Awesome shrines, a bit of Disney, and a vegetarian's paradise

Wear your most comfortable shoes.”

At the orientation meeting the night before our departure for Kaohsiung in Taiwan, we got this advice since we were expected to do a lot of walking during the “cultural and spiritual exposure trip” at Fo Guang Shan, a Buddhist monastery situated on five mountains, “laid out in the form of lotus petals,” in the Dashu district of Kaohsiung City in southwestern Taiwan. We did not only a lot of walking, but due to the rolling terrain, we also climbed up and down inclined driveways as well as steep steps and stairways to get from one shrine to another, from one building to the next, in the vast complex.

The overland trip which would otherwise have taken four hours to reach the port city of Kaohsiung, the second largest city in Taiwan, took just about two hours by high-speed train from the Tao Yuan station, coming from the Taipei International Airport after a less-than-two-hour China Airlines flight from Manila.

Located here is the first Buddhist monastery and biggest temple in Taiwan, Fo Guang Shan, which literally means “Buddha’s light mountain.” It is a renowned pilgrimage site. It is home, not only to monastics, but also to students, lay devotees and volunteers. It is also the residence of founding master, Hsing Yun.

The Buddhist monastic order was founded in 1967 by Venerable Master Hsing Yun. Born to a poor family in Chiangsu Province in China in 1927, he entered the monastery at age twelve. During the civil war in 1949, Hsing Yun came to Taiwan.

He devoted his efforts to the promotion of Humanistic Buddhism, a modern Buddhist philosophy that aims to make the spiritual practice relevant and integrated in the world and in daily life.

This approach to spirituality is perhaps best illustrated at the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Memorial Center, which is both a holy shrine as well as a tourist attraction. Occupying more than 100 hectares of land formerly owned by a gunpowder manufacturer, its main landmark is the world’s tallest and largest seated bronze.

Buddha, weighing over 1,780 tons, with a total height of 108 meters, towers behind the Main Hall where the Buddha’s tooth relic is enshrined.

It took nine years of planning and three years to build the center. It was formally inaugurated in December of 2011. The first building is the Front Hall, an 84,000-square-foot multi-functional building that houses reception and information facilities as well as gift shops and dining outlets. It has the only vegetarian Starbucks and 7-Eleven stores. Also found here is the elegant Water Drop Tea House as well as the vegetarian restaurant of the Grand Hi-Lai Hotel where we enjoyed a sumptuous vegetarian lunch. This was where we got to sample the notorious ”stinky tofu” dish, which we happily discovered, does not really deserve all that bad press.

The Front Hall is like a mini mall, and there’s a reason for this: to have visitors start in familiar surroundings, something closer to their daily life, before they slowly walk towards the “world of Buddhism” which the Main Hall at the rear represents. There are eight Chinese-style pagodas on either side of the open walkway, which stand for the Noble Eightfold Path, leading up to the Main Hall. They serve various purposes such as exhibition and briefing rooms as well as a venue for weddings and other family celebrations.

At the Bodhi Wisdom Concourse and Grand Photo Terrace, a perfect spot for photo ops right in front of the Main Hall, you negotiate a 35-meter-wide and 50-meter-long staircase with 37 steps that represent the 37 ways leading to enlightenment.

We arrived just in time to watch Life of the Buddha in the 4D movie theater inside the hall. There is a bit of Disney in the animation interwoven with the sublime. In the Museum of Buddhist Festivals, scenes are shown through three-dimensional models. With the aid of modern technology a giant-sized golden Buddha with moving lips greets visitors in Mandarin, Taiwanese and English. There are interactive displays where visitors can participate, like bathing the baby Buddha.

In a statement, the Venerable Master Hsing Yun explains, “The exhibitions combine cutting-edge multimedia technology with beautiful Buddhist works of art and historical artifacts to attract the public, so that they may then accept the Buddha’s teachings.”

Underneath the Main Hall are 48 underground palaces, representing the 48 vows of Buddha, where artifacts of historical, cultural, contemporary and commemorative value collected from around the world, are stored. Every 100 years, one palace will be opened so those in the future may learn how people lived in the past.

There are three shrines inside the Main Hall. At the Golden Buddha shrine, visitors offer small lighted candles before the giant seated Buddha. The Buddha’s tooth relic is enshrined in the Jade Buddha shrine, above the reclining Buddha made of white jade. The third shrine houses the thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Goddess of Mercy, symbolizing compassion and representing the Buddha’s universal spirit. Here, we received the Great Compassion Water poured mechanically in a small bottle for us to take home.

A local newspaper reporter asked us: coming from a Catholic country, what did we think about what we’d seen? There are many similarities. Aside from certain fundamental beliefs (while we believe in “God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” they believe in the principle of cause and effect; Buddha is not a god but a human being who attained enlightenment), we share the same universal values such as kindness and compassion. We are taught to “love one another”; they are taught the three acts of goodness: think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds.

Our response resonates with Hsing Yun’s teaching, “to seek commonality amidst differences.”

With altruistic and compassionate aspirations, Hsing Yun founded Fo Guang Shan, putting emphasis on education, service and charity, culture and art. There are now over 200 branch temples worldwide, among them in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Africa, Japan, China, and Canada. He has established a number of libraries and art galleries as well as four universities: in the US, Australia, and two in Taiwan.

“Our goal is to build a university in the Philippines,” says Venerable Yung Guang, dean of Tsung Lin University in Taiwan. She was the first monastic assigned to the Philippines back in 1989. She taught at the Cebu Eastern College, a Filipino-Chinese school in Cebu City, for many years. Fo Guang Shan also has temples in Bacolod and Iloilo. Its headquarters is located in Manila, at the Mabuhay Temple in Malate. The 10-story multi-functional building is equipped with modern facilities not only for prayer and rituals but also for education, publication, accommodations and different cultural activities.

Our visit at Fo Guang Shan in Kaohsiung coincided with the International Youth Seminar on Life and Ch’an, which had 1,200 participants coming from 40 countries including the Philippines. In the program held at the Great Enlightenment Auditorium, which can seat over 2,000 people, at the Main Hall of the Buddha Memorial Center, the youths sang songs featuring Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s teachings set to music. A song from the Philippines, Wear a Smile, was sung by Marie Antoinette Gorgonio from the school of performing arts in Cebu. Antoinette studied Mandarin and took her masters in Arts and Buddhist Studies at Fo Guang University in Taiwan.

Before leaving the center, we viewed prize-winning artworks by Filipino schoolchildren that were part of an exhibit at the Main Hall entrance. Outside, the lighted pagodas and giant Buddha glowed against the velvet night sky.

It had been a long day, which started at daybreak at the Great Buddha Land, on top of a hill in the monastery. There, in the presence of the towering golden Buddha, surrounded by numerous smaller Buddha statues, Venerable Miao Bo, head of media relations at Mabuhay Temple and our travel companion, showed us how to meditate.

At the Great Vow Shrine, we watched a monastic strike the good luck bell countless times, which is believed to free those suffering in hell. The other shrines at Fo Guang Shan are the Great Practice Shrine, the Great Wisdom Shrine and the Great Compassion Shrine. Then there’s the Main Shrine, with three giant Buddha statues at the center and thousands of smaller Buddha statues on the walls.

The Pure Land Cave was constructed by Hsing Yun “for the purpose of teaching Humanistic Buddhism for the purification of people’s hearts and minds.” With the strange-looking, lifelike figures of Buddha’s disciples, colorful lotus ponds, rainbows, and mechanically moving representations of heavenly maidens, the walk-through reminded us somewhat of Disneyland.

Breakfast was prepared especially for us by Shie Shu Hui, a volunteer at the Pilgrims Lodge at Fo Guang Shan. We never imagined that such a vegetarian meal could be so delightful and satisfying: porridge topped with soybean floss, dumplings filled with steamed cabbage, bamboo shoots, Chinese broccoli leaves, shredded mustard leaves, lightly fried tofu, fresh fruits, and soy milk tea.

They say that the next Buddha will be a smiling Buddha. Venerable Miao Jing, Head Abbess at the Mabuhay Temple, wears a pretty smile. “I used to not smile a lot,” she says. Then she met Venerable Master Hsing Yun. She was a student, taking up her masters in Chemical Engineering at the University of Alberta in Canada when she heard about Ven. Master Hsing Yun from friends in the youth choir. She went to Taiwan to learn more about his teachings, thinking she’d return home after two years. She never did. “It’s a kind of life I can live for a long time,” she says.

At the Mabuhay Temple in Manila, there is an ongoing exhibit (until Aug. 31) of Hsing Yun’s One-Stroke Calligraphy, so-called because every piece is done in one stroke. Suffering from poor eyesight due to diabetes, “he is forced to complete the whole work in one stroke, as any discontinuation will make it difficult to continue to the next character.” The exhibit was put together with the guidance of Venerable Ru Chang, chief executive and chief curator at the Fo Guang Yuan Art Gallery in Taiwan. In a message, Venerable Master Hsing Yun remarked: “I always tell people they cannot just look at my writing; they can look for my heart in these writings.”

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Fo Guang Shan Mabuhay Temple is located at 656 Pablo Ocampo St. (formerly Vito Cruz), Malate, Manila ; tel. (02) 559-9540 ; e-mail fgsphilippines@gmail.com ; visit http://www.fgs.org.ph.