Taiwan Today

One year after his death, the works and teachings of a revered Buddhist master continue to influence the lives of thousands of people around the world.

Visit Dharma Drum Mountain, a Buddhist monastery about an hour’s drive northeast of Taipei, and you’ll likely be taken to see a curious waxwork figure in a small museum in one of the buildings. The figure is of Chan Master Sheng Yen, the monastery’s founder, meditating in a small hut during a six-year solitary retreat in southern Taiwan.

The waxwork illustrates two apparently contradictory facts about Sheng Yen: his single-minded, sometimes lonely, dedication to Chan, an austere Zen practice of experiential wisdom that eschews fame and wealth; and his immense renown in Taiwan, where he helped spark a renaissance of Buddhist practice.

When Sheng Yen died of renal failure at the age of 79 in February 2009, Republic of China President Ma Ying-jeou and mainland China Religious Affairs Minister Ye Xiaowen both attended his funeral. Kung fu movie star Jet Li and well-known Taiwanese actress Brigitte Lin issued public statements, while as many as one million followers, mostly ethnic Chinese, mourned around the world. Today, when you ask almost any adult in Taiwan about Sheng Yen, the result is likely to be a story about his good works in areas such as typhoon relief or suicide prevention.

Not that this self-deprecating monk sought fame for its own sake. Beginning in 1976, he spent three out of every six months in the United States, a country where he was not widely known outside his circle of Chinese disciples and a small number of American students. At his small temple in Queens, a borough of New York City, and at a meditation center in upstate New York, he led smaller groups in the same rigorous Zen retreats that attracted hundreds of practitioners in Taiwan.

Ven. Guo Dong, who holds the title of Dharma Drum Mountain abbot president, recalls Sheng Yen saying, “it doesn’t matter whether I, Sheng Yen, become an accomplished practitioner, or if the name Sheng Yen will remain a household name for years to come. Individual achievement in itself does not perpetuate Buddhadharma [Buddhist principles].”

Burden of Fame

The growing renown, both in the United States and at home, was not something that Sheng Yen could easily dodge, however, especially after 1998, when Taiwan’s Commonwealth magazine named him one of Taiwan’s 50 most important people of the last 300 years. Indeed, fame was often a burden to Sheng Yen, as everyone from housewives to government ministers sought his counsel. Ven. Guo Hsiang, a nun and early disciple, remembers him saying “I’m as busy as an American president.” Still, somehow, despite being so busy, he was able to write more than 90 books, many of which were translated from Chinese to English and other languages.

One year after Sheng Yen’s death, his life retains something of the paradox of a Zen koan, a phrase students repeat over and over until their rational minds let go: His pictures and name are everywhere at Dharma Drum Mountain and sister facility Nung Chan Monastery, yet he had no money or possessions of his own and forbade followers from creating monuments to him or giving him a fancy funeral. He was born to a desperately poor family, but by the end of his life he was the founder of Dharma Drum Mountain, a project that cost millions of dollars. And he sought to revitalize Chinese Buddhism by adapting it to modern society and the West, while remaining faithful to a practice that has changed little since his lineage was established 52 generations ago in mainland China by a Buddhist master named Dong Shan.

Japanese Zen is better known to Westerners, but Chan predated and inspired Zen. Chan is said to have been taken to China by the Indian prince Bodhidharma, who legend has it sat in meditation so long that his legs fell off. That image is apt: Zen emphasizes experiential wisdom, not theoretical knowledge found in books. Enlightenment comes, in part, from vast amounts of sitting meditation. Many of Sheng Yen’s students, who sat in retreats for days at a time, undoubtedly felt sometimes they were also about to lose their legs.

Sheng Yen taught a practice that is as simple as counting the breath and sitting cross-legged on a cushion. Simple but not easy: Practitioners discover that their attention is constantly diverted by the flow of thoughts. As their concentration improves and thoughts quiet down, however, they begin to see things directly, without judgment or commentary, and deep understandings become possible.

Sheng Yen also incorporated traditional Chan practices such as the paradoxical koans and yelling at or even striking students to shock them into new states of consciousness. “He was not a soft master. He was very tough,” says John Crook, an evolutionary psychologist from the United Kingdom and one of Sheng Yen’s so-called Dharma heirs, part of an unbroken lineage of Chan masters stretching back more than 1,000 years. “The interviews were very challenging indeed—he had an extraordinary ability to draw things out of you.”

Traditional Chan practices require intensive work over months and years, and were vanishing by the time Sheng Yen started teaching in Taiwan in 1978. Ancestor worship and superstition had become commonplace, and few opportunities existed for laypeople to undertake serious Chan practice.

Early Practice

The situation was little better when Sheng Yen was a young monk in the mainland Chinese province of Jiangsu. Born Zhang Bao-kang near Shanghai in 1930, he became a monk at 13, a common choice for impoverished families in the countryside. His early practice consisted largely of working on the temple grounds, memorizing sutras, or Buddhist verses, and performing thousands of prostrations to the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin.

