Cultivating Karmic Connections: Doctrinal Emphases in the Tzu Chi School of Buddhism

The Tzu Chi Foundation, established by Dharma Master Cheng Yen證嚴 in 1966, is the world’s largest Buddhist charity. From its headquarters in Taiwan, Tzu Chi oversees a vast global volunteer network that provides disaster and poverty relief, medical assistance, educational resources and more. For volunteers of the foundation, a doctrinal emphasis on karmic connections serves to orient their everyday practice toward the need to establish positive relationships in the human realm. Volunteers draw on their affective experiences of karmic entanglements to help them form new affinities or transform negative relationships. This paper analyzes narratives volunteers have offered from their own life experiences of how they interpret their actions through a karmic worldview.