Meditating On Buddha's Light Mountain

Main Shrine
Fo Guang Shan Monastery


I live about 30km from Fo Guang Shan Monastery, the leading center for Mahayana Buddhism in the country, according to them. I never asked around. The monastery is pretty big, though no self-respecting Buddhist would ever brag about size. Just down the hill is the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum, which is one of the most popular tourist sites in Kaohsiung, even though it is practically in Pingtung and at least 35km from downtown. The museum is pretty enormous. Someone told me it was the largest Buddhist museum in the world. I never checked. But it does house the tallest seated bronze Buddha statue in the world. That is easy enough to verify, but one should keep in mind that there are a million superlative Buddha statues. Most of the tallest or biggest will mention indoor, outdoor, standing, seated, reclining, bronze, wood, gold, left handed, right handed or facing east. But again, no self-respecting Buddhist would ever brag about size.

I spent some time at the Fo Guang Shan Monastery, but not as a tourist. You can certainly visit the monastery, but most people go to the much larger museum. I have been to the museum a time or two, but I went to the monastery for a completely different reason.

Fo Guang Shan has a program specifically for foreigners who want to play Buddhist for the weekend. The “volunteer group” lets people sleep in dorms, do a few arts and crafts, and mostly wash dishes and do laundry. It is probably beneficial for the monastery. They have people come in and do some chores, while the volunteers get a brief introduction to Buddhism. I did not want that.

It should be noted that both the monastery and museum have full time volunteers who are mostly walking information booths for visitors. They are all locals who work at Fo Guang Shan for years and wear civilian clothes with colored vests, depending on location and specialization. If you enter the Sutra Repository, you will be greeted by a monk in brown or gray robes who might not know much English beyond a few words and a volunteer in a red vest who might be able to explain the room in two or three languages. At the Great Buddha Land, you will be greeted by a volunteer or two in yellow or orange vests who may or may not speak any English. The museum has far more English and Japanese speaking volunteers than the monastery. These volunteers, though called volunteers, are nothing like the foreigners in the weekend volunteer group.

Like a lot of temples and monasteries, Fo Guang Shan Monastery has a temple retreat for foreigners. The difference from the volunteer group is that people pay to sleep in the dorms, wear gray pajamas, learn the basics of meditation and chanting, pretend to learn calligraphy, do some light chores, eat three meals a day, watch a tea ceremony, and always stay in their group of however many people are booked that weekend.

Before I went, I did a little research. Most of the information I found was on the volunteer group and the paid retreat, so I initially thought I might pay to stay the weekend. But the more I looked into it, the more it sounded like a waste of time. The volunteers spend little to no time with the monks. They are supervised by a public relations employee of the monastery who is not ordained. They eat in a separate room away from the main dining hall. Almost all socializing is with other volunteers. They sleep in shared dorm rooms, wear whatever clothes they brought with them, and live in their own volunteer bubble. There is no schedule, aside from meal times. Their only obligation is to do assigned chores, which is mostly cleaning things outdoors, washing things indoors, and doing laundry. The paid retreat is more educational than the volunteer group, but far too short and superficial. It is like reading only the first paragraph of a long book. And you have to pay to get in.

Eventually, I figured out that I could stay at the monastery as a student. Student is not really the correct word. In Chinese, I was 學習者 (xuexizhe) rather than 學生 (xuesheng). The easiest translation is learner vs student. Fo Guang Shan welcomes locals who want to learn as much about Humanistic Buddhism as they can cram into their brains. There is no time limit. Some people stay for years before eventually joining the monastery. We all knew I was never going to do that, but I could probably stick around for a week or two. I'm not technically a local, but since I moved here from China, they treated me as if I was Chinese. Being from China or Taiwan is not required, but only the tourist weekends are in English. If you want to study for any length of time, everything is in Chinese.

While I was Xuexizhe, my teachers were mostly 老師 (Laoshi) or 師父 (Shifu), and rarely 法師 (Fashi). While every shifu and fashi is also a laoshi, laoshi and fashi are only called shifu by people further down the ladder. I was at the bottom, so I could call everyone shifu or laoshi. Fashi, of course, is only reserved for specific laoshi. Or shifu. To every fashi and shifu, I was Xuexizhe, but the occasional laoshi called me Xuesheng. I think maybe five people on the entire campus knew my Chinese name, and I only told one laoshi my English name, because he asked and he enjoyed practicing his English with me.

