Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE MAVERICK: CHENG YEN
Her followers call her Shangren ('the exalted person') and consider her a living
Bodhisattva. Business magazines think she is a powerful and effective CEO. If you
listen in on one of her sermons, you might think Cheng Yen is a recycling plant own-
er. She isn't - but as the head of the worldwide Tzu Chi organisation, she does have
her own TV station on which she spends more time talking about doing good in the
world (which includes recycling) rather than expounding on scriptures. What kind
of Buddhist nun is this, you may ask? A maverick, an iconoclast, a Made in Taiwan
special.
Cheng Yen was born in 1937 to a wealthy business family in Taichung. Beautiful
and deeply compassionate, she began her journey to Bodhisattva-hood after the
death of her father compelled her to seek comfort with the Buddhist nuns living
nearby. At 24 she made the extraordinary move of running away with another nun
and spent the following years wandering the island, living in huts and caves, and
studying scripture as a lay Buddhist.
Cheng Yen's devotion and spirit caught the attention of the Venerable Yinshun, a
major advocate of reformist humanitarian Buddhism. Yinshun took Cheng Yen on
as his last student and helped her to become ordained. For the next year the nun
meditated, endured hardship and, according to her small number of disciples, per-
formed miracles.
More significantly, Cheng Yen began to display her genius for organising people
and she set about restoring dignity and rationality to monastic orders. Disciples
were, among other restrictions, forbidden to take money for alms but had to work
for their living. Such changes would pay off in the 1980s, when Taiwan's spiritually
void but progressive middle class began looking for a faith that didn't smack of su-
perstition and backwardness.
Two chance events in 1966 set the stage for the most important phase in Cheng
Yen's life: the formation of Tzu Chi. In the first incident, Cheng Yen saw a poor ab-
original woman die of a miscarriage. In the second, not long after, Cheng Yen was
challenged by three Catholic nuns over why Buddhists, with their concept of uni-
versal love, do no charity work.
Cheng Yen's response to the challenge came a few months later. Rather than ac-
cept a cushy position as a lecturer in Chiayi, she stayed in Hualien, and sensing the
latent power of Taiwanese lay society to do good, started the Tzu Chi Buddhist Hu-
manitarian Compassion Society.
The society (which is composed mostly of lay followers) grew slowly. In 1966 it
was but a handful of housewives pledging 50 cents a day to charity. By 1979,
however, it was large enough to attempt to build a hospital in then poor and mostly
aboriginal Hualien. Against the odds, the Tzu Chi (Ciji) Buddhist Hospital opened in
1989 to islandwide acclaim.
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