This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Cheng Yen, known formally as Dharma Master Cheng Yen, was born in 1937 in Qingshui, in Taichung, Taiwan, and became a Buddhist nun. In 1966, in Hualien, she founded the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation by gathering thirty housewives who agreed to set aside a small amount of coins from their household grocery money each day into a bamboo bank, seed money for charity.
That modest beginning, a handful of women saving coins together, grew under Cheng Yen's leadership into one of the world's largest Buddhist humanitarian organizations. Tzu Chi is now active in disaster relief across more than a hundred countries and runs its own hospital network, in Taiwan and, since 2021, in Indonesia as well.
Cheng Yen organizes the foundation's work around eight missions, charity, medicine, education, humanistic culture, international relief, bone marrow donation, environmental protection and community volunteerism, treating each as an expression of the same Buddhist teaching on compassionate action rather than as separate programs pursued independently of one another.
The distance between a bamboo bank fed by thirty housewives' grocery money in 1966 and a hospital network and disaster relief operation spanning over a hundred countries measures how far Cheng Yen carried that founding idea, that compassionate action organized collectively could scale from a single congregation to a global institution.