For over fifty years as the founder of Fo Guang Shan, the Taiwanese Buddhist Venerable Master Hsing Yun has been preaching what he calls "Humanistic Buddhism."

This is a Buddhism stripped of superstition and ritualism and dedicated to making the religion relevant in everyday life and for everyday problems.

One of Hsing Yun’s leading disciples is the Venerable Yifa. In her book Safeguarding the Heart, Yifa reflects on September 11, 2001, and what the terrible events of that day can teach us about the essential Buddhist teachings on suffering, cause and effect, and the meaning of life. With clarity and honesty, she attempts to answer the question of how we can and should respond when great violence enters our lives. This book has now been revised and retitled as The Tender Heart.

Yifa has also turned her attention to our culture of consumerism, commodification, and superficiality. In Authenticity, Yifa looks at our thoughtless when it comes to food, stuff, communication, relationships, and thoughts and emotions, and offers practical and thoughtful techniques for living life more authentically and attentively.

Her most recent book, Discernment examines the quality of mind that analyzes and perceives accurately the nature of something and then forms a thoughtful and accurate judgment about it.

Buddhism has long held that all life forms are sacred and worthy of kind actions and explicitly includes animals in its moral universe. The first precept of Buddhism "do not kill," should apply to our treatment of animals as well as to our treatment of other human beings. Yet some Buddhists eat meat and meat eating is sometimes defended as consistent with Buddhist teaching. The Great Compassion by practicing Buddhist Norm Phelps studies the sutras that command respect for all life and various schools of Buddhist thought to see if Buddhist practice demands vegetarianism, and comes up with some surprising answers.