The farewell song at the Tzu Chi College of Medicine this summer was quite special, because the members of its first graduating class, with their compassionate love and enthusiastic hope, were starting off on their maiden voyage into the vast sea of the medical field. Cultivating excellent medical professionals is the ideal for which Tzu Chi has been accumulating the love of so many people.

Four years have gone by. Some graduates are heading towards more advanced education, while others are excited about offering their skills to society. No matter where they are, their kindness and skills will be blessings for all people. No matter where they go, they will bring bright rays of joy.

Graduation is an ending and also a beginning. When they walk out of the college gate, they will take with them the exhortations of their instructors, the blessings of their Yi Teh parents and the sad farewells of their friends.

Everlasting Great Love
(Speech by Master Cheng Yen)

My heart is filled with mixed feelings today, but I still want to congratulate all of you on your graduation. Whether you continue studying or begin working, I hope that you will keep love and care in your hearts and that you will sincerely work and study hard. This is what I expect from you the most.

This is the first graduating class. The college is only four years old, and the construction has still not been completed. For example, the dormitories you used to live in were originally designed to be classrooms, and even now the new dormitories have not been finished yet. Now you are graduating, and I feel sorry for the inconveniences that you had to put up with. I hope you will understand that it takes time to finish anything. You are the first class, and so you had to face more difficulties. I would like to apologize to all of you.

Tzu Chi teaches students without asking for anything in return. We only hope to produce a few good, skillful people who can offer love and care to others. This is my only wish. We really must deal with other people with love and care. If there is no love among people, then no matter how well-educated or capable they are, they will never be able to create a sense of security for themselves or for the world.

Tzu Chi established this college with the highest expectations. Someone once asked me why we still had to build dormitories when building the classrooms could be considered enough. I replied that when parents send their children to us, we not only have to give them the best professional training, but we also have the obligation to teach them how to deal with their lives. I must do my best for the parents and their children.

The Yi Teh Mothers and Tzu Cheng Fathers have spent four years with you with sincere love. Sometimes they had to leave their own children behind in order to come to Hualien to be with you. When their children ask them why they are so concerned with these Tzu Chi students, they may reply that they want to love their own children with the wisdom of the bodhisattvas and Tzu Chi children with the heart of a mother.

The Yi Teh Mothers and Tzu Cheng Fathers have offered you only sincere love. You can try to recall if they ever asked for anything from you. They offered you care without asking for anything in return, and they shared with you valuable experiences on how to love and get along with other people. This is Tzu Chi's "culture of life."

Some parents have said to me that it is just because Tzu Chi has this kind of culture that they are willing to send their children here in the hope that they will absorb Tzu Chi's humanitarianism. Whenever I hear something like this, I feel a heavy sense of responsibility. Whenever I see our students behave well, I do not regret my hard work.

I hope you can remember Tzu Chi's humanitarianism after leaving here. I believe it will be quite a memorable experience. That kind of interpersonal feeling is everlasting, not temporary. As I see you graduate, I am delighted to congratulate all of you. I also hope that you can bring love and care to society.

I would also like to thank the college president and all the professors. Education is not an easy job, and everything was especially difficult with the college just starting up. The president gave up everything in the United States and returned to Taiwan to offer his skills. I am most grateful to him. Many of the professors came from western Taiwan or the United States. Why? To offer their knowledge with love. There is a Chinese saying: "You should respect your teacher as if he were your father, even if he teaches you for only one day." These professors were your instructors for a while, but you should respect them all like your own fathers. I hope all of you will always remember what your instructors taught you.

I also want to thank the Yi Teh Mothers and Tzu Cheng Fathers for your unselfish contributions in accompanying these students throughout these years. Whenever they had any problems, you would always apply your wisdom and love and walk with them on that rugged road. I want to thank you all for giving them love on my behalf.

Finally, I hope that all you graduates will have a wonderful future!

