Chang Yi-Jui, later known as Grand Master Hun Yuan (born February 2, 1944 in Zhongliao, Nantou, Taiwan), is the founder of Weixinism, also known as Weixin Shengjiao, one of the largest Taiwanese new religious movements. He is also the author of several books on I Ching and Feng Shui and a prolific painter.
Grand Master Hun Yuan | |
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File:Hun Yuan 2.jpg | |
Born | Chang Yi-Jui February 2, 1944 |
Known for | Founder of Weixinism |
Leben
Chang Yi-Jui was born in February 2, 1944 in Zhongliao Township, Nantou County, Taiwan.[1] For the first thirty-eight years of his life, he was not particularly interested in religion, although he developed an early interest in the philosophical and practical wisdom of the traditional Chinese systems I Ching and Feng Shui.[2] In 1963, he graduated at the Land Survey Department of Kuang-Hwa Senior Industrial Vocational High School in Taichung City, Taiwan. He remained in the School as a teacher of Engineering Measurement. He was also the founder of Zhong Xin Measuring Ltd., known as the first company of land surveying in Taiwan.[3] His business career came to an unexpected halt in 1982, when Chang fell seriously ill. He attributed his seemingly miraculous recovery to a divine intervention, and decided from then on to consecrate his life to religion. He claimed to have received revelations from Guiguzi, a name indicating a book of military strategy written between the late Warring States period and the end of the Han Dynasty and by extension its real or mythological author, later deified in Chinese folk religion.[4] Chang then went to a pilgrimage to Mount Dawu, in Taitung County, Taiwan, accompanied by some friends. On the mountain, he claimed to have received a new revelation. He reported that the Jade Emperor, a popular character in Chinese folk religion, admonished him “never to be selfish” and to “encourage people for self-cultivation.”[5] In 1983, Chang started putting his vow to devote his life to religion into practice. He opened a family hall called Yi Yao She in Taichung City, where he started teaching I Ching and offering divination services to the followers he had gathered. One year later, Yi Yao She was renamed Shennong Temple and Chang claimed to have received the Buddhist name and title “Grand Master Hun Yuan” by divine revelation.[6] He claimed to be mystically united with the Bodhisattva Wang Chan Lao Zu, who had once incarnated on Earth as Guiguzi, and to receive regular revelations from him.[7] In 1987, the Martial law in Taiwan was lifted, and Grand Master Hun Yuan was allowed to expand its activities and eventually to legally register a movement known as Weixin Shengjiao, or Weixinism, literally “Sacred Teachings of the Heart (or Mind) Only.”[8] The movement opened its new and larger headquarters in 1987 in Nantou County, where the Hsien Fo Temple was inaugurated.[9] Eventually, it was followed by 42 branch temples, where religious rituals are performed and courses of I Ching and Feng Shui are offered on a regular basis.[10] In 1993, Hun Yuan hold what he called the 99 Days Chanting Ceremony and taught his first research classes on I Ching and Feng Shui.[11] The book Feng Shui World View, published in 1995, made Hun Yuan known to a larger public in Taiwan.[12] In the same year, the convention “Propagating the Dharma of Feng Shui for the Home” at Linkou Stadium, Taipei, drew a crowd of 36,000.[13]
Weixinism
Hun Yuan is primarily known as the founder and leader of Weixinism or Weixin Shengjiao, a Taiwanese new religion with a presence among the Chinese diaspora in other countries and with some Western followers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Spain.[14] Its global membershio is "about 300,000, with a larger audience estimated by Taiwan's Ministry of Internal Affairs at 1,000,000".[15] Weixin Shengjiao has been described as an institutionalization of traditional Chinese folk religion, centered on the worship of Guiguzi and of the Three Chinese Ancestors, the Yellow Emperor, Yandi and Chiyou, and on the divulgation of I Ching and Feng Shui as systems of practical and not only philosophical wisdom.[16] The canon of Weixin Shengjiao includes scriptures of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, as well as the large corpus of revelations Hun Yuan claims to receive from Guiguzi, collected in the sixteen volumes of the Apocalypse Sutra.[17] All the speeches and writings, and in fact all the daily utterances, of Hun Yuan, are collected in the Weixin Dao Zang, which, by 2017, had reached the extraordinary size of more than 18,000 volumes.[18] In addition, Hun Yuan is the author of several volumes popularizing I Ching and Feng Shui. One, collecting his Yang House Feng Shui Lectures, was translated into English in 2016.[19]
Education Facilities
In 1996, Hun Yuan founded a continuing education facility known as I Ching University, while the parallel institution Weixin College served as an academic facility for the study of I Ching and Feng Shui and was accredited as a university by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan) in 2013.[20] In 2015, I Ching University stated that, from its foundation, it had completed twenty-three year-long courses, and the number of its students had exceeded sixty thousand. In 2016, I Ching University started acknowledging “pingxin virtuous fellows,” i.e students who had studied there for 24 years.[21]
Television programs
