Religion East & West
Issue 1, Inaugural 
Issue 2, Ecology and Ethics
in Religious Traditions
Issue 3, Resonances, Adaptations
& Misunderstandings
Issue 4, Contemporary Crisis,
Ancient Truths
Issue 5, The Universal Grammar
of Religion
Issue 6, Self and Other, Emptiness
and Plenitude
Issue 7, Interreligious Dialogue
and Spiritual Hospitality
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A Brief Portrait of the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua
The Venerable Master Hsüan Hua (1918-1995) was born into a peasant family in a small village on the Manchurian plain. He attended school for only two years, during which he studied the Chinese classics and committed much of them to memory. As a young teenager, he opened a free school for both children and adults. He also began one of his lifelong spiritual practices: reverential bowing. Outdoors, in all weather, he would make over eight hundred prostrations daily as a profound gesture of his respect for all that is good and sacred in the universe.
He was nineteen when his mother died, and for three years he honored her memory by sitting in meditation in a hut beside her grave. It was during this time that he made a resolve to go to America to teach the principles of wisdom. As a first step, at the end of the period of mourning, he entered San Yüan Monastery, took as his teacher Master Chang Chih, and subsequently received the full ordination of a Buddhist monk at Pu To Mountain. For ten years he devoted himself to study of the Buddhist scriptural tradition and to mastery of both the Esoteric and the Chan schools of Chinese Buddhism.
He had also read and contemplated the scriptures of Christianity, Daoism and Islam. Thus, by the age of thirty, he had already established through his own experience the four major imperatives of his later ministry in America: the primacy of the monastic tradition; the essential role of moral education; the need for Buddhists to ground themselves in traditional spiritual practice and authentic scripture; and, just as essential, the importance and the power of ecumenical respect and understanding.
In 1948, Master Hua traveled south to meet the Venerable Hsü Yün, who was then already 108 years old and China's most distinguished spiritual teacher. From him Master Hua received the patriarchal transmission in the Wei Yang lineage of the Chan school. Master Hua subsequently left China for Hong Kong. He spent a dozen years there, first in seclusion, then later as a teacher at three monasteries which he founded.
Finally, in 1962, he went to the United States, and by 1968, he had established the Buddhist Lecture Hall in a loft in San Francisco's Chinatown. There he began giving nightly lectures in Chinese to an audience of young Americans. His texts were the major scriptures of the Mahayana. In 1969, he astonished the monastic community of Taiwan by sending there for final ordination two American women and three American men, all five fully trained as novices, conversant with Buddhist scripture, and fluent in Chinese.
During subsequent years, the Master trained and oversaw the ordination of hundreds of monks and nuns who came to California from every part of the world to study with him. These monastic disciples now teach in the twenty-eight temples, monasteries and convents that the Master founded in the United States, Canada and several Asian countries. They are also active, together with many volunteers from the laity, in the work of the Buddhist Text Translation Society, which to date has issued over 130 volumes of translation of the major Mahayana sutras and instructions in practice given by the Master.
As an educator, Master Hua was tireless. From 1968 to the mid-1980s he gave as many as a dozen lectures a week, and he traveled extensively on speaking tours. At the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California, he established formal training programs for monastics and for laity; elementary and secondary schools for boys and girls; and Dharma Realm Buddhist University, together with its branch, the Institute for World Religions, in Berkeley. In forming the vision for all of these institutions, the Master stressed that moral education must be the foundation for academic learning, just as moral practice must be the basis for spiritual growth.
The Venerable Master insisted on ecumenical respect, and he delighted in interfaith dialogue. He stressed commonalities in religious traditions—above all their emphasis on proper conduct, compassion and wisdom. He was also a pioneer in building bridges between different Buddhist national traditions. He often brought monks from Theravada countries to California to share the duties of transmitting the precepts of ordination.
He invited Catholic priests to celebrate the Mass in the Buddha Hall at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, and he developed a late-in-life friendship with Paul Cardinal Yü Bin, the exiled leader of the Catholic Church in China and Taiwan. He once told the cardinal: "You be a Buddhist among the Catholics, and I'll be a Catholic among Buddhists." To the Master, the essential teachings of all religions could be summed up in a single word: wisdom.
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