flavour), such as chicken nuggets, (since these are Buddhist nuggets, they are, of course, vegetarian).
In 2011, an annual series of events called Shenming Lianyi Hui (“Assemblies of the Deities of the World”) began. These are annual pilgrimages of a novel kind: all the deities in Taiwan, plus some from overseas, visit the Buddha Memorial Center (See below) to pay their respects to the Buddha, to acknowledge his suzerainty, and thus promote religious harmony in the whole island and beyond. An explicit aim is to bring believers in folk religions into Buddhism; deities such as the Virgin Mary are also included. FGS claims that in 2016 world records were broken when 3,000 temples took part, bringing together 380,000 believers. Serving meals (usually referred to in English as “banquets”) to a thousand visitors at once has become commonplace.
In 1967, Hsing Yun used his earnings from royalties to buy some barren land in southern Taiwan. On it he founded Fo Guang Shan, which acquired a constitution in 1972. Previously he had built a seminary, originally called Shou Shan. Originally it was located in Gao Xiong District but later it moved into the present headquarters, the main seminary, which has existed since 1967. This indicates the paramount importance Hsing Yun attached to educating the Saṅgha. Hsing Yun himself tonsured about 31,000 monastics, and there are about 1,300 currently in robes.
DOCTRINES/BELIEFS
Tai Xu was responsible for many innovations, but the two most important were (a) the view that Buddhists should concern themselves less with the dead, more with daily life, and (b) that Buddhists should cooperate in a worldwide organization. Hsing Yun followed the first and attempted also to give effect to the second.
Stuart Chandler has written that Master Hsing Yun’s “efforts have centred on creating joy through Buddhist education. … Ultimate liberation from suffering can occur only through realizing the joy of the dharma, and providing people with this opportunity … is the mission of Fo Guang Shan’s multifaceted educational enterprises”(Chandler 2004:70).
The two most fundamental facets of Hsing Yun’s personality, and thus of his ethics, are warm-heartedness and pragmatism. The most important feature of Buddhism, as a sensitive and perceptive person like Hsing Yun is bound to understand it, is its ethos of compassion (compassion for all living beings, but particularly for women and children, the sick and the aged), in a word, the disadvantaged. It is this principle, rather than any theory, that has determined his actions.
Pragmatism permeated the Buddha’s ethics. In the canonical Vinaya, the account of how and why he laid down rules for the community he founded, we can see how he adapted his decisions to circumstance; and in the teachings he gave to the laity we see how that adaptability shaped the ethical principles which underlay the whole edifice. The most basic building block of all was the law of karma.
The Buddha had many ideas of great and perhaps disconcerting originality, and it seems that he had to employ what came to be known as his “skill in means” to make them more palatable to his audiences. His central teaching about karma restated a doctrine already familiar from older local traditions, but changed the meaning of crucial terms so as to subvert the doctrine’s earlier meaning. Thus karma originally simply meant “act” or “deed,” and in a religious context meant an act that has consequences. By saying that he took the word to refer to “intention,” the Buddha created a whole new ethics and gave a new value to the basic fact of being a sentient being. To understand the karma theory, one should realize that its basic metaphor is agricultural: planting a seed and reaping a harvest.
When a Buddhist makes a moral decision, they cannot rely entirely on what a teacher (even the Buddha!) has told them, but must take account of the entire situation. There is no general principle that a rule must be (or must not be) taken literally. One first has to decide whether circumstances would make a literal interpretation inapplicable. The karma doctrine teaches uncompromising individualism: each sentient individual is a moral agent and is responsible for their own destiny. This explains why in early Buddhism (though not later, in the Mahāyāna) the Buddha cannot save anyone: he can only teach and advise.
While the individual who undoubtedly had the greatest influence on Hsing Yun’s ideas and ambitions was Tai Xu, to understand what led Hsing Yun to form FGS requires a wider view of Buddhist history. FGS could roughly be characterised as an amalgam of two great Mahāyāna movements, Zen (in Chinese: Ch’an),which was developed in the latter part of the first millennium AD, and Pure Land Buddhism. The latter was developed in Japan by the saint Shinran (1173-1262) with the name Jodo Shinshu (“True Sect of the Pure Land”).