In 1997, Hun Yuan started what would become a long career as teacher of I Ching and Feng Shui via television. He became a familiar face for Taiwanese TV viewers, and in 1998 presented his ideas overseas through his first international tour.[22] The movement claimed that the number of television programs and series of lectures on Feng Shui by Hun Yuan airing in different countries around the world in 2017 exceeded five hundred.[23]
Humanitarian Activities
In 1996, Hun Yuan founded the “Pure Land in This World Chinese Merit Foundation.” Its original aim was to propagate I Ching and Feng Shui. In 1999, however, the devastating 1999 Jiji earthquake struck Taiwan. Hun Yuan mobilized the members of the Foundation and sent them to the afflicted areas. They taught how to rebuild anti-seismic public buildings and homes by using the principles of Feng Shui, but also provided help to affected families.[24] The movement reported that the number of Taiwanese families that received help from the Foundation exceeded three thousand.[25] In 2012, the name of the Foundation was changed to “Weixin Shengjiao Merit Foundation.” According to the movement, the current number of members is around sixty thousand.[26]
Relations between Taiwan and China
In 2001,with the stated aim of improving the relationships between Taiwan and China, Hun Yuan organized in Taipei what became the first of a series of annual conferences on Guiguzi, featuring scholars from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and reached an agreement with the authorities of the Chinese province of Henan to build there a Town of Chinese Culture, or City of Eight Trigrams (a name derived from the I Ching), featuring several temples.[27] In 2003, Hun Yuan established the Gui Gu Zi Academic and Research Association, whose stated aim is to trace the origins and foundations of Chinese culture. In particular, the Association compiled a list of 15,615 Chinese family clan names,[28] 917 names of emperors who ruled in China,[29] and 3,762 wars which plagued Chinese history.[30] For Hun Yuan, collecting these names does not serve a purely scholarly purpose but also a religious one. In 2004, he organized in the Linkou Stadium, Taipei, the first “Unified Ancestor Worship Ceremony for Chinese in the 21st Century,” honoring all the ancestors of the Chinese peoples, particularly those who had died in different wars.[31] Crowds in excess of 30,000 attend these ceremonies held each year on January 1.[32] Presidents of the republic of Taiwan and other senior political leaders have also participated in the ceremonies.[33] In 2012, Wu Ching-ji, then Taiwan’s Minister of the Education, announced during a conference on Feng Shui that Hun Yuan had been nominated as a candidate for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize[34] (which was finally awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons).
Artistic Production
Hun Yuan is also a prolific painter. Although rooted in the tradition of Chinese calligraphy and ink wash painting, his large works, often depicting dragons, are realized in a distinctive style. He often demonstrates publicly how they are produced in a few seconds with a single brush stroke applying black ink to Xuan paper.[35] All branch temples of Weixin Shengjiao store paintings by Hun Yuan, but the largest collection is now at Weixin Museum, a museum that is part of Weixin Shengjiao’s headquarters in Nantou County.[36] Critics, and the movement itself. regard as most significant the 108 pieces of dragon-shaped ruyi ("auspicious," literally “everything goes as one wishes”) calligraphy, including the frequently reproduced The Stable Nation of the Golden Dragon.[37] Hun Yuan has also produced designs for building and gardens. The movement reported that the landscape design of the Hsien Fo Temple was based on a project by Hun Yuan, who insisted that the layout of the buildings should correspond with the shape of the nearby mountains to create a feeling of harmonious unity, based on both Feng Shui and Zen.[38] According to the movement, Hun Yuan also supplied designs for the two Eight Trigrams Holy City that Weixin Shengjiao is building in Henan, China and in Nantou County, Taiwan.[39]
See also
Notes
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Chang (2016), p. 5.
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016a), p. 58.
- ^ Chang (2016), p. 5.
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016a), p. 59.
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Chang (2016), p. 7.
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016a), p. 62.
- ^ See Chang (2006).
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016a), p. 107.
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Introvigne (2016)
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Chang (2016), p. 10
- ^ Chang(2016), p. 6
- ^ Huang (2010-).
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016b).
- ^ Chang (2016), p. 5; Ministry of Education (Taiwan) 2013.
- ^ See Chen and Li (2015).
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ See “陽宅風水學傳法講座” (Yang House Feng Shui Studies Dharma Preaching Lecture).
- ^ Introvigne (2016).
- ^ Jian (2007).
- ^ Wu (2015).
- ^ Huang (2016), p. 61.
- ^ Huang (2004a).
- ^ Huang (2004b).
- ^ Huang (2006).
- ^ Hun Yuan (2016a), p. 68.
- ^ Introvigne (2016); Chang (2016), p. 8.
- ^ See Weixin Shengjiao (2004), p. 90, and Weixin Shengjiao (2008), p. 54.
- ^ See video at http://hunyuan.tw/?disp=wisdom&m=1&s=23&n=68&p=9739. Wu’s announcement is from minutes 6'18" to 7'05”.
- ^ Chang (1995); Chang (2007).
- ^ Huang (2011).
