In order to promote Humanistic Buddhism and fulfill the vision of "From Disciple to Speaker", the Buddha's Light International Association held the "2023 BLIA North America Humanistic Buddhism Speaker Assessment" in various BLIA chapters and temples in North America on April 29. In total, there were 58 Fo Guang members from 13 BLIA Chapters across North America who participated. Among them, 6 speaker trainees were from BLIA Toronto.

For this speaker selection event, all participants were required to take two online training courses via Zoom. The first course was given on March 24th. Venerable Chueh Pei, Secretary-General of BLIA World Headquarters taught attendants how to use the three-stage speech method to preach articles written by the BLIA founding president, Venerable Master Hsing Yun. The relationship between the article and the speaker; and, the utmost reward the speaker receives. The second course was given on April 14th, Venerable Chueh Pei invited several participants to demonstrate the speech method they had learned and provided them with their evaluation feedback. Through the comments that the venerable made on each demonstration, everyone learned how to express the key points and things to keep in mind.

On April 29th, the assessment day, the six speaker trainees who participated in the assessment were Hong Liu, Xiaodan Wang, Catherine Wang, Emily Wang, Tiger Chen, and Libuo Luo. Each of them chose an article from one of the three sets of books “Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Dharma Words”, “Between Ignorance and Enlightenment”, and “The Many Matters of Life”. Through the three-stage speech method, each individual shared their selected article, their personal practice and experience; and, summarized the inspiration and understanding of the article for themselves. The Venerables of Fo Guang Shan Temple of Toronto were divided into two groups to carry out the evaluation and assessment in the Great Assembly Hall and the Meditation Hall simultaneously. They provided guidance and feedback to each and every participant.

At the conclusion of the assessment event, Venerable Chueh Fan, the abbess of FGS Temple of Toronto praised that all speaker trainees diligently learned Venerable Master’s article by heart and were able to grasp the main points. Venerable also directed everyone to increase their own life experience sharing, so as to strengthen the interaction with the audience and even more closely connect to the subject of Venerable Master’s article. Venerable also encouraged everyone to uphold Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s concept of Humanistic Buddhism as the objective to propagate the Dharma to benefit more people.

All participants were full of Dharma joy. They expressed that no matter what the result could be, they already learned a lot through training and gained a great deal!

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