TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Famed Taiwanese Buddhist master Chin Kung (釋淨空) died early on Tuesday morning (July 26) at the age of 95.

According to a press release issued by the website Collected Talks of Venerable Master Chin Kung, the well-known Buddhist teacher from the Mahayana tradition, "passed away peacefully" at 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Taipei time. Chin Kung has been a familiar face in Taiwan for decades due to his early adoption of modern technology to spread Buddhist teachings.

He was born on March 13, 1927 in Lujiang County in China's Anhui Province under the given name Hsu Yeh-hong (徐業鴻. During the Chinese Civil War, he fled to Taiwan from China in 1949.

For 13 years, he studied the classics, history, philosophy, and Buddhism under Professor Fang Tung-mei (方東美), Changkya Khutukhtu (章嘉呼圖克圖), and Lee Ping-nan (李炳南), reported ETtoday.

(Facebook.com, amtbtw photo)

In 1959, he became an ordained monk at the Linji Huguo Temple in Taipei, where he was given the Dharma name Chin Kung, meaning "pure emptiness." He went on to disseminate the teaching of Pure Land Buddhism for 62 years continuously until 2021.

In April 2022, he resigned from all of his duties, handing over the teaching of Dharma to the next generation, and officially retired. Many of his years of teaching were spent in the city of Toowoomba in Australia's Queensland, where he established the Pure Land Learning College Association.

Chin Kung has become a household name in Taiwan because of his use of electronic media to spread his teachings. His lectures have been recorded on audio, videotapes, DVDs, CDs for distribution to temples and he was also a regular on Taiwanese satellite and cable TV stations such as Hwazan Television (華藏衛星電視台).

Although his books and DVDs enjoyed widespread popularity in China as recently as 2015, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in recent years has launched a crackdown on these materials, labeling them "illegal" or "fallacious arguments and heretical teachings," reported Bitter Winter. An abbot in Jianxi Province's Jiujiang City told the news site that the CCP considers Chin Kung's works "inflammatory" and that it "doesn’t want cultured and educated people to accept Buddhism" by reading his books.