The Peace Meditation

More than 30 years ago, Master Hsin Tao practiced solitary ascetic meditation for close to a decade in cemeteries by the lakeside of Lung-Tan in Yi-Lan county, Taiwan. The training experience awarded the Master with a profound appreciation of the inner peace that Chan meditation is capable of discovering for us. The Master, in turn, has always been leading the way to help us attain our own inner peace, and share it on with the next person the world over. As a result, the LJM Buddhist Society has been promoting the Chan meditation at home in Taiwan with training camps mushrooming in Hualien, Taitung, etc., as well as offering hands-on courses abroad in Malaysia, Germany, South Korea, etc.

Parallel to LJM initiatives in establishing meditation centers in different countries, Master Hsin Tao has made it a point to intensify communications with leaders of other faiths and traditions by accessing Chan meditation as a platform. The Master’s efforts in promoting interreligious exchange and contacts with like-minded leaders of various professions afford the expanded opportunities for sentient beings of different background to enjoy the rare experience of finding the way to their inner selves in different fashions with comparable findings of appreciation and realization. A great deal more than a mere campaign tagline, Master Hsin Tao’s ideal that ‘when the heart is at peace, the world is at peace’ has been gaining momentum and traction in moving towards his vision coined in the twin appeal of “Love and Peace / The Whole World as a Family”.

In the secular world, people are always rattled by the hustles and bustles of life. But what bothers and got people restless can be both there and not there. If the Buddhist concept of ‘non-self’(anātman in Sanskrit) refers to space, and ‘impermanence’ refers to time, ‘enlightenment’ would then mean the transformation of space and time. The practice of meditation get the practitioners to become meditative, and eventually lead to the realization that all of the people’s worries and concerns are but self-inflicted and -imposed.

Meditation is one major way of practicing Chan, and Chan can be in effect ubiquitous in our daily life. For many years, the Ling Jiou Mountain (LJM) Buddhist Society has been promoting Peace Meditation at home and abroad. And for the domestic participants a variety of Chan-centric activities have been offered, including programs like ‘3-day Chan on Tour in Hualien’, ‘3-day Chan in Taidong’, ‘2-day Chan in Hualien’, etc. And the LJM Peace Meditation can be practiced in a manifold of styles ranging from ‘Chan in Sitting’, ‘Chan in Walking’, ‘Peace Kung Fu’, ‘Peace Psalm’, ‘Joy of Chan Music’, ‘Peace amidst Waves & Tides’, ‘Observe the Heart while Watching the Stars’, and ‘Fun Sipping Tea’, etc. The wide range to choose from aims at connecting more people to Peace Meditation.

The LJM Peace Meditation is a Triyana tradition uniquely created by Chan Master Hsin Tao, who himself a rare and highly esteemed practitioner of all three major Buddhist traditions Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana. Creating the unique LJM Peace Meditation by combining meditative theories and methods of all three mainstreams of Buddhism, Master Hsin Tao practically brings a special gift to the world. Once you start practicing the LJM Peace Meditation, you gradually realize that the true merit of meditation is not the pursuit of anything, nor how long your sitting sessions last, but that it is everywhere in our daily life at all times. The realization helps the habit of practicing Chan to take up a more definite place in our daily life.

In order that more people in the world get to appreciate that our peaceful state of mind is key to world peace, Venerable Master Hsin Tao has been leading the Ling Jiou Mountain (LJM) Buddhist Society on journeys to countries abroad and promote the LJM Peace Meditation. Thus the beauty of the LJM Peace Meditation has been shared on with people in Germany, Austria, Malaysia, Korea, and in places like WuXi in China.

That Zen (Chan in Chinese) became popular in Europe can be traced back to the promotion via Buddhist philosophies in the tradition of the Chinese Lin Ji School and Tsao Dong School after their adaptation in Japan, as well as by a few Tibetan Rinpoche. The original Chinese Chan, by contrast, only became better known after Professor Michael von Brück of the Department of Religions of the Munich University started to invite Master Hsin Tao to chair Peace Meditation sessions in Germany from 2011 onwards.

Peace Meditation in recent years has been gaining momentum in Asia and it suffices to illustrate the two following examples. Master Hsin Tao was invited by Master JuShan, Dean of the Seoul Buddhist College, Korea, to attend and teach Peace Meditation to a crowd of more than 1,000 in the audience at the Third World Meditation Congress in 2016.. Then, in the same year and on the occasion of the ground-breaking ceremony for LJM’s meditation center in Penang, Malaysia, a crowd of 1,000-plus people took part in ‘An Evening of Meditation in Penang’ at the Botanical Garden of the city. It was an outdoor event by night, but the big crowd practicing Peace Meditation rendered the park quiet and full of peaceful spirit.