As the communists prepared to take power in 1949, Sheng Yen joined the Kuomintang army in order to flee mainland China and spent the next 10 years in military service. Continuing to meditate every day, he tells in a short autobiography about feeling “suffocated by doubt” by apparently contradictory Buddhist teachings until he had a chance meeting with a famous monk named Ling-yuan on the sleeping platform of a temple in southern Taiwan.

“He slapped suddenly on the bed, and shouted ‘Put down!’” Sheng Yen wrote. “These words struck me like lightning. My body poured sweat; I felt like I had been instantly cured of a bad cold.”

Released after 10 years in the army, he was drawn to Master Dong­chu, an heir to the Lin-chi and Tsao-tung traditions of Chan. “Seeking neither fame nor followers, he was widely known and respected,” Sheng Yen wrote of Dongchu. “His speech was unusual, and he had a startling effect on people.”

The student’s days with Dong­chu were some of the toughest of his life. He was constantly scolded for incorrectly performing tasks like chopping firewood and brewing tea. Sheng Yen fared no better in his Buddhist studies. “He would say, ‘You’re smart. Write an essay.’ When I showed him an essay he would tear it up saying, ‘These are all stolen ideas,’” Sheng Yen wrote.

Despite the harshness of the training, Sheng Yen came to regard Dongchu as “compassionate” because he encouraged the rigor and self-discipline that would later become hallmarks of Sheng Yen’s own teaching. Crook says that when he was studying under Sheng Yen, the master would sometimes treat him in a friendly manner during one retreat interview, then chastise him the next. “What he was doing was throwing at me a very mild version of what he experienced [with Dongchu],” Crook says.

After two years with Dongchu, Sheng Yen began a six-year retreat to deepen his practice. It was a highly productive time: He published three books on Buddhist sutras and taught himself Japanese. At the end of his retreat, at the age of 38, he decided that to teach Buddhism in the modern age, he needed a modern education and a degree. So he spent another six years at Rissho University in Japan to earn a doctorate in Buddhist literature.

He surely must have appreciated the ironies of that choice: Sheng Yen, a master of a branch of Buddhism that often disdained book learning, was on his way to becoming the first Chinese monk to receive a Ph.D. from a Japanese university.

Another irony: Chan grew strong first in China before it was transplanted to Japan as Zen. But now, as a Chinese monk who had to flee persecution in his homeland and discouraged by the lack of Chan practice in Taiwan, he was obliged to go to Japan to study.

Looking Overseas

That discouragement was reflected in his choice to teach in the United States upon receiving his Ph.D. from Rissho in 1975. The Buddhist community in Taiwan at the time was “very conservative,” says Guo Hsiang. “They didn’t care about education and they didn’t know about Chan. He thought he wouldn’t be given a chance, that he’d end up as an abbot in a small monastery.”

Undeterred by his hesitant English, Sheng Yen quickly established a small sangha (Buddhist community) in Elmwood, New York, teaching meditation and Buddhism to small groups of Chinese and American practitioners. Buffe Laffey, today an administrative staff member and teacher at the Dharma Drum Retreat Center in Pine Bush, New York, was one of just seven students who joined him in his first meditation retreat in the United States.

“We got a lot of one-on-one attention, a lot more personal than it would be in later years,” she recalls. “I was only 23 or 24 at the time and didn’t realize what a treasure I had.”

Dongchu’s death in 1978 took Sheng Yen back to Taiwan, where he inherited two facilities from the old master in Beitou, a Tai­pei suburb: the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Culture and the Nung Chan Monastery. Until Dharma Drum Mountain was completed in 2005, these two centers remained his teaching base in Taiwan.

He quickly attracted an enthusiastic following of people eager to rediscover Chan and participate in his arduous, weeklong retreats. The retreats were not for the timid, requiring participants to rise at 4 a.m. and perform sitting and walking meditation for as much as 16 hours a day, interspersed with periods of work and silent meals. But some participants emerged changed people.

As Sheng Yen’s fame grew in Taiwan, he still retained his sangha in New York, teaching a smaller community of Westerners and overseas Chinese inspired by his message. For the next 30 years, until a few months before his death, he continued a regimen of alternating three months in Taipei with three months in New York.

The smaller number of students in the West meant there would be fewer Westerners in North America and Europe to continue teaching Chan after his death. In Taiwan, he trained dozens of monks; in the West, just one remains today. Sheng Yen also left five Western Dharma heirs, lay disciples recognized as masters in his Chan lineage. They teach in Britain, the United States and Croatia. He has seven Chinese heirs. In a meeting with senior Western lay disciples about six months before his death, he said with characteristic bluntness, “As for myself, my impact on mainstream Buddhism in the West can be said to be not that successful. But you can’t say it’s a failure, either. Having all of you, as disciples, at least 30 people, makes me quite proud and happy.”