All the monks had names, of course, but they also had Dharma names and courtesy names. This is pretty common in Chinese. Sun Yat Sen was born Sun Deming, called Sun Wen as a child, called Sun Yat Sen in Hong Kong, called Sun Zhongshan in Taiwan, and given the courtesy name Zaizhi. I still call him Sun Yat Sen, the rare time he comes up in conversation, but no one around here knows who I am talking about until I mention Zhongshan. Ironically, the National Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall in Taipei is not called Sun Zhongshan Memorial Hall. Not that it matters since that is the English name. In Chinese, it is the National Father of the Country Memorial Hall. To avoid confusion, I was encouraged to address the monks by title rather than name. Pretty much everyone I met was either Laoshi, Fashi or Shifu.

I spent most of my days with one monk or another, usually Laoshi. I ate with monks and novices in the dining hall. I met plenty of other people at the monastery. It is almost impossible not to. But I did not see a single foreigner or another xuexizhe. All of the volunteers I met were full time locals who knew what they were talking about, and not part of the foreigner volunteer group. I don't know how often they host weekend retreats, but I doubt any were going on while I was there.

I slept in a tiny, private room, which was more decorated than I expected. It was all Buddhist decor, but I thought it would just be bare walls and a bed. It was more like a small hotel room with a larger than average bathroom, which is not much of a surprise since Fo Guang Shan often hosts monks, scholars, and dignitaries from all around the world. They gave me student robes to wear, which were a different color and style from what the monks or novices wore. The hierarchy of robes was fairly complicated and took a while to figure out. No one was ever going to mistake me for a monk, especially since I had hair, but the clothes announced to everyone exactly who I was, which was convenient. Since part of the monastery is open to the public, tourists sometimes wander into areas not intended for tourists. Had I been in civilian clothes, I would have spent too much time trying to explain why I was there. The robes were an all-access pass, or more like a low-access pass.

There was a schedule for practically every waking moment of every day. It was far from hectic, but I was expected to follow it religiously. I was free to leave at any time, of course, but as long as I was there, they wanted me to be fully there. Being in the moment is kind of a big thing to Buddhists. Best of all, I was not part of any group. I was in a group of one, getting individual attention, except when I was surrounded by monks. My schedule might not have been tailor made for me specifically, but I was the only person on it. Sharing the experience with a group of tourists would have diminished it.

Since Humanistic Buddhism is more about helping the living than mourning the dead, the monks at Fo Guang Shan are not cloistered in a cave somewhere. They operate a wide variety of social and educational programs around the country. They work in village clinics, volunteer in city hospitals, operate rehabilitation services in prisons, run orphanages and senior centers, and do all the usual monk jobs of feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and officiating at weddings and funerals. They go to conferences around the country and other parts of the world. They publish articles, hold seminars, and write books. A lot of books. Every shifu wrote at least one book and the laoshi were handing me books left and right.

I never witnessed any of their outside activities. As a xuexizhe, I was not at all qualified to do anything even remotely close to monk work. From what I saw, even the novices mostly stayed on site. Unlike the monks, I was cloistered, but in a monastery too large and populated to feel claustrophobic. There are usually two to three hundred monks at the monastery, with ample room to hold a few thousand during conferences and major holiday festivals. There was an ordination ceremony while I was there. New monks from around the country came to Kaohsiung to get sworn in. It was wall to wall monks for a few days. I have no idea how many people came to the monastery, but it could have easily been in the thousands.

Something I saw all the time was how much they embraced modern technology. Fo Guang Shan is known for its use of modern technology. They have websites and apps, a couple of podcasts, a public relations and marketing department, and like a lot of other Buddhist groups in Taiwan, they have TV shows. Not shows about monks who go from town to town solving crimes, but single camera lectures where a monk talks to the audience. Sometimes they chant. It is not riveting television. There was no TV in my tiny room, but the entire monastery is a wifi hotspot. Not only was my phone not taken away, I was encouraged to bring a laptop to do online research. Seeing monks with smartphones and other i-devices is common in Taiwan, but for some reason, I did not expect it in the monastery. I had to remind myself that these people were Buddhist, not Amish.

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