The Chan Handbook: The Learner's Guide to Meditation
Master YongHua, aka Thich Vinh Hoa to the Vietnamese, was born in South Vietnam in 1955. He graduated from a French high school in 1973 and went to the United States for college in 1974. He earned a Bachelor's of Science in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1976 and an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1982.       As he was graduating from the Marie Curie French high School in Saigon, Vietnam, the master aspired to go abroad to study business administration in order to acquire the skills to run companies and eventually come back to help build his country that was severely ravaged by the civil war. So he started working as a programmer for large US computer companies after graduating from college and eventually took on positions of Accounting, Finance and Sales in an environmental company in which he became a top level executive.        He became disenchanted with the corporate life and grew weary of the worldly life. In 1995, he decided to leave the home life under Great Master Xuan Hua who founded the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and stayed within that system for four years. He later received full ordination under Master Man Giac in 1999 at Vietnam temple in Los Angeles.       Master YongHua's original plan was to leave the home life and spend the next ten years to investigate Chan but he enjoyed the purity of the sanghan's life and never left.       After becoming a fully ordained monk, Master YongHua went to Taiwan to learn Chinese and precepts (Buddhist rules of morality). Two years later, he came back to the United States where he practiced in seclusion for several years before he started teaching Chan at the living room of his place of abode. A few years later, a temple was offered to him. Therefore, he started teaching Chan and Pure Land in parallel.