Still, his influence in the West pales when compared to teachers like Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki of Japan, who helped popularize Zen in the West, or Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who has established monastic and practice centers around the world. A question, therefore, naturally arises: Why did Sheng Yen—an equal to these teachers in practice and education, and at least as well known in his home country—not attract more Western students?

His division of time between Taiwan and the United States, his disciples agree, is probably the main reason. As Dongchu’s heir, he was bound to take responsibility for his old master’s temples in Taiwan upon Dongchu’s death; and as Sheng Yen’s fame in Taiwan soared, his time was further constrained. His English also suffered.

“Suzuki realized that you couldn’t be a Zen master for both the Americans and the Japanese,” Crook observes. “Shifu [the Chinese honorific for spiritual teachers like Sheng Yen] was never able to [take that path] because of his constant return to Taiwan and the interpreters.”

If his success in the West was modest, his imprint on Taiwan has been enormous. It is hard to find an adult from the island who has not heard of him. A Taipei taxi cab driver relates a story, for example, of how the master, dying of renal failure, refused a kidney transplant. “He didn’t feel it was right that his life be saved at the expense of someone else’s suffering,” the driver explains. Sheng Yen’s influence also extends to Taiwanese who now live overseas, as in the case of a Taiwanese postal worker in Los Angeles who recalls reading about the master’s death in the local Chinese newspaper.

In his later life, Sheng Yen’s fame spread to China as well. In 2002, he led a delegation of monks and Buddhist laypeople to return the stolen head of a 1,300-year-old statue of Akshobhya Buddha to its rightful place at the Four Gate Pagoda in mainland China’s Shandong province. That gesture led to an unusual friendship with mainland religious chief Ye Xiaowen and perhaps encouraged mainland China to relax slightly its control over the country’s religious life.

Sheng Yen was also a tireless advocate for interfaith dialog, whether participating in a public exchange of ideas with the Dalai Lama or helping chair the United Nations’ World Council of Religious Leaders. “It really didn’t matter to him whether people were Buddhist or not,” says Liu Wen-ren, a lay disciple and linguistics professor at St. John’s University in Danshui, Taipei County. “He figured everyone could use a little wisdom.”

The constant activity and unremitting stress of his work took a toll on the master, who was always frail and prone to sickness. Still, he wrote unceasingly right up to his death: His last book, Shattering the Great Doubt: The Chan Practice of Huatou, was published posthumously in May 2009.

Seeking to accommodate his growing number of followers and ensure Chan’s survival after his death, Sheng Yen laid the groundwork for the sprawling Dharma Drum Mountain monastery in 1989, buying a plot of mountainous land in Jinshan Township, Taipei County. Ground was broken for the center in 1993 and its university, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, opened in 2001.

Sheng Yen knew that realizing his vision for Dharma Drum Mountain—including establishing a retreat center for hundreds of people, a university, an international conference center, dormitories for monks and lay people and the world’s largest research center for Chinese Buddhism—would require many millions of dollars. As it happened, much of that money, his followers say, came in the form of small donations from his thousands of devotees around the world.

Despite his death, Sheng Yen’s influence still looms over everything associated with the Dharma Drum organization, sometimes literally. At Nung Chan Monastery, an enormous portrait of the master is painted on a wall near the meditation hall and his books, likeness, calligraphy and aphorisms are everywhere. This apparently reflects more the will of his adoring disciples than the master himself, as Sheng Yen had little use for such displays, preferring to call himself “a simple monk traveling through wind and snow.”

The Spirit Still Guides

Now that he has passed away, however, the question inevitably arises: Can Dharma Drum survive the loss of its charismatic founder? Those within the organization are certain that it will. “Shifu’s presence is missed, but there isn’t a void, as his spirit still guides us,” insists Guo Dong, Dharma Drum’s abbot, adding that Sheng Yen’s will clearly spells out the future direction for his community, with monastics taking charge of safeguarding the master’s vision and setting the basic direction for the organization, then reaching a consensus with laypeople on individual projects.

When Sheng Yen became seriously ill and stopped visiting the United States, the number of people attending classes and retreats there dipped, longtime student Buffe Laffey recalls. “It wasn’t clear whether the center would survive without his presence,” she says.

But Sheng Yen himself had predicted that the ancient teachings of Chan, not his own charisma, would be the ultimate draw for students of Buddhism. He was correct: As his senior disciples began to take charge in retreats and classes, the meditation halls filled up again. Today, Laffey says, the community in the United States is thriving once more.

Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan also appears to be thriving. On one crisp day last fall, for example, the monastery was hosting a visiting delegation of Taoist academics, a tour group and more than 100 meditators on retreat. Dozens of monks gathered for a silent midday meal, professors taught the dharma to a new generation of students and workers prepared a plot of ground for new construction.

The one empty room was the tiny museum, which chronicles the master’s life through photographs, paintings and waxworks. Sheng Yen, no doubt, would have appreciated the irony.
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Michael Stroud is a writer in Los Angeles. He lived in Taiwan from 1981 to 1984.

Copyright © 2010 by Michael Stroud