Who is the Buddhist nun who built a global charity from a tiny apartment in rural Taiwan?

HUALIEN, Taiwan (AP) — The Buddhist teacher who founded what is now a global charity and religion with a $283 million operating budget grew up at a time when women could not be ordained as Buddhist nuns.

What Cheng Yen, now 87, started in 1966 in Taiwan’s countryside as a grassroots effort among housewives has now burgeoned across 67 countries, including the United States. The organization, called Tzu Chi, has mobilized 10 million volunteers who have helped build schools and hospitals, run programs for refugees in Ukraine and victims of mass shootings, and respond to natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods.

Cheng Yen and about a dozen other nuns reside in the Jing Si Abode in Hualien, the headquarters of Tzu Chi. The picturesque region — known for its majestic mountains that overlook the Pacific — gets its name from the phrase “huilan,” a reference to the swirling currents of the Hualien River where it meets the Pacific Ocean.

What sets Cheng Yen apart is that she is one of very few Buddhist women leaders in a strongly patriarchal faith tradition where ordination was barred for women — and still is in many countries.

“A female leader in our entire research of religious history is very, very different,” said Yao Yu-shuang, a professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan who has studied Buddhist movements.

Cheng Yen was born Wong Chin-Yun in 1937 to a relatively well-off family, but her parents gave her to her childless uncle’s family to raise. After her adoptive father died from a heart attack when she was 21, she ran away from home to become a nun.

Yao said getting ordained was an uphill task for her because, in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia at the time, being a monk was reserved for men.

That changed when