Amidism is typical of the Japanese form of Buddhism known as tariki, literally “other power,” according to which Enlightenment can only come through the help of a Buddha (normally, Amida). Its predominant practice is the repetition of his name, and that is done to thank him for his compassion. “Obedience to the Buddhist commandments and the performance of good deeds are not necessary to attain deliverance; … it is precisely the bad man who can be sure of being born into Amida’s paradise” (Heinemann 1984:224)..
Initially, the worshipper of Amida regards their goal as rebirth, after their death here on earth, in a paradise which is presided over by Amida and situated somewhere in the remote West. (Hence it may be referred to as “the Western Paradise.”) In this heaven, they spend a blissful existence listening to Amida’s preaching, and ultimately attain Buddhahood, which means passing on into the inexpressible void in which there is no distinction between subject and object, and thus no dualism.
In one of his late letters Shinran “explains that Amida and the Pure Land lie in ourselves.” This is a form of the cardinal doctrine of many gnostic religions: To the devotee the world at that point appears transformed, but to the onlooker the transformation looks to be undergone by the devotee. For Hsing Yun, “there is no need to await rebirth to experience the bliss of a pure land; one need only fully realise the ultimate sanctity of mind and, hence, of all reality” (Yao and Gombrich 2022:23).Thus the title of Chandler’s book refers both to this world which we inhabit and to all of us, the individuals within it: it ‘assumes that optimal spiritual cultivation relies on purifying both external environment and internal intention’.
According to Hsing Yun, even this world around us can be a serene pure land so long as the mind is tranquil; ‘a tranquil mind transforms and purifies the surroundings. There is … no need to await rebirth to experience the bliss of a pure land; one need only fully realize the ultimate sanctity of mind and, hence, of all reality’(Yao and Gombrich 2022:23). Because the purity of mind necessary for meditation and recitation depends on the satisfaction of certain basic material needs, attending to those needs for oneself and others is an ineluctable part of Buddhist practice. Master Hsing Yun does not want people passively to accept their present conditions while awaiting rebirth. He states: “Today there are many Buddhists who wish to be reborn in the Sukhavati Pure Land, but I think that that is not as good as putting one’s energies to changing today’s world into a Buddhist pure land” (Yao and Gombrich 2022:24). The Western Pure Land does not exist, but since for the time being we live in this world, this is where we should concentrate our energies.
Hsing Yao urged his followers to get as much enjoyment as they could not only from their lives but also from their Buddhism. He taught that every country in the world wants to increase its GDP, so the Saṅgha should be rich (fa cai發財); that is the hope of the nation and the need of today’s Buddhism. This is an unusual line for a Buddhist leader to take. At the same time, Hsing Yun’s praise of wealth does not imply any lack of compassion for the poor – far from it. He has always shown great compassion for the down and out, especially for orphans, and tried to help them, even taking them as his disciples. It seems probable that in this regard he was deeply influenced in early life by his own experience of extreme poverty.
Hsing Yun cleverly blended the capitalist view of being rich with his argument (which may be new to Buddhism) that one should not lend money at high interest. Though he did not use the term “Middle Way,” he did appear to be applying that concept. It has been said of him that though money has seemed continually to flow to him, he so assiduously used it to support good causes that he never actually possessed much.
FGS monastics do not perform religious services for fees, but BLIA members may request a service and in return offer a contribution to the monastery (not to the individual officiants). FGS may be unique in that not only does every monk and nun receive a “small monthly wage” but also the amount varies “with an individual’s rank and post” (Chiu 2014:25). This remains a sensitive issue and wording is important. Since the wage is very small, some prefer to call it “pocket money.” Certainly the role that money plays in the lives of monastics is restricted. The monastery is not against members having monetary savings individually, provided they are not for one’s own benefit. In principle, at least, money must be used for Buddhist causes and the general good of society, and saved on FGS’s account. Monastics are not allowed to save money privately, invest in a secular business, commit usury, or leave money for use by secular members of their families.
RITUALS/PRACTICES
In his message to Taiwan and the world, Hsing Yun deliberately blurs the boundary between Buddhism and the rest of the world. What is offered by FGS in its many overseas branches is not simply Chinese Buddhism; rather, it is traditional Chinese culture in forms readily recognizable to any Chinese person who is conscious of their roots. The same message greets the hordes of visitors to the Buddha Museum which has been constructed at vast expense (surely balanced by vast income) just outside the entrance to the Gao Xiong Temple, the movement’s heaquarters.
