What do Buddhist monks have in common with UFO’s? well, nothing actually but an old Buddhist monk by the name of Hsu Yun, also referred to as Xu-Yun, described his experience with a UFO (remember not necessarily alien).
He has been somewhat of a living legend and his life has aroused awe and inspiration around Chinese Buddhist and by the time he passed on to the next life, Hsu Yan was recognized as one of the most recognizable Han-Chinese Buddhists in the middle kingdom, he lived for 119 years. During his life he was author to numerous poems and writings. He is considered a Buddhist idol and has two orders named after him.
The great Xu-Yun (虛雲) was born in 1840 and he lived to witness the last five reigns of the Manchu Dynasty and its decline between 1910 and 1911. As the new order was formed in China, new leaders were less interested in Buddhism to the point that they considered it to be a medieval superstition that prevented China for progress in both social and economical ways and as in every other culture, traditional teachings and history were not compatible with the modernization era that was “raging” across China leaving monasteries and thousand year old traditions in ruins. All of this did not prevent Xu-Yun to rescue Chinese Buddhism from its dangerous decline and he even managed to revive and refresh it, founding and restoring temples, schools and even hospitals.
The story that involves the UFO story originates from a Autobiography of a famous Chan Buddhist of which Hsu Yun was an influential Buddhist master. The discovery about the mysterious account was discovered by Sanjin Đumišić, a Swedish writer, photographer, intermedia composer as he was reading the autobiography of the Chan Buddhist. In the pictorial biography/autobiography of Master Hsu-Yan, Sanjin discovered the account of Hsu-Yan and his visit to the Da-luo peek in 1884 as he was on the way to pay respects to the “wisdom lamps” (source):
