In 1967, Venerable Master Hsing Yun purchased 30 hectares of land in Dashu , a small town in Kaohsiung county and founded the Foguangshan Monastery. During the groundbreaking ceremony on May 16th, Master Hsing Yun established the following objectives.

Spread the Dharma through culture.

Cultivate human talents through education.

Benefit society through philanthropy.

Purify the mind through cultivation of awareness.

Born in Jiangsu, China on July 22, 1927, under the name Li Guoshen ,Venerable Master Hsing Yun was ordained at the age of 12 under the Dharma names Jinjue ( to be enlightened today) and Wuche (through enlightenment) at the Qixia Monastery in Nanjing, China. In the mid 1940s, he gave himself the Dharma name Hsing Yun, and in 1949 left China for Taiwan. He immediately began propogating the Dharma, through education, publications and radio broadcasts. His first book, Singing in Silence, was published in 1949, and in 1955 he published one of the first hardback biographies of the Buddha. Following the establishment of Foguangshan, he served as abbot until 1985 and established Buddha’s Light International Association (BLIA) in 1992.

Located an hour away from Kaohsiung, Foguangshan is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan, with its 36m high statue of Amithaba Buddha surrounded by 480 smaller statues being its most famous feature. The official motto of the monastery is

“May the Buddha’s Light shine upon the ten directions. May the Dharma stream continuously flow towards the five great continents.”

In addition to the complex at Foguangshan, a further 57 temples in Taiwan and 95 overseas are part of Foguangshan. The ordained Sangha numbers over 1300, and while the number of lay disciples under BLIA is hard to determine, it has been suggested that there may be as many as 1-3 million globally. In Taiwan, BLIA is the largest Buddhist organization, with approximately 400 000 members with KMT chairman Wu Po-hsiung serving as the second president of BLIA Taiwan.

Foguangshan emphasizes education and service, maintaining public universities, Buddhist colleges, libraries, publishing houses, translation centers, Buddhist art galleries, teahouses, and mobile medical clinics worldwide. The order has also established a children’s home, retirement home, high school and television station.

In contrast to the majority of Buddhist associations, Foguangshan employs a democratic system for choosing the abbot of the monastery. The current abbot, Venerable Hsin Pei , born in Penghu in 1970, is the seventh abbot of Foguangshan. Although he is the fourth person to hold the position, he is considered the seventh abbot as an abbot’s term lasts for 6 years. He was ordained in 1990 under the guidance of Venerable Master Hsin Yun, and initially given the Dharma name Hui Han.

Foguangshan’s order of precedence is a sequential hierarchy of nominal importance of monks, nuns, and laity. One’s position in an order of precedence is not necessarily an indication of functional importance, but rather an indication of ceremonial or historical relevance. Of particular importance is length of monastic ordination, a notion relevant to Buddhism as a whole. The current order is as follows.

1. Founder and head teacher (Ven. Master Hsin Yun).

2. Abbot (Most Ven. Hsin Pei).

3. Former Abbots.

4. Members of Foguangshan Religious Affairs Committee, a nine member elected council.

5. Senior Monastics.

6. Abbots and Abbesses of branch temples.

7. BLIA World Board of Directors.

8. BLIA Chapter Presidents.

9. BLIA Members.

Foguangshan offers a variety of meditation retreats, including one-day, weekend, and five-day programs, which are open to the public. Graduates of the short retreats can sign up for the 49-day retreat. The monastery offers many other programs for lay people, including chanting retreats, monastic retreats, and calligraphy retreats, also of varying length. Visitors can also tailor programs to their own needs, experiencing different aspects of monastery life.

Foguangshan receives about 70,000 visitors per month, of all kinds, including pilgrims, participants, and sightseers. The monastery has a live-in population of about 3,000, and includes a high school, a male college and a female college, an orphanage, and several hundred monks and nuns. The monastery also has an art museum, called the Culture Exhibition Hall, which features general Chinese art and calligraphy, nicely displayed. Another hall, the Buddhist Cultural Museum, has a valuable collection of antique Buddha statues. The art is not strictly for entertainment – it is also supposed to beautify and enrich the mind.

And so we come to the end of this post. As usual, I’ll leave you with a few more images. Enjoy.