Buddha’s Light Mountain intends to unify the eight major lineages of Chinese Buddhism. Almost any kind of Buddhist practice can be engaged in at the temple. The complex of symbols offered by FGS contains something that can speak to almost everyone. Its symbolic net is wide enough … even to include non-believers. Madsen quotes an FGS nun as telling him: ‘“This isn’t a religion, it is our cultural tradition”’(Madsen 2007:58). This matches a culture in which orthopraxy has priority over orthodoxy. Tai Xu argued that Buddhist ethics meant involvement in society and interaction with one’s fellow men, not spending hours in solitary meditation or undertaking private courses of asceticism. FGS adopts the traditional Buddhist duties “to follow a middle way between asceticism and sel-indulgence, to engage in ritual worship of Buddhas and sacralia, and to meditate. One will not find at Fo Guang Shan such practices as sealed confinement, long-term vows of silence, or the use of one’s own blood to copy sutras.”(Chandler 2004:44).
What features of Hsing Yun’s teaching most clearly differentiate FGS from the rest of Buddhism? There are two doctrines which permeate the Buddha’s teachings and play a part in Hsing Yun’s message but are far less emphasised than in most Buddhist traditions. They are the sadness of life (as in the Four Noble Truths) and karma, the foundation of his ethical philosophy. Hsing Yun was learned in the Buddha’s teachings and never impugned the validity or even the importance of those teachings, but he was committed to putting his emphasis elsewhere. A third distinguishing feature was Hsing Yun’s slight emphasis on practising meditation. He showed less enthusiasm for meditation (including Zen practice) and the usual concomitant austerities than one would expect to find in a Buddhist leader.
Hsing Yun regarded Chan as “more a way of “seeing and acting in the world than a particular form of practice.” He adopted the Chan maxim that “A day without work is a day without food,” but radically broadened it, so that he took “work” to refer not just to agriculture but to all forms of industriousness. Chandler quotes him as saying in a lecture: “The most miserable person in this world is one who does not have any work; the greatest privation in life is the loneliness of boredom” (Chandler 2004:46).
In a lecture on the internet, Hsing Yun pursued this theme further: “We promote the middle way in physical practice: we eat when we feel the need, we sleep when we feel the need. I have been asked to take the precept not to eat after lunch, but it is all right to take noodles so long as they are in liquid form. In the old days when we had no electricity we went to bed at sunset, but now we can have a longer day and complete fasting after lunch may make us ill, so there is no need to feel guilty about eating in the evening. What matters is to maintain good health” (Yao and Gombrich 2022:21).
The Buddha held ritual in very low esteem; for him, everything truly important in life takes place in the mind. Even in ethics, intention is of paramount importance. He declared sīlabbataparāmāso to be one of the first three fetters that tie us to the cycle of rebirth: it is “dependence on moral rules and religious vows,” an unhealthy attachment. Using the term sīla, commonly “morality,” with such a negative connotation may appear puzzling, but in this context it is an aspect of the Buddha’s warning against literalism: depending on sīla here means regarding morality as a matter of keeping to rules, not of taking responsibility and acting with the best intentions. The only rituals which the Buddha evidently regarded with tolerance were those concerning the dead (Yao and Gombrich 2022:95).
By contrast, Chinese culture ever since Confucius has attached great importance to a whole range of rituals which are felt to dignify and validate life in the family and in society. This has had a profound effect on the practice of Buddhism, and nowhere more than in their treatment of the dead. The cornerstone of Tai Xu’s thought when he founded “Buddhism for Human Life” was his disapproval of the Saṅgha’s deep involvement in caring for the dead (Chandler 2004:43), particularly one’s ancestors. It was by officiating in the cult of ancestors that monastics and their monasteries derived most of their income. Chinese Buddhism has solved this apparent paradox by belief in and practice of “the transfer of merit,” which has come to permeate Buddhism in every tradition. It is based on the Buddha’s dictum that the moral quality of an act resides solely in the intention behind it. A good intention may evoke a similar good intention in an onlooker, and the latter thereby earns as much merit as the first intender. Thus, if I intend to give a poor man a dollar, someone who learns of my intention may come to feel equally generous and thus develop an intention just like mine, regardless of whether the intention is finally carried out.
