Venerable Long Gen (Chinese: 隆根长老; 1921 – 15 June 2011) was a key monastic figure in the Singapore Buddhist community, known for his role in propagating Chinese Buddhism in Southeast Asia and for his leadership of the Singapore Buddhist Federation.
Early Life
Venerable Long Gen was born in 1921 in the Jiangsu province of China. He became a Buddhist novice at the age of 10 and underwent formal ordination at Mount Bao Hua in Nanjing at the age of 22. In 1949, amid the Communist Revolution in China, he left his hometown of Wuchang and traveled to Guangzhou and Hong Kong. In 1956, he visited Taiwan.
Achievements in Southeast Asia
In 1960, while in Penang, Malaysia, propagating Buddhism, Long Gen began the publication of Buddhist literature for Malaysia and Singapore. In 1964, he settled in Singapore and gradually relocated the Nanyang Buddhist Bookstore from Penang to Singapore. In November 1973, he was appointed Abbot of Leng Foong Prajna Temple. He became a member of the Singapore Buddhist Federation (SBF) in 1984 and assumed its leadership in July 1994. During his tenure, he promoted traditional Buddhist orthodox practices, including regulations regarding the dress code for the Buddhist monastic community (sangha). He died on 15 June 2011 at the age of 90 (or 91 by East Asian age reckoning).
Other Usages
The term "Long Gen" or its variants also appear in several technical and academic contexts, which are distinct from the Buddhist figure:
- LongGenBench: A benchmark introduced in 2024 for evaluating long-form text generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs), assessing their ability to generate coherent, instruction-following text over extended sequences (16K–32K tokens).
- LONGGEN: A hybrid transformer architecture proposed for efficient long-context training and inference in LLMs, using sparse attention patterns to reduce computational overhead.
- LongGeneDB: A bioinformatics database providing multi-omics profiles of long genes (protein-coding genes longer than 200 kb) across multiple species.
