I often like to say that any place can be a temple of enlightenment, and there is no one who cannot be liberated.

During the 1950s when I was teaching at Leiyin Temple in Ilan, Taiwan, there were always groups of people outside the hall laughing, talking loudly, and in many ways disturbing the people inside. One time I turned off all the lights, leaving only the glow of the burning incense in front of the Buddha statue. The noisy crowd outside was startled by the sudden and unexpected darkness and instantly fell silent.

Humanistic Buddhism is truly based upon liberating living beings without attachment to the notion of self. When teaching the Dharma, one cannot become attached to oneself or what is traditional. Once someone becomes attached to the Dharma, that person becomes rigid, formalistic, and cannot judge how the Dharma should be adapted to suit people’s needs.

Once the Buddha gave the metaphor of practice being like tuning a musical instrument to one of his disciples who was formerly a musician, stating that he should not “tune” his mind too tightly or too loosely. The Buddha gave the metaphor of tending cows as similar to taming this restless body and mind to a devotee who was a cowherd. As a teacher, what the Buddha excelled at most was adapting his message to his students without clinging to notions, thus ensuring through skillful means that the wondrous Dharma connects with the minds of his listeners.

I have also tried to emulate the practice of adapting the Dharma to the needs of the people. For example, early on in Ilan I established the “Amitabha Buddha Recitation Society” to give illiterate people the chance to pick up the Buddhist sutras and recite for themselves, word by word, sentence by sentence. Next, in Ilan, I established Taiwan’s first Buddhist choir. I wrote the lyrics to the songs, and I asked Yang Yungpo, a teacher at Ilan High School, to write the music. I then established a Chinese composition class for correcting students’ compositions. At that same time I instituted after-school study sessions for underprivileged children and asked my followers who were teachers to volunteer their time as tutors in subjects like English, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

In 1954 I stepped outside the temple by organizing a group to tour the island to publicize the recent printing of the Buddhist Tripitaka, the collection of canonical Buddhist texts, in Taiwan. I led my followers on a forty-four-day campaign all around Taiwan that taught the importance of the Buddhist Tripitaka. The campaign even reached as far as the distant island of Jibei in the Penghu Archipelago.

While giving lectures on the Platform Sutra in 1995, I invited the Taipei Chinese Classical Orchestra to perform in conjunction with my presentation. The orchestra played more than twenty pieces of music, including the “Buddhist Great Compassion Repentance Chant,” the “Amitabha Buddha Recitation Suite,” and “Buddhist Hymn with Bells;’ to lead the audience in singing verses from the Platform Sutra. In this way I was able to make the profound meaning of this sutra more accessible to modern people.

In 2002, I presided over a lecture series on Buddhist hymnal music at the National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei. These lectures combined narratives from Dunhuang literature,¹ Buddhist music, and liturgical chanting to meld literature and music. During the lecture series literature and art came together to act as an instrument for the Dharma to liberate living beings.

We cannot allow the Dharma to become fixed, nor should we rigidly adhere to our own set ways of teaching. For as the Lotus Sutra says:

Sentient beings have their various capacities:
keen or dull, diligent or indolent;
And [the Tathagata] teaches the Dharma to them
According to their abilities.

The Lotus Sutra also mentions in its famous Universal Gate chapter:

.. .If there are living beings in this land who should be liberated by someone in the form of a Buddha, then Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva will manifest in the form of a Buddha and teach the Dharma to them …. For those who should be liberated by someone in the form of a lesser king, then he will manifest in the form of a lesser king and teach the Dharma to them …. For those who should be liberated by someone in the form of a young boy or young girl, then he will manifest in the form of a young boy or young girl and teach the Dharma to them.

In the same way, whenever artists come to Fo Guang Shan, I talk with them about the cave murals at Dunhuang. When athletes come, I talk about Shaolin gongfu. When farmers come, I talk about how Buddhist monastics were the ones to first import certain fruits and vegetables from central Asia. When soldiers come, I speak of how defending our country is like defending the mind. When young students come, I talk about their future prospects. When children come, I talk about what the sutras call the “four small things not to be taken lightly”: that a great fire can be caused by a single spark, that the earth is nourished through single drops of water, that little boys can grow up to be Dharma kings, and that little girls can grow up to be Dharma queens. With members of the National Science Committee, I can discuss the scientific qualities of Buddhism. With members of the Ministry of Economics, I can discuss the Buddhist view on wealth. With civil engineers, I can discuss Buddhist architecture.

Since I am convinced that there is no one in the world who cannot be liberated, I make a vow to do so, and then there is nothing that cannot be accomplished.

Source: Hsing Yun, Four Insights for Finding Fulfillment: A Practical Guide to the Buddha’s Diamond Sutra, Los Angeles: Buddha’s Light Publishing, 2012.

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Footnote:

1. Dunhuang literature encompasses a corpus of ancient Chinese manuscripts discovered during the turn of the twentieth century in a series of underground caves in Dunhuang Province, China. The majority of the manuscripts are Buddhist texts, many of which were newly discovered, and are of intense interest to Buddhist scholars. Ed.