Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1993

CITATIONS unconventional. One of her disciple s described Wang Chin-yun as thinking to herself thus on that occasion, 'If women can be like men and can shoulder social responsibilities and extend their love of family to the whole humankind, they would be blessed indeed because this would really be true happiness.' At this point, she probably also believed, as Thomas Hardy did, that Though one can be happy at times, moments of gaiety are interludes, and no part of the actual drama.' Her conflicts with herself and with the conventional perception of the rol e of women temporarily put aside, Wang Chin-yun cut her own hair and became a nun at Pu M i ng Temple in Hualien at the age of 25. She was given the Buddhis t name of Cheng- yen which means solemn testimony to th e way of the Buddha. L i f e within the cloistered walls of Pu Mi ng Temple was extremely hard for th e novice. The nuns were committed to earning their keep and lived by the motto 'an honest day's food for an honest day's work'. What others might regard as a particularly hard life suited the Reverend Cheng-yen very well. She knitted, made shoes and envelopes in the day time and gave lectures on Buddhist teachings in the evening. She refused to be supported by contribution, nor did she and her group try to make money by acceptin g invitations to pray for the dead and departed. Two things then happened in quick succession to make the Reverend Cheng-yen emerge f r om a cloistered existence to embrace fully an involved, participatory role in society. The first was when she witnessed, at first hand in a private hospital in Hualien, a woman who was suffering f r om miscarriage bein g turned away by hospital staff because she did not have the money for an operation. The second was a discussion she had with three Catholic nuns which ended in a debate on the respective merits of Buddhism and Christianity. The Catholic nuns, while conceding that Buddhism was probably a more intellectual religion with more philosophica l teachings, pointed out that it was the Christian missions which were providing the schools and hospital s and engaging themselves in social work which constituted more concrete and more substantive help to the poor and destitute. The Buddhists, on the other hand, were preoccupied with their own spiritual world and their own salvation. Confronted with such incontrovertible facts the Reverend Cheng-yen vowed to change the situation. Her opportunity came when she was about to be transferred out of Hualien to a nunnery in another city. She told her congregation who worshipped her that i f they wanted to keep her in Hualien, they would have to help her satisf y a need and yearning to serve the sick and the poor of the community. She believed in starting with a modest beginning. A l l she asked her congregatio n to do was to save 50 cents a day. For the novice nuns under her guidance, she asked each of them to make an extra pair of baby shoes; this brought in an additional four dollars. In one month, they managed to raise 46th Congregation 16