Da Ai Television

Da Ai Television, whose name translates roughly as Great Love, went on the air on January 1, 1998, built and operated by the Tzu Chi Foundation, the Taiwanese Buddhist charity founded by the nun and teacher Dharma Master Cheng Yen. The channel was conceived from the start as an extension of Tzu Chi's broader humanitarian and spiritual mission rather than as a conventional broadcaster: it does not accept commercial advertisements of any kind, funding its operations instead through a combination of Tzu Chi's own recycling and environmental programs, staffed largely by volunteer workers, and direct donations from supporters of the foundation's work.

By October 1999, less than two years after its Taiwan launch, Da Ai had already expanded into a dedicated global satellite channel, Da Ai Tai, built to reach Tzu Chi's members and the broader Chinese speaking diaspora far beyond Taiwan itself. The network became the first station in Taiwan to broadcast digitally in 2005, and it added a high definition channel in 2012, technical milestones that reflect a station reinvesting steadily in its own infrastructure despite refusing the advertising revenue that funds most commercial broadcasters' equivalent upgrades.

Da Ai Television produces the great majority of its own programming rather than acquiring it, and its content policy is unusually strict for a channel with global satellite reach: no politics and no violent content appear on air, a rule the network maintains consistently across news coverage, documentary programming and its extensive children's programming slate. The teaching that runs through nearly everything Da Ai broadcasts is Buddhist dharma as Dharma Master Cheng Yen has taught it throughout Tzu Chi's history, built around the foundation's central conviction that people are fundamentally good, a premise the network treats as something to demonstrate through documentary storytelling about humanitarian work rather than argue through direct religious instruction.

That approach extends to Da Ai's international programming as well, including an internet radio service carrying English language shows such as The Power of the Heart to audiences well outside Taiwan and mainland Chinese speaking communities. Alongside Tzu Chi's hospitals, schools and disaster relief operations across dozens of countries, Da Ai functions as the foundation's storytelling arm, broadcasting the same humanitarian Buddhism in motion that the organization practices on the ground, funded entirely by the recycling and giving of the people who watch it rather than by anyone buying airtime.