Rev. Danny Fisher

Via Barbara’s Buddhism Blog: The Wall Street Journal offers a fascinating piece today about how the medical school at the Buddhist-founded Tzu Chi University has taken the lead on encouraging Taiwanese people to donate their dead bodies to science. Certain aspects of Chinese religious culture have hindered the study of cadavers in the past, but Tzu Chi founder and leader Master Cheng Yen has created farewell rituals to help doctors and donors navigate these concerns. Author Tseng Guo-Fang writes:

Traditionally, Chinese view their bodies as a bequeathal from their ancestors. This means bodies mustn’t be damaged before burial. At Tzu Chi, therefore, Ms. Cheng insists that — unlike in Western medical schools — cadavers be sutured after being cut up. The laborious process takes days, but in the end the body is whole.

Ms. Cheng also makes a more profound pitch to potential donors: Society needs you.

The effect of this work at Tzu Chi University has been remarkable.

More than 23,500 Taiwanese have willed their bodies to Tzu Chi, allowing the hospital to satisfy its educational needs and supply other schools on the island. Following Tzu Chi’s lead, other schools have implemented similar commemorative services, eliminating the shortage of corpses that long hindered the Taiwanese medical establishment.

“The public was conservative about corpse donation, but Tzu Chi has made the public more open-minded,” says Lu Ko-shian, director of the National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology. “Tzu Chi changed that mindset with the power of religion.”

Master Cheng Yen’s Tzu Chi Foundation is one of four organizations in Taiwan doing significant amounts of work to propogate the Buddhadharma. The others are Master Sheng-yen’s Dharma Drum Mountain, Master Wei Chueh’s Chung Tai Shan, and Master Hsing Yun’s Fo Guang Shan.

Take a look at the article–as I say above, it’s pretty fascinating. The story also includes a video report: