Chade-Meng Tan

Chade-Meng Tan
Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is an award-winning engineer, international bestselling author, movie producer and philanthropist. He is Co-chair of One Billion Acts of Peace, which has been nominated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and seven other Nobel Laureates for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was also Executive Producer of the movie Walk With Me, and Adjunct Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore. He co-founded the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI, pronounced “silly”). He retired from Google as its Jolly Good Fellow at the age of 45.
Meng led the creation of a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course at Google called Search Inside Yourself, which was featured on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. Search Inside Yourself is also the title of Meng’s first New York Times bestselling book which has been endorsed by world leaders such as President Jimmy Carter of the United States, business leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google, and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama. Meng hopes Search Inside Yourself will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.
Meng delivered a TED talk on compassion at the United Nations and spoke at the White House about the development of kindness. His personal motto is, “Life is too important to be taken seriously”.
Meng hopes to see every workplace in the world become a drinking fountain for happiness and enlightenment.

Soryu Forall
Soryu Forall has decades of intensive monastic training, a degree in Economics from Williams College, and extensive experience in social and environmental justice. As a child, Forall saw deep suffering in the world and he knew that he must do something. Forall wanted to face the problem directly, but did not know how. As a teen, upon learning that monasteries are built for such a purpose, he traveled to Japan in order to study suffering and the end of suffering. Forall was ordained in 1998 at Sogen Temple under the tutelage of the Zen Master Shodo Harada.
After training at Sogen Temple for five years, Forall trained further at Hemis Gompa, a Kagyud Tibetan monastery in northern India; Xue Feng Si, an ancient Ch’an monastery in eastern China; and at the Sariputta Ambedkar Monastery in southern India, where he served as head monk (Ambedkar Buddhism is an influential sect that defines spiritual training as social engagement and economic justice). While there, he led peaceful protests and organized community efforts to overcome the injustice of the caste system. He also helped to raise thirty boys with the understanding that all are inconceivably valuable, regardless of family circumstance.
Forall, a native Vermonter, returned to his home state in 2008 and has continued to fight against systemic injustice and promote youth empowerment. He has created successful curriculum for mindfulness in education, trained professional mindfulness teachers all over the world, worked with high level athletes and business people on using mindfulness for high performance, and founded the Center for Mindful Learning, where he currently serves as President and head teacher.
At the Monastic Academy Soryu dedicates his life to creating the next generation of awakened leaders.