Karma refers not only to any intention to do good, but also specifically to a ritual act. Thus when I perform a ritual as part of a funerary rite I have acquired merit (= good karma) for myself, but if I have the thought that I wish this merit to accrue, for example, to my parents, the very thought that I want them to share in my merit makes them aware of my merit and thus fulfils that intention (This result recalls the English expression of “having your cake and eating it too”).
Historically, the “transference of merit” entered Buddhism as a concession to the overwhelming desire of Buddhists to “make merit” which they could pass on to their dead parents, who could no longer act for themselves. This is possible because the dead survive as ghosts and can be aware of what their descendants are doing and thinking. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Mahāyāna was constructed by generalizing the transfer of merit and abolishing the condition that it is possible only when the person who receives the merit is aware that it is being transferred to them. A Mahāyānist states (or thinks) that all living creatures are welcome to share the merit. No one is bothered by the fact that this noble sentiment contradicts the logic of the original doctrine, because how can everyone be aware of the transfer?
In the tradition of Chinese Buddhism followed by FGS, the commonest form of communal ritual centres on transferring merit to the dead, particularly to one’s own parents and other ancestors. The most important such ritual, held annually by most temples and twice annually in the FGS headquarters, is in English called the Water and Land ritual or the Great Compassion, and is also referred to as Feeding the Hungry Ghosts.
The main activities in the rituals practised by the FGS are purification (by sprinkling water); chanting texts (mostly in classical Chinese); and worship of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, both in general and specifically, by offering them lamps, incense, flowers and food. For major rituals participants must pay a fixed financial contribution (which Hsing Yun tried to keep at a modest level). Quite a few rituals involve repentance (chan懺 or chanhui懺悔): the repentance consists in chanting the appropriate texts, and the good karma from the chanting is thought to cancel the bad karma one has previously incurred. Bottles of water may be left in front of a Buddha image during chanting; the water thus empowered is taken away for healing and other benign purposes. Traditionally animals are released at some point in the ceremony, but Hsing Yun did not favour this ritual and so FGS tends not to practise it.
When one surveys what Hsing Yun has remarked in regard to this major ritual, one is struck by how little he has to say about the repentance, which seems to be at its core, and how much about the music, a theme intimately connected with togetherness. The role he ascribes to music is reminiscent, from a slightly different perspective, of Tai Xu’s remarks about Christian church attendance on Sundays: “they all worship with the same music and rituals, and this uniformity has a profound impact on their families. Thus the harmonic music and solemn rites mould family life and develop organizational ability.”
In general, chanting together and with the heart is the main thing, more important than getting the words right. Everyone is both giver and taker, so the merit is multiplied. A two-hour session of chanting is fine for the Saṅgha, but too long for the laity nowadays. As a child, Hsing Yun would stand chanting for hours on end, but most people prefer to sit and that is acceptable too. People can prostrate to any Buddha, even to those we do not understand. But after every service we must give a lecture and explain to the congregation the meaning of what we have been doing and the story behind it. Already in 1963, Hsing Yun displayed considerable ambivalence towards chanting as an occupation for the Saṅgha: “Among Buddhist monastics, the best will become abbots and abbesses; the weakest will be chanting for ritual (jian chan經懺) and seeking donations (hua yuan化緣). Other young monks and nuns will spend their precious lives on lengthy chanting morning and evening and cleaning the monasteries. In more than ten years they will only have learnt to sweep the floor and chant, nothing else. This is a very serious problem for Buddhism” (Yao and Gombrich 2022:104-05).
In the days of Tai Xu, when the body was cremated in a coffin along with Buddhist objects, funerals were elaborate and expensive. Most of the rituals involved chanting by monastics, for which they were paid fees by the descendants, and in many cases a large part of a monastery’s income depended on the services performed for the dead. The ideology of filial piety ensured that most descendants did their duty on a generous scale. Traditional celebration of funerals in this style is by no means obsolete. Hsing Yun has not attempted to abolish funerary rituals or commemorative rites for the dead. Not only would this have been shocking to the sentiments of his followers, it would completely forego this major source of income, which would have been foolhardy.
ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP
Abbots of FGS are elected by the Religious Affairs Committee, which headquarters founded in 1967. At that time, then aged forty, Hsing Yun began to stop centering his activites on Yilan and went south to Gao Xiong to found Fo Guang Shan. He served as its first abbot until he abdicated in 1985. From then on, every abbot has held office for four years, sometimes more than once.The position has never been offered to a woman, despite their historic importance.
Hsing Yun said that Fo Guang Shan complies with the times and often adjusts the direction of propagating the Dharma so that it can operate sustainably. Expanding on the rejuvenation and “collective leadership” emphasized by Master Hsing Yun, Ven. Ci Hui has written (in the 1987 yearbook): “Master Hsing Yun practices collective creation by himself, rather than dictatorial leadership. He wanted collective creation and brainstorming to become the inheritance assets of Fo Guang Shan. The members of the religious committee are all elected by all Saṅgha members. through fair and just democratic elections. Candidates must have a bachelor’s degree or above and have a good understanding of Fo Guang Shan. They will never vote blindly. The Saṅgha attaches great importance to precepts. Though the seniority of the selected religious committee is relatively low, the public will respect the system and support the leadership. The election system of the Religious Committee has set a good example for Buddhism.”
Hsing Yun’s first semi-official deputy (one might say “chief disciple”) was Xin Ping, a layman from Yilan, who was trained as a printer. After his military service, he was working at a printing factory when Hsing Yun phoned to ask him for help. At this he left his job and moved to live with Hsing Yun in Taipei. He was formally ordained (i.e.,was tonsured) on January 1, 1963, and was officially announced as Hsing Yun’s first disciple. More than a thousand people attended this ceremony. In 1973, when FGS founded its own Saṅgha , he was its first leader, and Hsing Yun again publicly declared him to be his first disciple. When Hsing Yun resigned as abbot in 1985, Xin Ping became his successor and received the Dharma scroll from him. By this act he became the forty-nineth patriarch in the lineage of Lin Ji Chan. For many years he was the only male in the FGS Saṅgha. His work focused on the production and distribution of publications.
When Hsing Yun moved the headquarters to Gao Xiong, Xin Ping was usually the only FGS person to stay on the site. His life style was ascetic: he had his own small hut, drank water from the stream, collected firewood for cooking, and lived on fresh vegetables. He recorded the local geography, flora and fauna, and climate. Hsing Yun said he was the person who had to be given the credit for their buildings there. When Hsing Yun was on his travels, Xin Ping took over his duties and responsibilities at the base. Though modest about his gifts, he was known to sing beautifully, had excellent visual taste, and was a superb cook. However, he died of liver cancer in 1995, at age fifty-eight.
Hsing Yun resigned as abbot on September 22, 1985. In the ceremony to install Xin Ping as his successor, Hsing Yun led a musical procession, and on arrival he read the Dharma scroll and passed it to Xin Ping. He also gave him a rope and a bowl, and a written code of conduct, “the eye of the Dharma.” Xin bowed to Hsing Yun nine times and vowed to take the latter’s wish as his own, to preach to benefit society, and to receive guests from the ten directions. Ven. Yue Ji, a senior monk, then spoke to exhort Xin Ping. Hsing Yun then spoke and stated that he had resigned for four reasons:
To show that Darma principle is more important than human principle.
There was nothing that was required to be done by him personally.
Resignation was not retirement.
This enhanced the exchange between the generations.
In 1978, Hsing Yun founded a branch temple in Los Angeles, which in1988 became the Xi Lai temple, the largest Buddhist temple in America. In 1991, he attached a monastery to the temple, and founded the University of the West (Xi Lai). Previously, in 1988, he offered the Chinese ordination rite to both Tibetan and Theravadin nuns, hoping that they might eventually establish FGS ordination lineages in their own countries. He held this rite at Xi Lai, which he envisioned as a centre for Chinese American Buddhists and the flagship of his mission to the West. By 1988, about 3,000 monks and 7,000 nuns had received the rite.