Creating Your Path with a Broad Mind
(Dr. Li Ming-liang, president of Tzu Chi College of Medicine)

Today is a special day in the history of the Tzu Chi College of Medicine, because it is the graduation ceremony for the first graduating class. I have mixed feelings now, and I have so much I want to say. It was very dark last night after twelve when I was about to go home from my office. I noticed some people loading things onto a truck. At first I thought they were thieves, but when I took a closer look, I found that it was a graduating student moving home. I suddenly realized that the day had really come. How fast the time flies!

I remember four years ago, in my first meeting with you people, I said time would go by very fast. I said that in the first year you would be confused and directionless, in the second year you would try to find out the meaning of your medical studies, in the third year you would prepare yourselves for graduation, and in the fourth year time would fly by fast. Today is the final day of the fourth year-it has finally come. I told you at that time that I hoped that in four years you would walk out of here proudly and confidently. I wonder if you can still do that? I hope you can remember every little thing, including the things that you learned and the friends that you made. No matter how much you do remember, I only hope you will cherish your memories of this wonderful time.

Now you are leaving, and I have so much to say. There is one thing I want to remind you: you must be open-minded. Unfortunately, residents of an island tend to be suspicious and jealous. Our college campus is situated right by the Pacific Ocean. I hope that your hearts will always be as broad and accommodating as the ocean.

Finally, I pray that the bodhisattvas will protect you. God bless you! Thank you!

Helping Others and Learning All Your Life
(Lee Yuan-tseh, president of Academia Sinica and 1986
Nobel laureate in chemistry)

First, I would like to congratulate all the graduates. After a lot of hard work, you have received your diplomas and now you are leaving. However, in this constantly changing society, having a university degree does not promise once and for all that you won't have any trouble in the future. At the starting point of your life, having a university degree doesn't mean your career will be smooth sailing either.

One year I attended the graduation ceremony at the University of California in Berkeley. After the ceremony, a student and his girlfriend came to my office. The girl told me that her boyfriend had been working and studying very hard, but now they could have more time together and live a comfortable life.

I told her that her boyfriend had studied very well up to that point and that he was quite interested in many things. But from then on, he would have to start another learning stage in life. He would discover that there were even more things to learn in the world, and he would need to work harder. His future would not be all that easy.

It sounds like I'm trying to depress you, but this is the way it is. I remember in 1962, I was so glad to receive my degree, like all of you, and then I went to study in the United States. After I received my master's degree, I went to the University of California to do research with a famous professor there. I immediately encountered many problems.

The professor gave me a difficult task to do research on. I kept wondering how I could solve the problems and what experiments I should carry out to solve them. I went to ask my professor, who then replied, "If I knew all that, I would have solved these problems a long time ago. Why should I wait for you to come from a foreign country to do research with me? It is just because no one else in the whole world knows how to find the answer that I want you to do it."

That was a great awakening for me: we have to depend on ourselves, not others. I was a student for many years and learned many things in class. But when I entered a world of unknowns and faced problems that no one had ever solved, I discovered that all my accumulated knowledge was of no use!

You studied hard in class and your instructors also wanted to pass along to you thousands of years of collected knowledge within a limited time. However, they didn't tell you at the same time that there were still things they didn't know. Hence, students tended to believe the instructors were supermen.

When we receive education and training in school, we are actually repeating things that mankind has already learned. What I learned in school that was most beneficial to me was not the technical training, but the education in how to be a conscientious human being and how to interact with others. The most important of all was how to face the future and how to improve myself.

I would like to share two points here with you, in the hope that they can be of some help to you before you leave.

First, you must continually learn. The knowledge you have learned here and the habits you have accumulated will not get you far, no matter how good your grades have been. There will be much more for you to learn in the future. So you must create the habit of continually learning new things for the rest of your life.

Second, you must continually help other people. I learn the most when I am helping other people. This does not only apply to academics. If you help other people, I can guarantee that you will learn and grow a great deal through helping them. You will also find out how patient you can be!

For that reason, whenever a young person asks me if there is a shortcut that can make him successful and famous, I always say that there are two: continually studying and helping other people.

Now I want to bless you all, and I also want to encourage you, once you have jobs, to improve the quality of our democracy so that our society can move forwards. Furthermore, I hope you will learn to cooperate with people around the globe to protect the earth's environment, so that mankind can continue to live here.

The next century will be a turning point for all human beings. If people around the world can truly think about the future of their descendants, we will begin a new era of world peace. Otherwise, mankind's existence will be in great danger. I hope you young people can continue to work hard to create a good world for future generations.

The Road to World Peace
(Eric Yao, representative of Tzu Cheng Fathers and Yi Teh Mothers)

During my four years as a Tzu Cheng Father, I did not guide the students. Instead I made the fastest self-improvement in my life. While I was trying to teach others, I actually learned the most myself. When students asked me questions, I had to try hard to think: what is the truth of this matter? How can I let them understand?

During a family gathering two years ago, Sister Hsing-hui invited us to talk about our greatest hopes and dreams. I still remember what I said at that time, because it was the dream of my life: world peace.

In my dream, a peaceful world has no conflicts or fighting, but only mutual blessing and assistance. That is difficult, I know. However, do we have a chance to create this type of world? Maybe when you are celebrating your graduation later today, you can discuss this question among yourselves: do we have a chance to work for world peace?

I once thought about a question: why is it so difficult to bless and help each other? The answer I came up with is: because blessing and helping require creativity!

When a problem comes our way, we should not simply think, "This is not what I want, so I will go fight and argue about it." Maybe we should try to think of new and more creative ways to help and bless others, so that the world may have peace.

I remember a young person once asked the Master, "Master, when you were planning to build the hospital, you only collected NT$30 million. Why did you still insist on building a $600 million hospital?"

The Master's reply, a single word, is still carved in my heart: faith. She said that she often asked herself whether she was building the hospital to become famous or rich or powerful. She carefully examined her conscience, and when she was certain that she didn't have any of those thoughts, she then had the faith to believe that she could receive help from everyone.

Besides having faith in herself, the Master also had faith in other people. She said that more than 2,500 years ago, the great sage Sakyamuni Buddha taught that the basic nature of every person is good. The Buddha believed that if someone started a work of great love, many other people would also be willing to join in.

What impressed me the most was the Master's conclusion: "I am no dummy, and of course I knew quite well that it would be extremely difficult to use thirty million dollars to do something that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. However, if I myself had not been willing to shoulder such a task, how could I have brought other people to offer their great love?"

To me, her words are just like a road to world peace, because they mean "service."

If we try to find the meaning of "leadership" and "management" in books or on the World Wide Web, we can discover that in the past ten years the meanings of these concepts have kept changing. What have they changed to? "Leadership with service."

Finally, I want to share something with you. Tzu Chi seems to have done so many things, but when I take a closer look, I discover that it is really only doing one thing: building bridges among warring people and circulating love and goodness. This "bridge culture" is the Tzu Chi culture.

What does "bridge" mean? Helping the poor and educating the rich can cross the gap between the poor and the rich.

It is not easy for the rich to give money to help the poor. If the Master had simply said, "The rich should give their money, and we will use the money to help the poor," not many people would do it. Thus, the Master had to use a lot of creativity in planning all kinds of activities for the rich to help the poor. This is "building bridges."

The Tzu Chi missions of charity, medicine, education and culture all do the same thing: build bridges.

The final purpose of this bridge is education, teaching people not to be so greedy and not to try to grab everything for themselves. This world is a place that we can happily offer ourselves to. We only need to take a little bit, enough to live on, for ourselves.

In other words, education is the key to the Tzu Chi culture. We can see many people who are developing their own creativity-developing their own power to contribute to the world-under the Master's guidance.