Source: Taiwan Panorama News Archives
Zen leadership
In the Judo room at National Tsing Hua University, a group of youths sit cross-legged, with their eyes closed and their backs erect. The very picture of peace and calm, they sit in this manner, carefully regulating their breathing, for about 40 minutes. Then they stand up with their knees slightly bent and their palms pressed together in a position known as “Children Pray to Kuanyin.” These aren’t kungfu-fighting monks training at Shaolin Temple on the mainland. Rather, they are participants at a “Zen Leadership” camp sponsored by the World Leadership Education Foundation (WLEF).
Founded just this year by a group of Tsing Hua University professors, WLEF sponsors youth leadership training in order to foster a peaceful outlook among the young.
They are actively trying to create an environment much like what is found at New Age spiritual retreats in the West. The participants, who live at the center and meditate as part of their daily routine there, are exposed to a program designed to imbue their hearts with religious ideals, their minds with visionary thinking, and their spirits with qualities of leadership. A tranquil environment much like a church or Zen monastery replaces the often raucous and heated debates that occur around seminar tables at more politically oriented leadership camps.
Holding that meditation will, along with natural science and behavioral science, emerge as one of the three most important educational disciplines, WLEF has designed a Zen leadership program that emphasizes state of mind. Students are encouraged to probe their inner selves during moments of solitude and thereby cultivate self-discipline, increase their wisdom and potential, and improve their physical endurance and ability to handle pressure. They learn both how to get involved in the world and how to morally transcend it. “Regular exposure to Zen cultivation causes a temporary cessation of the brain’s frenzied inner motion, which improves both physical and mental states,” declares Yu Ting, the foundation’s executive director.
Leaders are servants
What’s more, WLEF emphasizes that spiritual values such as benevolence and peace are important components of leadership. With a curriculum that includes topics such as “Strategic Alliances among International Rescue Organizations,” “Using Science and Technology for Peace,” “Promoting a World without National Boundaries,” and “Implementing a Spiritual Internet for the Global Village,” most of the students it attracts have peaceful characters. The foundation’s educational philosophy puts the focus on inner development, in large part aiming to get leaders to return to a state of “transcendent innate goodness.” In this respect, their concerns are much like those of organized religion. The training methods they have developed involve bringing out innate leadership abilities. It’s an approach that differs greatly from the “confrontation management” typically stressed when teaching political and entrepreneurial leadership skills.
Students who take leadership training with a religious orientation are invariably service oriented, and they don’t think about leadership strictly in terms of political power. “After you develop religious concerns, you become even more inclined to help your fellow man, so you will naturally want to become a leader!” says one smiling student. “Leaders are public servants!” adds another.
Lin Ta, a WLEF student who has just passed her exams to become a judge, took time out from her busy lawyer’s schedule to pursue leadership training because she believes that her life’s purpose is to help bring about world peace. Therefore, among all the various leadership classes, including many put on by political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), she selected one with a religious orientation.
Facing life and death
“Start with the little battles faced by people every day!” says another WLEF student. “War is the greatest obstacle to peace for contemporary man, so we believe that a defining characteristic of a leader is that he or she lessens conflict between people and thus reduces the potential for war.” Students earnestly consider how to resolve petty interpersonal conflicts, before expanding the scope of their discussion to how to contribute to the resolution of major world crises.
Filed under: Peace