In 1992, Hsing Yun founded and headed the Buddhist Light International Association (BLIA) as a global extension of FGS for the laity. The laity previously had no formal organization. The BLIA was and remains the biggest religious organisation ever founded in Taiwan. When it was formally inaugurated in 1992 in Los Angeles, an event attended by 4,000 people from forty-five countries, the BLIA was strongly supported by a politician named Wu Boxiung. He held a number of other positions in government: Home Secretary, Head of the National Security Council, Mayor of Taipei and chair of the GMD party. At the inauguration, Wu was elected as one of four vice-chairs. He later became its president, and then he and Hsing Yun became Honorary Presidents of BLIA World. Wu gave his family home as FGS provincial office in Zhongli. By 2010, Hsing Yun had established 260 branches in the five continents. There is currently no formal term that includes both the FGS Saṅgha and the BLIA, but there exist such informal terms as “the Fo Guang people.” Their number has been estimated as high as 6,000,000 worldwide, but is probably less.
In the religious freedom of Taiwan since 1989, Hsing Yun, as unquestioned leader, had a free hand in moulding his Saṅgha according to his own ideas, some of which can be called novel. Hsing Yun attempts to preach modernism without sacrificing his allegiance to Chinese tradition. His syncretism often turns out to be a combination of the old and the new.
There are some notable examples; one is lines of transmission. In Chinese Buddhism, these generally follow the same rules as does inheritance in a patrilineal society. There is more than one kind of teacher, but the most important is the monk who ordains you and thus remains as it were your “father” in Buddhism. The chronological order of a teacher’s pupils is never forgotten and the father to son lineage may be maintained over centuries. Hsing Yun also chose to transmit the forty-nineth generation of Lin Ji to thirty of his disciples. They came from Taiwan, U.S., Canada, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Hong Kong. Hsing Yun made much of being Tai Xu’s pupil, but he himself repeatedly innovated, bestowing ordination on pupils, both male and female, from other temples. His most spectacular move was to let it be known that he was willing to ordain nuns from any lineage, going even beyond the confines of Chinese Buddhism. In 1988, he “decided to offer the Chinese ordination rite to Theravāda as well as Tibetan nuns.” The occasion he chose was the consecration of the Xi Lai monastery in Los Angeles. 250 candidates, male and female, from sixteen countries were ordained.
Hsing Yun also has changed how the hierarchy works in another way. At the beginning of The Practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900–1950, Holmes Welch (1967:4) explains that in China there had been to be two kinds of Buddhist temple, the public (shí fāng cóng lín四方叢林) and the hereditary (zî sūn miào子孫廟).
The essential characteristic of the hereditary temple was private ownership. It belonged personally to a monk or group of monks, who operated it as they pleased. On the other hand, the public monastery was supposed to be the property of the whole Buddhist Saṅgha and to be operated in accordance with a common monastic rule.
FGS was a private temple owned by Hsing Yun, but he gave it features otherwise found only in public temples. The most important is that a member of the Saṅgha is not admitted (ordained) into the lineage of a current monastic individual but acquires the whole ordaining generation as his/her collective master. This hybridity of temple type is unique.
Visitors from Theravāda countries may be astonished to find that monks and nuns share FGS monasteries; of course. While they have separate dormitories, they mingle throughout their daily lives. This is unprecedented in the Theravādin Saṅgha. Indeed, in Thailand monks go to extraordinary lengths to avoid any physical contact with women; but in Chinese tradition the separation is often far less rigorous. At Gao Xiong, the Ci’an Nunnery is for nuns and the Dajue Monastery for monks; most departments are run by either monks or nuns, seldom if ever by both. Indeed, some of the organizational principles were strikingly conservative. Hsing Yun, a male, headed a Saṅgha consisting of eighty to ninety per cent women, and most of his early followers, starting from his days in Yilan, were women. He depended on women to take almost all the important roles. Yet, though the leadership of FGS has changed several times, the top position has never been offered to a woman. Even today, except for a couple of comparatively large temples, the branch temples are staffed only by nuns.
ISSUES AND CHALLENGES
In 1998, Hsing Yun was entrusted with the custody of a relic, one of the Buddha’s teeth; the ceremony took place in Bangkok at the headquarters of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, of which Hsing Yun remained Hon. President until his death. In order to house this relic in sufficient sanctity and splendour, he had the Buddha Memorial Center built at FGS, which is not a single building but a major complex . It exhibits to the public what Hsing Yun, who designed it, considers the essentials of Buddhism. This complex was opened to the public late in 2011, and in 2016 was finished by erecting in the middle a new College of Humanistic Buddhism. It also features a Historical Museum. The museum issues an illustrated folding leaflet that identifies FGS objectives:
the objectives of propagating Buddhism through culture, fostering talent through education, benefiting society through charity, and purifying the human mind through cultivation to advance Buddhism past the new milestone of modernization and spread Humanistic Buddhism from Taiwan to the world.
The aim of Buddhism is thus not to help people to escape from life, but to show them how to solve its problems by deploying their talents. They should engage with society, not avoid it, and eliminate obsolete customs and prejudices.
In this same pamphlet we read of Hsing Yun:
His arhat shoes leave behind traces of four-colored lotus flowers, and his waving robe sleeves produce Pure Lands with seven gems.” In the very next paragraph we read: “Throughout his life, the Venerable Master Hsing Yun never received a formal education and never received an official diploma. … His every thought, spoken word, and action all abide by the principle of being an ordinary monk who never does anything that is not for Buddhism.
These statements well illustrate the double vision presented to devotees throughout the FGS: the Master is at the same time an enlightened being (the charismatic side) and an ordinary monk without even the advantages of a superior education (the pragmatic side). Similarly, FGS pragmatically sets about turning our world into a Pure Land (a heaven on earth, a Christian would say), but in fact that Pure Land is already here, constantly evoked in art, music, rituals, and the never failing benignity of the Master.
The attitude to education is striking; in this case one can call it an ambivalence. Hsing Yun has followed Tai Xu in attaching paramount importance to educating his Saṅgha. When other founders of religious movements would probably begin by building a shrine, Hsing Yun founded the HQ of FGS by establishing a seminary, and the early years of FGS saw a seemingly non-stop flow of foundings of educational institutions from kindergarten to night school. Rank within the Saṅgha has been largely determined by educational achievement, and formal examinations played as great a part as in any Confucian establishment.
The key probably lies in Hsing Yun’s Biography of Śākyamuni (Yun 2013:3), which states that the Buddha’s teachings “are still hampered by those who mystify the teachings and ignore the spirit of the Buddha coming into this world. When their philosophy transcends the practical, they fail to experience the Buddha’s intention.” It may be that in “the spirit of the Buddha coming into this world” there is an echo of the Christian belief that God sent Jesus into this world to suffer alongside mankind.
With the death of Hsing Yun, the main challenge will be how to replace his charismatic leadership and in particular to raise funds, to maintain recruitment, and to find Saṅgha leaders of both sexes. Moreover, although branches have been opened in India and Africa, and a few local members have there been ordained, there are hardly any non-Chinese in the overseas branches.
The greatest challenges to preserving the range of institutions and customs created by Hsing Yun go beyond financial. In Africa and India, FGS has been interpreted in different ways. In India it has been accepted as a revival of mainstream Buddhism, whereas in Africa it appears to some as a Chinese attempt at colonialisation, similar to the activities of Western Christian missionaries.
In traditional Buddhism, schism takes place within the Saṅgha and has no formal effect on the laity, and this remains true of the FGS. There is no official record of when a monk or nun leaves the FGS. In some years more have left than have been ordained, but it is impossible to find out how many have left or their identities. One point of continuity is that as in the original FGS, male leaders of new branches may have female disciples.
REFERENCES
Chandler, Stuart. 2004. Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: The Foguang Buddhist Perspective on Modernization and Globalization. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Chiu, Tzu-lung. 2014. “Rethinking the Precept of not taking money in contemporaryTaiwanese and mainland Chinese Buddhist nunneries.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 21:1–56.
Fo Guang Shan. 1987. 20th Yearbook. Edited by the Religious Affairs Committee. Kaohsiung: FGS.
Heinemann, Robert K. 1984. “This world and the other power.” In The World of Buddhism, edited by Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich. London: Thames and Hudson.
Madsen, Richard. 2007. Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Welch, Holmes. 1967. The Practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Yao, Yu-Shuang and Richard Gombrich. 2022. Chinese Buddhism Today. Sheffield: Equinox.
Yun, Hsing. 2013. The Biography of Sakyamuni Buddha. Hacienda Heights, CA: Buddha’s Light Publishing.
Publication Date:
13 August 2024
