The first graduation ceremony of the Tzu Chi College of Medicine took place on June 13, 1998. In his speech, Dr. Lee Yuan-tseh, president of Academia Sinica, encouraged the graduates to devote their lives to serving people and learning, while Master Cheng Yen, founder of the medical college, advised them to associate with people through love and care. Both these two leaders in the fields of academics and religion stressed that people should transcend themselves and give to others all their lives.

In this modern Age of Information, when science and technology are everything, the value of knowledge is based on its practical usefulness and people have become nothing more than tools for distributing information. However, in addition to blessing the graduates, we sincerely hope that before they make plans for their future careers-whether to find a job right away or to pursue further studies-they will reflect and reaffirm that education must be oriented toward people, and that they will use the love and care in their hearts to actively serve others.

The education that we are referring to here embraces both the academic knowledge taught by teachers and the elevation of character, mind and soul through spiritual self-education. Most people only see the vastness of the former; they seldom comprehend the endlessness of the latter. With academic education, one's view of the world may be filtered by the limited knowledge one has obtained through narrowly specialized studies. Spiritual education, however, explores how to use one's knowledge to benefit others and how to respect and aid the ultimate development of their total lives.

How to merge academic knowledge and spiritual knowledge is a rigorous challenge for the education authorities, especially nowadays when there is a boundless flow of information and people are used to communicating with each other through spoken or written language without even having to see or to know each other. We hear countless disputes caused by obstacles in communication, which are in turn caused by the alienation of language from reality.

Since language is so weak, what else can we do to help people communicate and understand each other? The answer is innate body language-care and service.

We are grateful for the body language with which millions of people have silently expressed their love for others. There is no need of any profound theory to explain this body language. All that is needed is a sincere heart and the spirit to work hard without complaint. To achieve these, one must have a broad mind. This is not very easy, but religious concepts such as the compassion, kindness, joy and unselfish giving of Buddhism or the universal love of Christianity will support our faith.

Based on the responsibility to provide a complete education that includes both academic knowledge and spiritual formation, Tzu Chi established the Junior College of Nursing and the College of Medicine. The College of Humanities and Social Studies will open this summer, and in the future there will also be the Tzu Chi University, Tzu Chi middle schools and Tzu Chi elementary schools. We deeply feel that it is our duty to hand on our cultural assets to the next generation. This is also the basic purpose of our mission of education.