Hsing Yun arrived in Taiwan in 1949 as one of roughly a hundred monks who fled mainland China with the Nationalist retreat, in a monastic culture that still associated serious Buddhist practice with mountain retreats and closed monasteries. His own teachers had already been experimenting, decades earlier on the mainland, with a different idea, that Buddhism's teaching on compassion and interdependence obligated it to engage directly with ordinary social life, education and welfare rather than withdraw from them, an idea reformers had begun calling Humanistic Buddhism. Hsing Yun spent the following seven decades turning that idea into an institution at a scale nobody before him had attempted.
Fo Guang Shan, the mountain monastery he founded in 1967 in southern Taiwan, grew into a network that today includes universities on three continents, a museum housing a Buddha tooth relic, hundreds of branch temples worldwide and extensive publishing, broadcasting and disaster relief operations, all run on the premise that a monastery's obligations run outward into society rather than only inward into contemplative retreat. The lay organization he founded in 1992, the Buddha's Light International Association, gave millions of ordinary practitioners, rather than only ordained monks and nuns, a structured role in the movement, a genuinely significant departure from the older model in which serious practice was largely monastic business. Critics inside and outside Chinese Buddhism have argued the model risks trading contemplative depth for institutional scale; Hsing Yun's own answer, repeated across decades of writing and teaching, was that a Buddhism which could not build a school, run a hospital or answer a disaster had not yet finished learning what compassion required of it.