- ^ Chang (1998).
- ^ See “禪機山仙佛寺全球資訊網 (The official website of Chan Chi Shan Hsien Fo Temple).”
- ^ “禪機山視覺影像館(The picture gallery of Chan Chi Shan).”
References
- Chang, Yi-Jui. (1995). 禪境書道集 (The Collection of Grand Master Hunyuan Chanshi’ Calligraphy). Guoxing Township, Nantou County: Chan Chi Shan Hsien Fo Temple.
- Chang, Yi-Jui. (1998). 禪境書道展回顧 (A Retrospective Show of Grand Master Hunyuan Chanshi’ Calligraphy). 2nd ed. Guoxing Township, Nantou County: Chan Chi Shan Hsien Fo Temple.
- Chang, Yi-Jui. (2007). 禪境書法集 (The Collection of Grand Master Hunyuan Chanshi’ Calligraphy). 2nd ed. Guoxing Township, Nantou County: Chan Chi Shan Hsien Fo Temple.
- Chang, Hsin-Fang Fiona (2016). “Nationalities and the World, the Three Teachings (三教), and the Way of Change (易道) – Religious Connotations of Taiwan’s Weixinshengjiao (唯心聖教) and South Korea’s Daesoonjinrihoe (大巡真理會).” A paper presented at CESNUR 2016 international conference, Daejin University, Pocheon City, Korea, 5–10 July 2016.
- Chang, Yi-Jui. (2006). 世界新興宗教台灣唯心聖教精要版 (The Essential Edition of the New Religion of the World, Taiwan Weixin Shengjiao). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao College.
- Chen, Li-Yueh, and Li Chen-Mei (2015). 易經大學對世界和平的貢獻 中華文化大熔爐 (The Contribution of I Ching University to World Peace and the Great Harmonious Fusion of the Chinese people). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao College. ISBN 978-986-90443-5-6.
- Huang, Chun-Zhi (2016). Promoter of World Peace Grand Master Hun-Yuan: How Propagating Chinese Culture Contributes to World Peace. Taichung City (Taiwan): Wei Xin Zong Cultural Communication Co. Ltd.
- Huang, Feng-Shi (2004a). 中華民族列祖列宗姓氏譜 (Chinese Nationality Ancestors’ Names). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Huang, Feng-Shi (2004b). 中華歷代天子帝王聖號錄 (Chinese Nationality Emperors’ Names). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Huang, Feng-Shi (2006). 中華民族歷劫戰爭錄 (The Collection of the Wars of Chinese Nation). Taichung City: Taiwan Gui Gu Zi Academic and Research Association.
- Huang, Xiu-Yu (2010-). 鬼谷文化在台灣弘揚法寶大集結 (The Collection of Gui Gu Zi Dharma Propagation in Taiwan). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Huang Xiu-Yu. (2011). 唯心聖教禪機山仙佛寺唯心博物院 (Weixin Shengjiao Chan Chi Shan Hsien Fo Temple Weixin Museum). Guoxing Township, Nantou County: I Key Publishing House.
- Hun Yuan (Grand Master) (2016a). The New Religion of the World Taiwan Weixin Shengjiao. Guoxing (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao Hsien-Fo Temple of Chan-Chi Mountain; New Taipei City (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao Charity Foundation; and Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao College.
- Hun Yuan (Grand Master) (2016b). Gui Gu Zi Heart Dharma in Taiwan: Yang House Feng Shui Lectures. Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): Weixin Shengjiao Chan Chi Mountain Hsien Fo Temple. ISBN 978-986-7007-61-2.
- Introvigne, Massimo (2016). “Weixin Shengjiao.” World Religions and Spiritualities Project, Virginia Commonwealth University.
- Jian, Yi-Quan. (2007). 921災後學校重建 (Reconstruction of Schools after the 921 Earthquake). Taichung City: Wei Xin Zong Cultural Communication Co. Ltd.
- Lin, Song (2013). 唯心聖教世界和平大法輪全書:教育篇─兒童學易經 (The Corpus of Weixin Shengjiao World Peace Dharma Wheel - Education Chapter - Children Learn I Ching). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Ministry of Education (Taiwan) (2013). Issue no.:臺教高(三)字第1020165539號. November 6, 2013.
- Weixin Shengjiao (2004). 21世紀2004年中華民族聯合祭祖大典紀念專輯 (The Compilation of The Chinese Nationality United Ancestors Worship Ceremony in 2004, 21st Century). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Weixin Shengjiao (2008). 21世紀2008年中華民族聯合祭祖大典紀念專輯 (The Compilation of The Chinese Nationality United Ancestors Worship Ceremony in 2008, 21st Century). Guoxing Township, Nantou County (Taiwan): I Key Publishing House.
- Wu, Pei-Hsuan. (2015). 唯心聖教消災化劫天命紀實 (Documents on Weixin Shengjiao’s Work for Eliminating Disasters and Resolving Grievances). Taichung City: Center for Religious Affair of Weixin Shengjiao.