Advocating Spiritual Awakening at the 2021 online PoWR

Drawing global attention, the 8th Parliament of The World’s Religions (PoWR) Conference ran its course online October 17 to 19. Dharma Master Hsin Tao, Founding Abbot of the Ling Jiou Mountain Buddhist Society (LJM)  and Founder of the Museum of World Religions (MWR), addressed the conference’s general assembly with a keynote speech calling for interfaith & cross-domain cooperation and spiritual awakening. The speech received positive feedback all around. The Master also optimized the occasion by leading a group meditation in the style of the LJM signature Peace Meditation-in-Four-Steps to better prepare all online participants for the international conference. The Master then again took to the podium to lead a group prayer session for blessing at the Closing Ceremony on the 19th with the message to see everyone again at the next PoWR Conference in Chicago in 2023.  

'There is no better time than 2021 to bring people of diverse faith and spirituality together to bring about a better world,' noted the organizer in the webpage designated for the latest PoWR Conference. 2021 still suffers a lingering COVID-19 and safety concerns prompted the PoWR to take its conference online for the first time in its history to accommodate the presence of 80-plus countries representing more than 100 religious traditions via virtual participation by their respective religious leaders and followers that totaled in number in excess of ten thousand. Hopes were pinned on the sizeable world congregation attended by the world’s largest number of religious participants of a single event from which great strengths would be generated to help resolve issues confronting human communities.

As the world’s oldest global interfaith conference, the PoWR was inaugurated in 1893 to address key issues of every epoch ranging from war, conflicts, poverty, gender equality, to global crises of late, with efforts to advance social harmony by virtue of religious understanding and cooperation. PoWR 2021 was themed Opening our Hearts to the World: Compassion in Action with a total of 559 meetings in the format of forums, panel discussions, workshops, and breakout sessions that assumed the forms of opening and closing ceremonies, three plenaries respectively themed on Grief, Hope, and Compassion in Action, among other announced events and activities that took place online for expression as well as interactive exchanges to illustrate the conference’s religious diversity in proportion to the magnitude of its global outreach and impact.

Master Hsin Tao is a regular keynote speaker at PoWR who has attended the global conference for six consecutive times. For the PoWR 2021, the Master was invited to address the second Plenary Session themed on Hope. Also wearing the hat of the founder of the Museum of World Religons (MWR), the Master curated for PoWR 2021 ‘the Second Interfaith Dialogue Between Muslim & Buddhist Youths In Promotion of Spiritual Ecology’ that also featured the “Loving the Earth Forum: For Higher Education On Spiritual Ecology’’ with performance of songs by Chinese Tibetan spiritual musician Yangjin Lamu, winner of the 53rd Grammy Award for Best New Age Album in 2011. The focus was on the education of spiritual ecology as a conduit of hope for mankind’s sustainability.

‘Compassion, quintessentially, leads sentient beings to depart from suffering,’ remarks Master Hsin Tao on eminent crises resulting from climate change and ecological hazards. He believes that only by returning to spirituality that sustainability can truly be achieved. The Master hopes that strategic solutions to the Earth’s crises can be mapped out along that base line of spirituality for concrete actions of ‘spiritual awakening for interdisciplinary cooperation’. To achieve that, Master Hsin Tao offers three sets of objective-led-tactic as follows: (1) to form a consensus to revive the ecology by helping religious followers move toward spiritual awakening; (2) to solve problems by identifying their root causes; and (3) to eliminate nuclear warheads by reaching a pan-religion ceasefire. 

Master Hsin Tao also commented that our planet Earth is an organic mechanism that would inevitably strike back for self-preservation when insatiable exploitation by mankind depletes its lifeline resources. There is spirituality in all forms of existence with interconnections to one another tangible when our awareness quiets down to realize that spirituality and the ecology belong to the very same inseparable symbiosis. The Master hopes that the life network of love and spirituality will be interconnected with pan-religion connectivity and consensus for the awakening realization that ‘Spirituality is Ecology’ is literally the manifestation of compassion that is capable of bringing the hope of peace and sustainability.